Then, after some technical discussion about the rudder, he wrote again. “I can only say be extraordinarily cautious.”
On the evening of August 25 in Le Mans, a celebration banquet in Wilbur’s honor took place at the Hôtel du Dauphin. This time he was happy to join in the festivities.
Part III
CHAPTER NINE
The Crash
[He] rode the air as deliberately as if he were passing over a solid macadam road. Nothing I have ever seen is comparable.
GUTZON BORGLUM
I.
With her young nephew Milton much improved in health and her classes at the high school soon to resume, Katharine was feeling more herself. Orville was in Washington preparing for the demonstrations at Fort Myer, staying at the elegant Cosmos Club and meeting “stacks of prominent people.” And hardly a day passed without something in the papers about the continuing clamor over Wilbur in France.
Both brothers wrote when they had time, but Katharine longed for more than just aviation talk. “Suppose you tell me about a few things when you write!” she admonished Wilbur in one letter. “What do I care about the position of the trees on the practice ground? Hey! Hey! Sterchens wants to hear all about the beautiful young ladies and the flowers and champagne!”
Wilbur would go only so far as to tell her Mrs. Berg was a “very smart” and “charming woman, like yourself.”
Orville said he could hardly get any work done, so much time was taken up “answering the ten thousand fool questions people ask me about the machine.” A Washington Post reporter noted with amazement how “Mr. Wright stood and talked and talked and talked to his questioners.” Still, with it all, Orville was frank to tell Katharine, “I am meeting some very handsome young ladies!” The trouble was if he were to meet them again, he would have a hard time remembering their names.
“I don’t know when Pop has been in such good health,” she was happy to report to Wilbur. “Now, if you and Orville don’t do some wild things to get me crazy, I think I’ll weather the thing through.”
Fort Myer occupied a stretch of high ground on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, just west of Arlington National Cemetery. With its neatly arranged, handsome red-brick buildings, it looked not unlike an attractive college campus, and offered a panoramic view of Washington five miles in the distance. At the center was the parade ground, measuring approximately 1,000 feet by 700 feet, and there Orville was to perform his test flights.
It was a space smaller even than what Wilbur had to work with at Les Hunaudières, but with it came an ample shed for a hangar and a dozen army men ready to assist. To get there from the city he traveled back and forth by streetcar.
After several days of trouble with the motor, and with help from Charlie Taylor and Charlie Furnas, both of whom had come from Dayton, he had all in order as scheduled. It would be the first full-scale public performance of a Wright plane in the United States, and the machine Orville was to take into the air had never been flown until now.
Not until late in the afternoon of September 3 was it wheeled into place. That Orville was extremely on edge was plainly evident. “For the first time since his arrival in this city,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times, “Mr. Wright betrayed obvious signs of nervousness. The lines on his face seemed deeper than ever, and there was a furtiveness and an uneasiness of manner which was noticeable to everyone. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to control himself.”
He could hardly hold still. One minute he would be up on a sawhorse examining the upper wing, the next, down on his hands and knees helping adjust the starting mechanism. “That man’s nerves are pretty near the jumping off place,” another correspondent was heard to say.
The crowd on hand was small. Washington had yet to catch on to what was happening at Fort Myer. At last, at about six o’clock, Orville climbed into his seat, the motor was started, and the big propellers were “cutting the air at a frightful rate,” when he called out, “Let her go!”
The weights of the catapult dropped, the plane shot down the rail, but then for 50 feet or more it skimmed barely above the grass before lifting into the air. Everyone was shouting.
At the lower end of the drill field, Orville banked, turned, and started back, the white canvas of the double wings standing out sharply against the dark border of trees at the edge of Arlington Cemetery.
The crowd broke into a “frenzy of enthusiasm” as the plane circled overhead at about 35 feet and headed away down the field again. Suddenly it veered off toward the wooden hangar, descended at an abrupt angle and hit the ground.
The crowd rushed forward to find Orville calmly brushing the dust from his clothes. “It shows I need a great deal of practice,” he said.
By his estimate he had flown somewhat less than a mile at a speed of about 40 miles per hour. According to their contract with the army, the brothers were to receive $25,000 if the Flyer achieved 40 miles per hour in its speed test.
The day after, Friday, September 4, Orville and the Flyer remained in the air more than four minutes, circling the parade ground five and a half times under perfect control, covering three miles with no mishap. Major George Squier, president of the board in charge of the tests, thought the flight “splendid.” The Flyer “seemed to respond perfectly to your every touch, and that landing was a marvel,” he told Orville. Other officers were calling it the most wonderful exhibition they had ever seen.
In the days that followed, Orville provided one sensational performance after another, breaking one world record after another. As never before the two “bicycle mechanics” and their flying machines were causing simultaneous sensations on both sides of the Atlantic. They had become a transcontinental two-ring circus. Only now it was the younger, lesser known of the two whose turn had come to steal the show.
Early the morning of Wednesday, September 9, with relatively few spectators present, Orville circled the Fort Myer parade ground 57 times, remaining in the air not quite an hour. When word reached Washington that he might fly again that afternoon, offices were closed and a thousand or more government officials—members of the cabinet, department heads, embassy personnel, members of Congress—came pouring across the Potomac by automobile and trolley to see for themselves.
“At 5:15, as the sun was disappearing below the Virginia horizon,” wrote the Dayton Journal correspondent on the scene, “the latest invention of man to change the laws of nature, rose grandly into space and sailed over the drill grounds.