The less Orville had to say, the more Katharine talked and with great effect. She had become a celebrity in her own right. The press loved her. “The masters of the aeroplane, those two clever and intrepid Daytonians, who have moved about Europe under the spotlight of extraordinary publicity, have had a silent partner,” went one account. But silent she was no longer and reporters delighted in her extroverted, totally unaffected Midwestern American manner.
Some of what was written went too far. She was said to have mathematical genius superior even to that of her brothers, and that she was the one financing their time in Europe. In the main, however, it was full-hearted, long-overdue, public recognition of the “mainstay” of her brothers in their efforts.
Who was it who gave them new hope, when they began to think the problem [of flight] impossible? . . . Who was it that nursed Orville back to strength and health when the physicians had practically given him up after that fatal accident last September?
Besides, wrote one correspondent, “Like most American girls, the aviators’ sister has very decided views of her own.”
Wilbur made his first flight at Pau on February 3 and from that day on remained a sensation. As said one headline, all Pau was “AGOG.”
Virtually every day but Sunday a steady stream of elegant carriages and automobiles headed out to the flying field to see the doors of the huge red “aerodock” swing wide and the four-year-old Flyer come rolling out, showing signs of much wear and tear, the canvas soiled and torn, patched and tattooed with tin tacks. Wilbur would examine it up and down with his usual care, oil can in hand, pockets bulging with twine, a screwdriver, a wrench, touching a wire here, a bolt there, and never hurrying. Then, with all to his liking, off he would go, “right up into the air, turning, wheeling up and down, graceful as an albatross, showing the perfect command of the aviator.” For a second or two, the plane would seem to hang motionless against the high white line of the snowcapped Pyrénées, “absolutely a scene of beauty quite impossible to describe.”
One of the few problems to contend with was the ground filled with bumps, some the size of a bowler hat, that made takeoffs difficult. Someone suggested that with a bit of spade work the ground could be leveled. It was just what Wilbur and Orville had done preparing for their first test flights at Huffman Prairie, but Wilbur by now felt he could dispense with that. “If we have to alter the face of the earth before we can fly,” he replied, “we may as well throw up the proposition.” Such was the way of the man, observed a writer who was present. “He never sought to escape by the easy way round.”
Most of Wilbur’s time was devoted to training the Comte de Lambert and another of the French aviators he was expected to teach, Paul Tissandier. Like de Lambert, Tissandier was a wealthy aristocrat who had been an automobile racer before taking up aviation. The third student was a French army officer, Captain Paul N. Lucas-Girardville. Of the three, de Lambert was the best pilot and Wilbur’s favorite.
In none of his flights at Pont-Long was Wilbur attempting to set a record, and so other passengers, too, went aloft seated beside him, as many as a dozen altogether, including Katharine, who went up before a large crowd on February 15, just as night was coming on. It was her first time in the air.
A spell of cold weather had set in. (“Southern sunny France is a delusion and a snare!” she had told her father.) But all that was forgotten when Wilbur at long last invited her to go with him.
She was most happily surprised by how smoothly they sailed along and how easily she could recognize faces below. She thought they were flying at about 30 feet, but found out later it was 60 feet, and they were moving at 42 miles per hour. Yet she had a feeling of complete tranquillity and forgot completely about the cold. The flight lasted seven minutes. To show her the ease with which he could maneuver the machine, Wilbur made several sharp turns, but again she experienced no ill effects and never showed the least sign of fear.
Asked later if she had felt like a bird when flying with her brother, Katharine responded, “I don’t know exactly how a bird feels. Birds sing, I suppose, because they are happy. I sang, I know, and I was very happy indeed. But like the birds, I sang best after the flight was over.”
By now Wilbur was making flights with passengers five or six times a day. Who got to go was entirely up to him, and while it was assumed by many that he was charging a fee for so rare a privilege, and many were prepared to pay, and pay handsomely, he charged nothing, which made a great impression.
