The lateral control also was improved by enlarging the rear rudder from 20 to 34 square feet, and by moving it to a position three feet farther back of the wings.
On account of frequent rains, the soggy condition of the field, and other weather conditions, only nine attempts to fly were made in the first two months of experiments in 1905, and only three of these lasted for as much as ten seconds. But after the first of September progress was rapid.
During all this time, the newspapers had continued to let the Wrights alone. Indeed, the failure of the newspapers in Dayton and elsewhere to say much about the history-making experiments at Huffman field was often used as an argument to prove that there couldn’t be any truth in the rumors that men had actually contrived a successful flying-machine. “You couldn’t have kept a thing like that secret. Some reporter surely would have heard about it!”
Dan Kumler, who was city editor of James M. Cox’s Daily News, in Dayton, during those early years of flying, recalled in 1940, not long before his death, that many people who had been on interurban cars passing the Huffman field and seen the Wrights in the air used to come to the Daily News office to inquire why there was nothing in the paper about the flights.
“Such callers,” said Kumler, “got to be a nuisance.”
“And why wasn’t there anything in the paper?” Kumler was asked.
“We just didn’t believe it,” he said. “Of course you remember that the Wrights at that time were terribly secretive.”
“You mean they were secretive about the fact that they were flying over an open field?”
“I guess,” said Kumler, grinning, after a moment’s reflection, “the truth is that we were just plain dumb.”
James M. Cox, owner of the Daily News, has likewise confessed that “none of us believed the reports” of flights.