In that letter, after telling of their recent long flights, the Wrights said they were prepared to furnish machines on contract, to be accepted only after trial trips of at least forty kilometers, the machine to carry an operator and enough supplies of fuel for a flight of 160 kilometers. They said they would be willing to make contracts in which the minimum distance of the trial trip would be more than forty kilometers, but that the price of the machine would then be greater. They were also ready, the letter added, to build machines carrying more than one man. No figures as to price were given.
Hoping to have the French War Department buy a plane, Ferber went to his chief, Colonel Bertrand, director of the laboratory of research pertaining to military aeronautics. But Colonel Bertrand told him the French Government could not commit itself to pay a sum “probably enormous” for an invention not yet authenticated. All that it was possible to do, said Bertrand, was to appoint and send a commission to see the Wrights.
Again Ferber wrote to the Wrights, on October 21, asking what the price for a machine would be. He said he didn’t think his government would any longer be interested in paying so great a sum as it had been when he had first asked for a price.
The Wrights replied, on November 4, saying they would consent to reduce their price to the French Government to one million francs—$200,000—the money to be paid only after the genuine value of their discoveries had been demonstrated by a flight of one of their machines in the presence of French Government representatives. Ferber had not told in his letter what the French Government had been willing to pay and the Wrights did not say what the price of one million francs was reduced from! The price was to include a complete machine, and instruction in the Wright discoveries relating to the scientific principles of the art; formulas for the designing of machines of other sizes and speeds; and personal instruction of operators in the use of the machine.
At the time Captain Ferber was thus dickering for the possible purchase of a Wright flying-machine, others in France who were interested in aeronautics still doubted if such a machine existed.
About the middle of October, Frank S. Lahm, a member of the Aéro Club of France, had a chance meeting with his friend Patrick Y. Alexander, of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, who had visited the Wrights as recently as the previous April. Alexander expressed to Lahm his strong belief that the Wrights had actually been making power flights in America.
Lahm was an American. After going to France from Mansfield, Ohio, many years before, he had introduced the Remington typewriter to Europe. As a hobby he had taken up ballooning and held a pilot’s license. It was of more than casual interest to him that Alexander believed successful flights had been made in America. Lahm then made an effort to learn the facts from a source right in Dayton, Ohio. He wrote to Nelson Bierce, a manufacturer there whom he knew, asking what sort of people the Wrights were and what was known about their reported experiments. Bierce didn’t make any investigation, but wrote to Lahm, late in November, that the Wrights were considered men of good character, and that they were said to be carrying on some kind of flying experiments near Dayton; but, he said, no one seemed to know much about the nature of these experiments.
Before there was time for Bierce’s letter to reach him, Lahm got other news about the Wrights. A letter they had sent on November 17, to Besançon, editor of L’Aérophile, giving a detailed account of their most recent experiments, had been published on November 30 in L’Auto, a Paris daily dealing with sports. Besançon had given the letter to L’Auto because his own next monthly issue would not go to press for a week or more and he was afraid a rival German publication might print, before he could, similar information from the Wrights.
That letter to Besançon, containing much specific information, created a sensation. There was much animated talk about its contents that night of November 30 at the Aéro Club. Indeed, that date is noteworthy in aeronautical history, for publication of the letter to Besançon led to several important investigations.
News about the Wrights’ recent flights that the letter revealed was taken up by one or two of the wire services and cabled back to the United States where it reached various newspapers, including those in Dayton. But Dayton editors couldn’t understand why the Wrights should have stirred up so much excitement in France.