When a wealthy American from Philadelphia was told by Lord Northcliffe that only Wilbur decided who went with him, the man replied, “Oh, I dare say that can be arranged.”
“I would like to be around when you do the arranging, just to see how it’s done,” Northcliffe replied. The man did not get his ride.
Northcliffe would later say he never knew more unaffected people than Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine Wright, and that he did not think the excitement over them and the intense interest produced by their extraordinary feats had any effect on them whatsoever.
Katharine filled her assignment as social manager for the brothers to perfection, taking active part in all manner of events night and day, and availing herself of every opportunity to make use of her rapidly improving French. “I understand a great deal now and talk fairly well,” she told her father. That neither of her brothers had made such an effort annoyed him greatly. “A year in France and not understand nor speak French!” he had written in reference to Wilbur in particular. It was about as critical as the Bishop ever was when it came to Wilbur.
In addition, the brothers depended on Katharine to maintain correspondence with their father, and so she did, sending off letters and postcards several times a week. In more than a month’s time at Pau, Orville never wrote a word to the Bishop, while Wilbur wrote only once, on March 1, to say he would be going to Rome next, that Orville was much better than when he arrived, though still “not entirely himself,” and that he, Wilbur, would be very glad to get back home again.
For his part Bishop Wright kept them regularly posted on events at home, his health (which was good), Carrie Grumbach’s cooking (also good), his travels on church work, the weather, and the fact that he was “not a bit lonely.” He had too much to do. He had begun work on an autobiography and had already produced fourteen typewritten pages. A few weeks later, he was up to fifty pages.
As noted in the press, the airfield at Pont-Long continued to shine as a “place of pilgrimage for men of eminence.” In the last week of February, the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, arrived to witness “the miracle.” He watched Wilbur take off and fly high above in great circles, never taking his eye off the spectacle. Afterward, as his entourage, Orville, Katharine, and others crowded around, he stood close to hear Wilbur explain each of the control mechanisms on the machine. The king, who spoke English and clearly knew a good deal about aviation, had many questions for Wilbur. At one point, turning to Katharine, he asked, “And did you really ride it yourself?” When she said she had, he said he wanted very much to go up with Wilbur but had promised his wife he would not. Katharine judged him “a good husband.”
Turning to Wilbur, the king inquired whether it would be asking too much to request another demonstration. “I have seen what you can do,” he said. “I want to see what one of your pilots can do.”
Wilbur at once consented, taking off this time with the Comte de Lambert for a flight of twelve minutes, during which Wilbur never once touched the levers. That a student pilot could have learned to handle the plane with such skill in such a short time seemed to impress the king more than anything.
Orville had told the press he would do no flying while in France. Nor did he plan to go up with Wilbur. But only days later Wilbur took Katharine for another ride, this time for a thirteen-mile flight cross-country. “It was great,” she told her father. Not long after that she would take off in a balloon with a French count, and this time Orville went, too, sailing some thirty miles to land at Ossun in the Pyrén
ées.
That accomplished, Katharine gave out. Close to collapse from “too much excitement,” she stayed in her hotel room for two days.
On March 17, the most beautiful day yet—“royal weather,” as people were saying—the king of England arrived, having driven more than seventy miles over to Pau from his customary holiday headquarters at Biarritz and with a considerable royal party accompanying him in a stream of gleaming black automobiles.
Edward VII was in his sixty-eighth year, a stout, white-bearded, affable figure whose enjoyment of life, whose manner of dress—the homburg hats, tweed suits, the habit of never buttoning the bottom button on his vests—along with his love of fast automobiles and unmasked enthusiasm for beautiful women, had led to his being taken as a kind of emblem for the years since 1900, the Edwardian Era. The oldest son of Queen Victoria, he was an altogether refreshing personification of escape from the Victorian Age. That he was also keenly interested in aviation and had come in person to witness for himself the wonder of Wilbur Wright seemed entirely in keeping.
