Looking back over their experiments, the Wrights noted that “in 1903, 62 pounds per horsepower were carried at a speed of 30 miles an hour; in 1904, 53 pounds at 34 miles an hour; and in 1905, 46 pounds at 38 miles an hour.” Thus the weight carried per horsepower was in inverse ratio to the speed—the smaller the weight carried per horsepower, the higher the speed. That seems obvious enough now, but at the time the Wrights were making these experiments many scientists still accepted the “Langley Law,” that the greater the speed, the less horsepower necessary.
The Wrights now knew that the airplane would have practical use—though they did not foresee how safely trans-Atlantic flights would be made—and not even in their wildest dreams did they think of anyone ever flying at night.
IX
IT STILL WASN’T “NEWS”
Though Dayton newspapermen had not besieged the Huffman pasture for details of the great news story lurking there during 1904-’05, one of their number had occasionally been in contact with the Wrights. That was Luther Beard—no kin to the other Beards mentioned—managing editor of the Dayton Journal. Besides being a newspaper editor, Beard also taught school at Fairfield, about two miles from the Huffman farm, and went back and forth by the interurban car line that passed the field where the Wrights were making history. It sometimes happened that on the trip to Dayton he was on the same car with one or both of the Wright brothers, returning from their flights.
“I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them,” Beard recalled, years afterward, chuckling over the joke on himself, “because I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying-machine. I had an idea that it must worry their father.”
In these conversations, neither the Wrights nor Beard was likely to bring up the subject of aviation. The Wrights showed no eagerness to talk about what they were doing, and Beard kept to subjects he considered more sensible. But one day, in the autumn of 1904, several of the school children told him they had seen the Wrights flying all around the field. Maybe, thought Beard, that might make a little local item for the paper. When he next saw Orville Wright on the car, a day or two afterward, Beard asked him if it was true that they had been flying all the way around the field.
Oh, yes, Orville admitted, they often did that. Then Orville began to talk about something else.
Evidently, Beard decided, the fact that an airplane could be flown under perfect control in circles didn’t amount to anything after all. Orville Wright himself didn’t seem to think it was unusual or important. There was no use putting it in the paper. One more reason perhaps for not printing much in the Journal about what the poor, misguided Wrights were doing was that such items were annoying to Frank Tunison, another of the editors—the same Tunison who had turned down the story of the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Having decided that the Wrights were not news, he was naturally irritated to see any reference to them, even on an inside page. “Why do we print such stuff?” he would ask.
However, Beard said to Orville, as they rode along on the car: “If you ever do something unusual be sure and let us know.” From time to time he went or telephoned to the Wright home to find out if by remote chance the brothers had done anything worth mentioning.
“Done anything of special interest lately?” he asked Orville Wright one evening.