Wilbur and Orville wondered why the reporters remained at such a distance. Only later were they told that it had been said the brothers kept rifles and shotguns at the ready to guard their machine. Asked what he and Wilbur would have done had the correspondents come into camp and sat there to watch, Orville replied, “We couldn’t have delayed our work. There was too much to do and our time was short.”
Describing what the scene looked like from where they were posted, another of the correspondents wrote of “dazzling white sand dunes, almost monumental, to the right, and to the left in the distance more sand dunes, and a glimpse of the sea, and the Carolina sun, pouring down out of a clear blue sky, immersed everything in a shimmer and glare.” The two brothers, moving their machine about near the shed, looked like “two black dots.” The engine, when it started up, sounded like that of “a reaper working a distant field.” The propellers “flashed and whirled,” and the next thing the plane swept by “fast as an express train.”
“[We were] all seasoned campaigners in the field of unexpected events,” wrote the Paris Herald correspondent, Byron Newton, “but for all that, this spectacle of men flying was so startling, so bewildering to the senses in that year 1908, that we all stood like so many marble men.”
A photographer for Collier’s Weekly, James Hare, snapped what would be the first photograph ever published of a Wright Flyer in the air.
Early the morning of May 14 the onlookers were treated to a sight never before seen anywhere—two men in a motor-powered flying machine—when Wilbur took Charlie Furnas up for a short ride.
To the newsmen from their distant vantage point, it appeared Wilbur and Orville had taken flight together and so some of their dispatches reported. But the brothers, ever conscious of the risks involved, had already decided they must never fly together. That way, if one were to be killed, the other could still carry on with the work.
Days as hot as summer had returned to the Outer Banks, and that afternoon, when Wilbur went up alone, the heat was nearly unbearable. Flying at something over 50 miles per hour, he made one big circle and was starting into another when, still unfamiliar with the new control levers, he made a mistake with the rudder and suddenly plunged to the ground about a mile from camp.
“I was watching with the field glass,” Orville would recount. “The machine turned on end—the front end—with the tail in the air. There was a big splash of sand—such a cloud that I couldn’t see from where I was exactly what had happened. . . . It was probably thirty seconds before Will appeared.”
He had been violently thrown against the underside of the top wing and had to be pulled from the wreckage. There was a cut across his nose, and though hit hard and bruised on both shoulders, an arm, and one hand, he was not seriously injured. No bones were broken.
The plane, however, was a total wreck, and thus as Wilbur announced, the tests had come to an end. Two days later he was on his way again. It was agreed he would go to France to proceed with the required demonstrations there, and that Orville would do the same in Washington.
During little more than a week of test flights at Kill Devil Hills, he and Orville had been the subjects of far more attention and praise in the press than they had ever known. They had become a popular sensation. Still no major public performance had yet been made. The rabbit had still to be pulled from the hat for all to see.
Passage was arranged for him on the Touraine, Wilbur reported to Katharine from New York. “I hate like anything to go away without first coming home.”
“Write often,” she told him in response. “Don’t come home without getting me several pairs of gloves—number six—black and white, short and long. . . . Don’t get them unless they are cheap.”
II.
The voyage to Le Havre proved uneventful—“smooth but foggy much of the time” was about all Wilbur had to say of the crossing. He reached Paris on May 29, and for the next week he and Hart Berg were on the move, touring possible sites for the public demonstrations, including Fontainebleau and Vitry, but found nothing suitable.
The French press, aware of Wilbur’s return, had a “tendency” to be hostile, he reported to Orville. But to almost anyone else it would have seemed considerably more than a “tendency.” The popular L’Illustration, as an example, ran a heavily retouched photograph of the Flyer taken at Kitty Hawk, saying, “Its appearance seems quite dubious and one finds in it every element of a ‘fabrication,’ not especially well done moreover.”
