The clamor and amazement over what the Wrights had achieved—all they had shown to be true time after time at Le Mans and Pau—was by no means limited to Europe. At home in the United States, newspapers and magazines from one end of the country to the other gave the story continual attention. Nor was the potential of so miraculous a creation lost sight of.
In a long article in the Waco, Texas, Times-Herald on “The Monarchs of the Air,” James A. Edgerton wrote as follows:
Most of us can remember when the automobile was a novelty. The writer is under forty, yet recalls the time when the first “horseless wagon” was used, and it was only about a score of years ago. . . . The machine was a big clumsy affair, with large wheels, uncertain steering apparatus, and was run by a very noisy steam engine. This was so great a failure that it was some years before another crossed my field of vision. Now they are as common as millionaires.
If the automobile could be so vastly improved in so short a time, who can predict what may occur in the field of aerial navigation now that the principle has actually been discovered and is before the world? Is it not possible that it will revolutionize human affairs in as radical a way as did the discovery of the use of steam?
In all this stupendous change going on before our very eyes the Wright brothers are the chief magicians. They are the leaders and pioneers.
It had been announced that the Aero Club of America would present the brothers with a gold medal on their return. Congress, too, had voted a medal to be presented by President William Howard Taft, and Dayton was making preparations for the biggest celebration in its history.
But for all the attention being paid to the Wrights, there was at the same time increasing realization of how much else was happening in aviation in France. Six months earlier the number of builders of airplanes in Paris and vicinity amounted to less than a half dozen. On April 25, the New York Times reported that no fewer than fifteen factories were now in full operation. If the Wrights were front and center in the show of inventive change, the cast onstage in France was filling rapidly.
Scores of inventors are constructing their own machines [the Times article continued]. There is an aerodrome where pupils are taught to fly. Three new papers devoted to aviation have been founded within the past six months. There are three societies in France for the encouragement of aviation, and over $300,000 in prizes will be open to competition in the course of the year.
The largest of the competitive events, an international flying meet, was scheduled for the coming summer, at the town of Reims, northeast of Paris in the champagne country.
III.
With his demonstrations concluded at Pau, Wilbur spent his final few days there packing the new Flyer for shipment in sections to Rome—the Flyer used at Le Mans and Pau would ultimately wind up in a museum in Paris—and supervising the final stages of training for his French students to the point where all three had soloed. Orville and Katharine had already returned to Paris, and on March 23, Wilbur, too, left Pau for Paris.
A few days later the three Wrights went to Le Mans to be received at a heartwarming farewell banquet. Three days after that Wilbur and Hart Berg were on board a train from Paris to Rome, where, a week later, Orville and Katharine were to join them.
In Paris, to Katharine’s delight, the social pace continued full speed. As she informed her father, she was the only woman ever invited to a dinner at the Aéro-Club de France. “You ought to seen it,” she wrote in the Ohio vernacular. “Me—sitting up there big as you . . . talking French as lively as anyone! It was a performance I can tell you.” Best of all, she also told the Bishop, he had been toasted. “They drank a champagne in your honor!”
Katharine and Orville left for Rome on April 9 and arrived the next afternoon to find the city overrun with tourists, including an estimated thirty thousand Americans. Apparently no one had prepared them for such crowds. Hotels, restaurants, monuments, and museums were swarming with people. Hart Berg had found rooms for Orville and Katharine opposite the Barberini Palace. Wilbur was staying several miles south of the city at a flying field called Centocelle, but instead of a shed this time he was living in a nearby cottage on an estate belonging to a countess.