Turning to Orville, Weaver laughingly observed: “I’m about convinced already. That boy couldn’t be a bribed witness.”
They also went, by interurban car, to talk with the Beard family, across from the flying field, and with Amos Stauffer, the nearest farmer up the road.
As Weaver reported: “On October 5, he [Stauffer] was cutting corn in the next field east, which is higher ground. When he noticed the aeroplane had started on its flight he remarked to his helper: ‘Well, the boys are at it again,’ and kept on cutting corn, at the same time keeping an eye on the great white form rushing about its course. ‘I just kept on shocking corn,’ he continued, ‘until I got down to the fence, and the durned thing was still going round. I thought it would never stop.’ I asked him how long he thought the flight continued, and he replied it seemed to him it was in the air for half an hour.”
Then Orville and Weaver returned to Dayton and called on William Fouts, West Side druggist, who had witnessed the long flight on October 5.
Later they went to the Wright home. Of that visit Weaver wrote: “The elder brother, Wilbur, I found even quieter and less demonstrative than the younger. He looked the scholar and recluse. Neither is married. As Mr. Wright expressed it, they had not the means to support ‘a wife and a flying-machine too.’”
Weaver was completely convinced before he left Dayton, and on December 3, cabled to Lahm: “Claims completely verified.” A few days later, on December 6, back at his home in Mansfield, he rushed a letter to Lahm giving his evidence of what the Wrights had done.
In a little more than a week after Weaver’s visit to Dayton, another investigator appeared there, Robert Coquelle, representing L’Auto, of Paris. He had been in New York attending the six-day bicycle races and arrived in Dayton on December 12. Since his paper and Les Sports had taken opposite sides regarding the possibility that the Wrights had flown, and L’Auto had been pro-Wright, Coquelle wished to report on these “deux marchands de cycles” in a way to make a sensation. The imaginative tale he wrote about how “mysterious” were the Wrights was almost worthy of his compatriot, Dumas. The Wrights gave him names of people who had witnessed flights but it is believed he didn’t bother to consult many of them, evidently feeling sure he could invent a better story than they could tell him. However, Coquelle was convinced that the reports about the Wrights’ flights were not exaggerated and he cabled a preliminary dispatch to his paper: Wright brothers refuse to show their machine but I have seen some witnesses it is impossible to doubt.
On December 13, the day after Coquelle’s visit to Dayton, the Wrights sent another letter to M. Besançon, editor of L’Aérophile, in reply to questions of his, and gave him details of their recent flights, distances, height at which they flew, size of field, and so on. Incidentally the closing paragraph of that letter contained a statement in contradiction of a myth, still widely accepted:
The claim often made in the 19th century that the lack of sufficiently light motors alone prohibited man from the empire of the air was quite unfounded. At the speeds which birds usually employ, a well-designed flyer can in actual practice sustain a gross weight of 30 kilograms for each horsepower of the motor, which gives ample margin for such motors as might easily have been built 50 years ago.
Before Besançon could have received this letter, with its details of recent flights, Robert Coquelle arrived in Paris, having taken a boat from New York only a day or two after his stay in Dayton, and his sensational story was published. Much of this report seemed so incredible that one member of the Aéro Club said it almost made him wonder if the Wright brothers existed at all.