Among the crowd that gathered outside the hospital as night came on were Charles Flint and Octave Chanute.
Not until well after dark did word come from within the hospital. Orville was in critical condition, with a fractured leg and hip, and four broken ribs, but was expected to live. Lieutenant Selfridge, however, had died at 8:10 of a fractured skull without ever having regained consciousness. His was the first fatality in the history of powered flight. Speaking for the Army’s Signal Corps, Major George Squier praised Lieutenant Selfridge as a splendid officer who had had a brilliant career ahead of him.
But no one who had witnessed the flights of the previous days could possibly doubt that the problem of aerial navigation was solved. “If Mr. Wright should never again enter an aeroplane,” Squier said, “his work last week at Fort Myer will have secured him a lasting place in history as the man who showed the world that mechanical flight was an assured success.”
That Orville’s passenger that day could well have been Theodore Roosevelt was not mentioned.
The telegram from Fort Myer arrived at 7 Hawthorn Street just after Katharine returned from school. Bishop Wright was in Indiana attending a church conference.
There was never a question of what she must do. Moving into action without pause, she called the school principal, told her what had happened, and said she would be taking an indefinite leave of absence. Then, quickly as possible, she packed what clothes she thought she would need and was on board the last train to Washington at ten that same evening.
Bishop Wright, too, had received the news, but from the little he wrote in his diary there is no telling how stunned or alarmed he was. Nonetheless, he excused himself from the conference and returned to Dayton without delay. Once there he wrote to Orville and clearly from the heart.
I am afflicted with the pain you feel, and sympathize with the disappointment which has postponed your final success in aeronautics. But we are all thankful that your life has been spared, and are confident of your speedy though tedious recovery, and of your triumph in the future, as in the past.
Then, in the way of a fatherly sermon, he added, “We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”
It was eight o’clock at Camp d’Auvours the morning of September 18 when Hart Berg arrived at Wilbur’s shed to tell him the news. At first Wilbur seemed not to accept what he heard. A thousand people had already gathered at the field. The weather was ideal for flying, Le Mans more crowded than ever with people eager to see him fly. But out of respect for Lieutenant Selfridge, Wilbur postponed all flights until the following week, then, shutting himself in his shed, refused to see anyone except Berg and one or two others who came to console him.
“Now you understand why I always felt that I should be in America with Orville,” he said. “Two heads are better than one to examine a machine.”
Left alone, he sat with head in hands. When another friend came in—Léon Bollée most likely—Wilbur looked up, his eyes full of tears, and said if anything could make him abandon further work in solving the problem of flight, it would be an accident like this. Then, springing to his feet, he declared, “No, we have solved this problem. With us flying is not an experiment; it is a demonstration.”
Others present saw him struggle with his emotions. He asked for fuller details, but there were none.
Since coming to Camp d’Auvours, he had acquired a bicycle on which he now went riding eight miles to Le Mans in the hope of hearing further word from Fort Myer. For some time he could be seen pacing nervously about the porch at the H?tel du Dauphin. He felt very bad about “this business,” he told a reporter for the Paris Herald who approached him. “It seems to me that I am more or less to blame for the death of poor Selfridge, and yet I cannot account for the accident.
Of course, when dealing with aeroplanes, or indeed anything mechanical, there is always the possibility of something breaking, and yet we imagined that we had eliminated all danger. . . .
The thing which is worrying more than anything is that my father, who is almost eighty years of age, will take this matter very much to heart. He has always been nervous about our trials, but up to the present he has never had occasion to be so.
Toward dusk, Wilbur took his bicycle and rode back to Camp d’Auvours.