Further, there was a resurgence of popular enthusiasm over French aviators and their daring feats. Earlier in the year Henri Farman had flown for nearly two minutes, and that spring at the end of May, Farman made news when he took a passenger up for a ride. As Wilbur reported to Orville, Farman and Delagrange were also putting on demonstrations elsewhere in Europe and with much success.
As for themselves, Wilbur wrote, “The first thing is to get some practice and make some demonstrations, then let the future be what it may.”
Hart Berg assured a correspondent for L’Auto that within two months the Wright plane would fly before the people. The period of secret trials was over, Berg said. The French public would be the first to see with their own eyes.
But where? On June 8, he and Wilbur went by train to Le Mans, a quiet, ancient town of some 65,000 people on the Sarthe River in the department of the Sarthe, 125 miles southwest of Paris. A prominent automobile manufacturer, ballooning enthusiast, and leading local citizen named Léon Bollée, hearing of Wilbur’s need for a suitable field, had sent a message to Berg suggesting Le Mans, where there was plenty of flat, open space.
Bollée met Wilbur and Berg at the station in one of the largest and handsomest of his automobile line and took them off on a tour. As it turned out, no one could have been more genial or helpful or generous with his time than Léon Bollée.
Short and dark bearded, he was extremely fat, weighing 240 pounds. The physical contrast with Wilbur was more pronounced even than between Wilbur and Hart Berg. Like Wilbur, Bollée had not attended a university, but instead joined his father’s bell foundry business and eventually began building automobiles with much success. (“Léon Bollée automobiles are constructed using only top quality materials in the vast and beautiful factories of Le Mans,” read a recent advertisement.) His English was reasonably good and Wilbur liked him at once. As things turned out Bollée would do more to help Wilbur than anyone, and never asked for anything in return.
Of possible sites, the Hunaudières horse racetrack, about five miles out from town, seemed to Wilbur most suitable. The course was entirely enclosed by trees and the ground was rough. Still, as he would report to Orville, he thought it would serve their purpose. Bollée said he would see what could be arranged. He also offered Wilbur full use of a large room at his factory in which to assemble the Flyer, in addition to the help of some of his workers.
Three days later, back in Paris, Wilbur received word from Bollée that the Hunaudières racetrack was available, and the day after Wilbur was busy getting ready, buying overalls, work shoes, and a straw hat.
One evening in the elegant Louis XVI salon of Berg’s apartment, Wilbur sat for an interview with a young French aviation journalist, François Peyrey, who knew it was the first interview Wilbur had agreed to do in France. Berg had made the arrangements. They talked of the experiments at Kitty Hawk, of motors and patents, and why Le Mans had been the choice for the demonstrations. But it was Wilbur himself, about whom Peyrey had had his doubts, who became the subject of greatest fascination.
“Mr. Hart O. Berg warmed up for the interview by offering me a cup of coffee and laid out a box of cigars,” Peyrey would write. “I felt my doubts fly away one by one in the blue smoke. Through curls of smoke I examined Wilbur Wright, his thin, serious face, lit by the strangely gentle, intelligent and radiant eyes. . . . I had to admit: no, this man is not a bluffer.”
The interview marked an important beginning. In the months to come, François Peyrey was to provide some of the
most insightful, firsthand observations about Wilbur ever published.
Wilbur arrived back in Le Mans close to midnight, June 16, and settled in at the Hôtel du Dauphin in a room overlooking the main square, the Place de la République. Eager to get started on the reassembly of the Flyer, he began opening the crates at the Bollée factory first thing the following day and could hardly believe what he saw. At Kitty Hawk two months before, he had found the old camp a shambles. Now he was looking at the Flyer in shambles and could barely control his fury.
A dozen or more ribs were broken, one wing ruined, the cloth torn in countless places. Everything was a tangled mess. Radiators were smashed, propeller axles broken, coils badly turned up, essential wires, seats, nuts, and bolts, all missing.
