While we were standing about discussing this last flight, a sudden strong gust of wind struck the machine and began to turn it over. Everybody made a rush for it. Wilbur, who was at one end, seized it in front. Mr. Daniels and I, who were behind, tried to stop it by holding to the rear uprights.
All our efforts were in vain. The machine rolled over and over. Daniels, who had retained his grip, was carried along with it, and was thrown about, head over heels, inside of the machine. Fortunately he was not seriously injured, though badly bruised in falling about against the motor, chain guides, etc. The ribs in the surfaces of the machine were broken, the motor injured and the chain guides badly bent, so that all possibility of further flights with it for that year were at an end.
It is unlikely that any of the five spectators who had seen these flights sensed their scientific importance. But some of them felt interested, from one point of view, because they would have the laugh on a number of natives thereabouts who had insisted that these Wright brothers must be a pair of harmless cranks. A common argument had been: “God didn’t intend man to fly. If he did, he would have given him a set of wings.”
It was the regret of his life to the Wrights’ friend, “Bill” Tate, that he missed witnessing that first flight. He had decided that “no one but a crazy man would attempt to fly in such a wind,” and made no effort to be there.
After preparing and eating their lunch, and then washing their dishes, Wilbur and Orville set out, about two o’clock that afternoon, to walk over to the Kitty Hawk weather station, four or five miles away, to send a telegram to their father. It must have been about three o’clock when they reached the station. So few telegrams were sent from this locality that no regular commercial office existed and it was permitted to send them over this government wire as far as Norfolk where they would be relayed by phone from the weather bureau to the office of one of the telegraph companies.
Orville wrote out the following message to their father: “Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one-mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 59 seconds inform press home Christmas. Orville Wright.”
What Orville meant when he wrote “against twenty-one-mile wind” was that the wind was at least twenty-one miles an hour during each of the flights. At the time of the first flight it was, as already noted, between twenty-four and twenty-seven miles an hour—probably about twenty-six miles.
After handing the message to Joseph J. Dosher, the weather bureau operator, Orville joined Wilbur over in a corner of the room to examine the record on an instrument that recorded the wind velocity.
Dosher got an almost instantaneous connection with Norfolk, and while the Wrights were still looking at the wind record, he said:
“The operator in Norfolk wants to know if it is all right to give the news to a reporter friend.”