FIRST FLIGHT. The only picture made of man’s first flight in a power-driven, heavier-than-air machine, Kitty Hawk, December 17, 1903. The plane, piloted by Orville Wright, has just taken off from the monorail. Wilbur Wright, running at the side, had held the wing to balance the machine until it left the rail.
One reason why nearly everyone in the United States was disinclined to swallow the reports about flying with a machine heavier than air was that important scientists had already explained in the public prints why the thing was impossible. When a man of the profound scientific wisdom of Simon Newcomb, for example, had demonstrated with unassailable logic why man couldn’t fly, why should the public be fooled by silly stories about two obscure bicycle repair-men who hadn’t even been to college? Professor Newcomb was so distinguished an astronomer that he was the only American since Benjamin Franklin to be made an associate of the Institute of France. It was widely assumed that what he didn’t know about laws of physics simply wasn’t in books; and that when he said flying couldn’t be done, there was no need to inquire any further. More than once Professor Newcomb had written that flight without gas-bags would require the discovery of some new metal or a new unsuspected force in Nature. Then, in an article in The Independent—October 22, 1903, while the Wrights were at Kitty Hawk assembling their power machine—he not only proved that trying to fly was nonsense, but went further and showed that even if a man did fly, he wouldn’t dare to stop. “Once he slackens his speed, down he begins to fall.—Once he stops, he falls a dead mass. How shall he reach the ground without destroying his delicate machinery? I do not think that even the most imaginative inventor has yet put on paper a demonstrative, successful way of meeting this difficulty.”
THE FIRST POWER PLANE. A side view of the 1903 plane at Kitty Hawk.
In all his statements, Professor Newcomb had the support of other eminent authorities, including Rear Admiral George W. Melville, then chief engineer for the United States Navy, who, a year or two previously, in the North American Review, had set forth convincingly the absurdity of attempts to fly.
The most recent Newcomb article was all the more impressive as a forecast from the fact that it appeared only fifteen days after one of Professor Langley’s unsuccessful attempts at flight. That is, Langley’s attempt seemed to show that flight was beyond human possibility, and then Newcomb’s article explained why it was impossible. Though these pooh-poohing statements by Newcomb and other scientists were probably read by relatively few people, they were seen by editors, editorial writers, and others who could have much influence on public opinion. Naturally, no editor who “knew” a thing couldn’t be done would permit his paper to record the fact that it had been done.
Oddly enough, one of the first public announcements by word of mouth about the Wrights’ Kitty Hawk flights was in a Sunday-school. A. I. Root, founder of a still prosperous business for the sale of honey and beekeepers’ supplies at Medina, Ohio, taught a Sunday-school class. One morning shortly before the dismissal bell, observing that the boys in the class were restless, he sought to restore order by catching their interest. Perhaps he wished to show, too, that miracles as wonderful as any in the Bible were still possible.
“Do you know, friends,” he said, “that two Ohio boys, or young men rather, have outstripped the world in demonstrating that a flying-machine can be constructed without the aid of a balloon?” He had read a brief item about the Wrights in an Akron paper.
The class became attentive and Root went on: “During the past two months these two boys have made a machine that actually flew through the air for more than half a mile, carrying one of the boys with it. This young man is not only a credit to our state but to the whole country and to the world.”