In a letter written that same day he exploded at Orville as he rarely had, charging him with the worst example of packing he had ever seen. “I am sure that with a scoop shovel I could have put things in within two or three minutes and made fully as good a job of it. I never saw such evidences of idiocy.” It was going to take much longer than he had figured to get everything ready to go, and there was no Orville or Charlie Taylor to help.
He set immediately to work, putting things in order and making repairs. “Worked all today and a few hours yesterday replacing broken ribs in the surfaces,” he recorded in his diary June 18.
Had to take one wing entirely down to fix it. Found many things not as well as in the old machine. Rear wire not inside of cloth right; little washers on this wire not on the proper side of ribs; no blocks to hold end ribs of sections from slipping back; no steel ferrules on front lower spar under heavy uprights; not play enough in rear hinges joining sections; no cloth wrapping around spar where screw frames fasten on.
The mechanics at the Bollée factory did as best they could to help, but were of little use at first. “I have had an awful job sewing the section together,” he informed Orville in another letter. “I was the only one strong enough in the fingers to pull the wires together tight, so I had all the sewing to do myself. . . . My hands were about raw when I was not half done.”
“In putting things together,” he added, “I notice many evidences that your mind was on something else while you worked last summer.”
But then Wilbur learned that the chaos and damage had not been caused at Dayton, but at Le Havre by careless French customs inspectors, and he apologized to Orville at once. Orville, knowing the stress his brother was under, made no issue of the matter.
Wilbur labored on steadily, installing uprights and wires, and fixing the old engine after finding work he had had done on it by French mechanics “so bad,” he had to give a full day to it. “I have to do practically all the work myself, as it is almost impossible to explain what I want in words to men who only one fourth understand English.”
True to the Wright rules of life, he did not work on Sundays, but instead wrote letters or went sightseeing. He was living most comfortably at the Hôtel du Dauphin, where, according to the Motor Car Journal, one found “nothing of luxe—simply plain, bountiful fare cooked and served by the patron-chef,” which proved exactly to Wilbur’s liking. And Le Mans, he was pleased to say, was an “old fashioned town, almost as much out of the world as Kitty Hawk.” He loved the sound of the chimes—Bollée bells—from the church across the square and was happy to provide those at home with a lengthy description of the town’s crowning edifice, the colossal Cathédrale Saint-Julien.
Set on a hill first settled by the Romans above the Sarthe River, it rose high over a thick cluster of medieval buildings and houses that constituted the oldest part of town. There was no steeple. Instead, the cathedral’s singular exterior distinction was its prominent double buttresses. But beyond that was the rare combination of both the Romanesque and Gothic styles all in one building and best seen within. That part built in the Romanesque manner dated back nearly nine hundred years, to the eleventh century, while the larger, more spectacular segment had risen out of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it was this, so plainly in evidence, that so moved Wilbur.
As he wrote to Katharine, “The arches forming the openings between the aisles and the choir keep increasing in height so that a person standing against the outside wall of the outer aisle can see way up to the top of the choir and take in the magnificent stained glass windows of the clerestory.” One saw not only the light and brilliant color of the ancient windows, but all the light and color that the windows threw onto the upper reaches of the arches some 108 feet above the cathedral floor.
If at the time he felt or reflected on any connection between the upward aspiration of this stunning human creation and his own unrelenting efforts in that direction, he made no mention. But it seems most unlikely that he would not have.
Attending a Sunday service at the cathedral some days later, Wilbur found the only part he could understand or participate in was the collection. Still, the great structure, he told Katharine, “impresses me more and more as one of the finest specimens of architecture I have seen.”
Meanwhile, just outside the cathedral, as he added, a farmer’s market filled the public square and, to cap it all, a traveling circus had set up camp.
He wrote of the comforts of the hotel, praising the food especially. The meals were better than any he had had since coming to Europe—better in that they were both plentiful and not overly fancy. He described a lunch that included sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, roast tongue with mushrooms, lamb chops with new potatoes, “some sort of cake,” and almonds. He had never been so comfortable away from home, he said, implying perhaps that a place like the Meurice had been far too luxurious for comfort. No one at the hotel understood a word of his English, but all did their best to serve him well.
