The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

Root knew that the circular flight he had just witnessed was of prime importance, for it demonstrated that the airplane would have practical use. He wrote an eye-witness account of what the Wrights had done for the January 1 (1905) issue of his magazine, Gleanings in Bee Culture, and sent a marked copy to the editor of the Scientific American, with a letter telling the editor he was free to reprint the article. The editor wrote back that he had not received the marked copy. So Root sent another. But when the editor of the Scientific American saw what Root had printed he paid no attention to it.

Root continued to print articles about the Wrights in his magazine. In December, 1905, he published the fact that a great number of long flights had been made during the previous season, “one of 24 miles in 38 minutes,” probably the first publication of that event in the United States. At about the same time, in its issue of December 16, 1905, the Scientific American said, in an editorial headed “Retrospect for the Year”: “The most promising results (with the airplane) to date were those obtained last year by the Wright brothers, one of whom made a flight of over half a mile in a power-propelled machine.” Previously in the same editorial, though, was the assertion: “... the only successful ‘flying’ that has been done this year—must be credited to the balloon type.” By that time, the Wrights’ total flying distance was about 160 miles.

In its issue of January 13, 1906, in an article headed “The Wright Aeroplane and Its Fabled Performances,” the Scientific American commented skeptically on a letter written by the Wright brothers which had been published in a Paris automobile journal. In that letter the Wrights had given details of the long flights of late September and early October, 1905. In expressing its disbelief in the “alleged” flights described in the Wright letter, the Scientific American said: “If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face—even if he has to scale a fifteen-story skyscraper to do so—would not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?”

A few weeks later, in February, 1906, the editor of the Scientific American wrote to the Wrights to inquire if there was any truth in reports that they were negotiating with the French Government. He enclosed in his letter a clipping of “The Wright Aeroplane and Its Fabled Performances.”

The Wrights wrote in reply that since the Scientific American obtained the data of what it termed “alleged experiments” directly from a published letter signed by the Wright brothers, and since it did not discredit the authenticity of the letter, but only the truthfulness of the statements, they were at a loss to understand why the editor should desire further statements from such a source. They did not answer the inquiry about the negotiations with the French Government.

Most of the long flights in late September and early October, 1905, had been seen by Amos Stauffer, a farmer working in an adjoining field. But he went right ahead husking corn. Another witness, however, was more of a gossip. At one of the October flights, William Fouts, a Dayton druggist, was present, and the Wrights cautioned him not to say anything about what he had seen. But Fouts must have taken a few people into his confidence. In the afternoon of October 5, the Dayton Daily News had an article saying the Wrights were making sensational flights every day. The Dayton correspondent for the Cincinnati Post reported this to his paper which printed it the next day. A fairly good-sized crowd then went to the Huffman pasture. But when they found nothing going on there most of them decided that the reports must have been much exaggerated. Nothing more was said about the Wrights in Ohio papers for some time. John Tomlinson, a reporter on the Dayton Journal, and correspondent for out-of-town papers, offered $50 to Henry Webbert, friend of the Wrights, to let him know the date of their next flight. There was one more short flight on October 16, but no newspapermen or other onlookers were at the field.

On March 12, 1906, the Wrights had sent to the Aero Club of America the following list of names of reputable men who had seen one or more of their flights: E. W. Ellis, assistant city auditor; Torrence Huffman, bank president; C. S. Billman, secretary, and W. H. Shank, treasurer of the West Side Building & Loan Association; William, Henry and Charles Webbert, in the plumbing business; Frank Hamburger, hardware dealer; Howard M. Myers, post-office employee; William Fouts and Reuben Schindler, druggists; William Weber, plumber; Bernard H. Lambers, of Dayton Malleable Iron Works. Besides those living in Dayton, were: O. F. Jamieson, traveling salesman, of East Germantown, Ohio; David Beard and Amos Stauffer, of Osborn; and Theodore Waddell, of the Census Bureau at Washington. The Wrights had a list of about sixty persons who had witnessed flights.

Those witnesses named in the published list got requests for confirmatory letters from the Scientific American whose editor finally had decided that reports of what the Wrights had done might be worth looking into. Then, in the issue of April 7, 1906, the magazine reported the long flights of the previous autumn and quoted in full a letter from one of the witnesses. More than six months later, on November 21, 1906, the Aero Club itself wrote to the various persons named in the list received from the Wrights, asking for letters about the flights they had seen.

As late as October, 1906, the Scientific American had devoted more than a column to a letter from J. C. Press, of South Norwalk, Connecticut, who presented arguments to justify his belief that “man may fly within a few years.” But, on the other hand, the letter-writer quoted the editor of Collier’s Weekly as expressing “disbelief in even the ultimate possibility of flight.”

At last, however, in the issue of December 15, 1906, or nearly three years after the Wrights’ first flights, the Scientific American printed an editorial which indicated that the editor was now becoming aware of the facts. The editorial said: “In all the history of invention, there is probably no parallel to the unostentatious manner in which the Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, ushered into the world their epoch-making invention of the first successful aeroplane flying-machine.”