The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

But the Wrights replied: Absolutely no! They preferred to have the first news of the event come from Dayton.

Dosher clicked out the refusal.

The operator at Norfolk, however, did not heed the warning.

When they left the weather bureau after sending their message, the Wrights went over to the Kitty Hawk life-saving station, a few steps away, and chatted with members of the crew there. Captain S. J. Payne, in charge of the station, declared that he had seen one of the flights with the aid of a pair of binoculars.

Then the Wrights walked to the post office at Kitty Hawk; and before returning to camp they stopped for a farewell visit at the home of Captain Hobbs, who had often done hauling and other work for them.

Meanwhile, the telegraph operator at Norfolk, disregarding the Wrights’ adverse response to his request, had promptly gone ahead and given a tip about the flights to a young friend, H. P. Moore, of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. Moore was connected with the circulation department of the paper but was breaking in as a reporter and was in the habit of calling at the weather bureau. He made a desperate effort to reach by telephone over the government line someone at Kitty Hawk or elsewhere along the coast who could furnish details about what the flying-machine looked like, and about this Mr. Wright who was supposed to have operated it. Whatever information he got did not come from eyewitnesses of the flights, or from anyone who had ever seen the machine, and the account published the next morning was about ninety-nine per cent inaccurate. It described a flight of three miles by Wilbur and told of Orville then running about yelling “Eureka.” The machine had one six-blade propeller beneath it, to elevate it, so the story ran, and another propeller at the rear to shove it forward.

“Very little can be learned here about the Wrights,” the story said. “They are supposed by the natives of Kitty Hawk to be people of means and are always well dressed.”

(When Moore met Orville, years later, and asked him what he thought of the account, Orville good-naturedly replied: “It was an amazing piece of work. Though ninety-nine per cent wrong, it did contain one fact that was correct. There had been a flight.” Then Moore wrote that Orville had corroborated his story.)

One must give the Virginian-Pilot editors credit for treating the news as important. The headline over the flight story the next morning extended clear across the top of the first page.

Moore sent brief “queries,” outlining the story, to twenty-one other newspapers over the country, including several in Ohio, one of them the Dayton Journal. But nearly all the telegraph editors resented having a correspondent suggest that a human being could fly by machinery. Of the twenty-one newspapers to whom it was offered, only five ordered the story. They were the New York American, the Washington (D.C.) Post, the Chicago Record-Herald, the Philadelphia Record, and the Cincinnati Enquirer. But not all five papers that received the story published it the next morning. The Chicago Record-Herald and the Washington Post delayed using it, and the Philadelphia Record did not print it at all. Thus only three newspapers in the United States had a report of the great event at Kitty Hawk the next morning. The Cincinnati Enquirer was the only one besides the Virginian-Pilot that gave space to the account on the front page.