A first encounter with alphabet soup provided opportunity for a touch of the wit he knew Katharine especially would appreciate:
I was a little astonished and disturbed the other evening, when I sat down to dinner to find my soup which was a sort of noodle soup, turning into all sorts of curious forms and even letters of the alphabet. I began to think I had the “jim jams.” On close investigation I found that the dough had been run through forms so as to make the different letters of the alphabet and figures, too! It was like looking into the “hell box” of a printing office, and was all the more amusing because every mouthful of soup you take out, brought up a new combination.
Progress at the Bollée factory was hardly improving, however. “I have to do all the work myself as there are no drawings to show anyone how things go together, and explanations take more time than doing things myself.
I have a man but he is not a first class mechanic; he has no invention or initiative, and his vocabulary is limited. When I say to him, “Hand me the screwdriver,” he is liable to stand and gawk or more often rush off as though he really understood me, and it is only after I have waited a long time and finally got it myself that I realize that he does not understand the special meaning of the word “hand” as I used it.
Most of my time has been spent on things I should not have to do at all. . . .
So far I have the main surfaces [of the wing] together and wired with new wires in a number of places. The skids are on and the engine is mounted and adjusted ready to run with the jump spark magneto in place. I have yet to put on the transmission and screws [propellers] which should be a small job. But I have the front rudder and framing and wiring yet to do and also the rear rudder.
Those who worked with him at the factory marveled at his meticulous craftsmanship, how he would make his own parts when needed, even a needle if necessary, and how at the sound of the factory whistle he would start or stop working just as they did, as though he were one of them.
On the evening of July 4, at about six o’clock, Wilbur, contrary to his usual work pattern, was still on the job. Only Léon Bollée remained on hand to keep him company. Having by then mounted the engine, Wilbur was standing close by, his sleeves rolled up, giving it a speed test, when suddenly a radiator
hose broke loose and he was hit by a jet of boiling water. His bare left forearm took the worst of it, but he was scalded as well across his chest.
Bollée eased him to the floor and ran for help. “Fortunately we had picric acid in the factory’s pharmacy,” he would report to Hart Berg, “so that in less than a minute after the accident he was swathed in bandages soaked in picric acid.”
Bad as it was, the press, as usual, made the accident sound still worse, and for the family at home Wilbur, as usual, made light of it, spending much of a letter, written three days later, describing how the local physician went about tending the wounds as would a horse doctor. Nonetheless, Wilbur insisted, all was practically healed, the pain gone, when in fact it would be a month before he could use his left arm and the stress he was under had been greatly compounded.
Yet despite everything, by the first days of August he was seeing to the finishing touches on a machine reconstructed from the smashed and broken remains of the original, an airplane that was thus different from those he and Orville had built at home and one he had never yet flown. Testing it, even under ideal conditions, could be highly dangerous. Besides it had been three months since his last flight and that had ended in a crash.
It was nearly dark, the evening of August 6, when Wilbur, Léon Bollée, and Hart Berg folded back the front framing of the Flyer, set a couple of wheels under the skids, hitched the whole affair to Bollée’s stately automobile, and hauled it down the road to the Hunaudières racetrack five miles to the south. There it was put away in a shed, and to Wilbur’s delight the press was never the wiser. For all the hovering, all the surveillance by reporters, none had taken notice.
To keep guard over the plane Wilbur would sleep beside it that night and the nights to follow. The shed was much like those at Kitty Hawk, except here there was a privy and an outdoor hose for bathing. In addition, a small nearby restaurant served “very good meals,” and at a farmhouse not more than a hundred feet from the shed, he could get milk and enjoy visits with a small boy of five or six who spoke some English and had all the appearance of “a truthful little chap.”