The crowd at the airfield was large, the excitement great. Katharine was presented to the king, who, as noticed, was wearing a small bunch of shamrock in his buttonhole in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.
He was taken first to see the Flyer inside the shed. Wilbur apologized for the plane’s worn appearance, but was proud to point to the very spic-and-span new Flyer being built right beside it, which, Wilbur explained, was to be used in Rome.
As Wilbur saw to the positioning of his plane on the field and did his final inspection, Orville explained its workings to the king. Then Wilbur took off, performed to perfection, and after about seven minutes made a perfect landing at the point where he took off. The king watched it all with “bated breath,” as he said.
As he had for King Alfonso, Wilbur offered to go again to show how he carried a passenger, and once again, Katharine went with him. She had by now flown longer and farther than had any American woman.
Later that same day, much to the pride of all three Wrights, and to every French man and woman in the crowd, the Comte de Lambert performed a solo flight.
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.
In terms of the purpose for which the Wrights had come there, Rome was an unqualified success. From April 15 to the 26, Wilbur completed more than fifty flights, all to great acclaim and without mishap. He trained Italian military officers how to fly his plane, lectured to schoolteachers and students, and took a variety of passengers for a ride, one of whom, a news cameraman, produced the first motion picture films ever shot from an airplane in flight.
The weather was ideal and as in France, large crowds watched in amazement. And again there was no shortage of prominent figures among the onlookers. King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy strolled about with a camera slung over his shoulder as though one of the tourists. There were princes, dukes, cabinet members, the American financier J. P. Morgan and his sister and daughter, and James J. Hill, the famous American railroad builder. The American ambassador to Italy, Lloyd Griscom, was one of those who went flying with Wilbur.
But for Orville and Katharine, Rome, after the time they had had in France, left much to be desired. That April was “the choice season” in Rome, that the palaces of the Caesars, the Arch of Constantine, and the Colosseum were even more impressive than expected, was not sufficient. As Katharine told her father, “I was homesick for the first time when we reached Rome.” She and Orville both were “very anxious to come home.” She found their hotel appallingly dirty. “We would appreciate a good clean bathtub and clean plates and knives and forks much more than the attention we receive.” In another letter she reported, “The waiters at the table are so dirty that I can hardly eat a mouthful of food.”
She and Orville thought J. P. Morgan, his sister and daughter, “pleasant” enough, but were growin
g weary of the ways of the aristocracy. When word came that Victor Emmanuel would be arriving at Centocelle Field at eight in the morning to see Wilbur fly, it only went to prove that kings could be a nuisance. “They always come at such unearthly hours,” wrote Katharine.
A lunch in honor of the three Wrights at the beautiful villa of the Contessa Celleri, who was providing Wilbur’s living quarters, was all quite fine, as was the drive provided for their enjoyment into the countryside in a brand-new, elegant automobile, until the chauffeur, taking a curve at breakneck speed, smashed head-on into a stone wall. Fortunately no one was hurt, though the car was a total wreck.
Brother Wilbur was quite well, Katharine was pleased to report to the Bishop. Orville, too, was looking well and “improves all the time, but—like me—doesn’t care much for the discomforts of Rome.” They would be heading to London by way of Paris, then on to New York as soon as possible.
After two days in London, where they were feted and honored still further—a banquet at the Ritz Hotel, the first ever Gold Medal awarded by the British Aeronautical Society—the three sailed on May 5 from Southampton on the German ocean liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie.
For Wilbur it was the end of just over a year in Europe, much the greater part of which had been spent in France. It was there, in France, beginning at Le Mans, that he had flown as no man ever had anywhere on earth. At Le Mans and Pau he had flown far more than anyone ever had and set every record for distance, speed, altitude, time in the air, and made the first flights ever with a passenger, and all this, after so many years of the near secrecy of his and Orville’s efforts, had been done for all to see. The whole world now knew.