The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

The members of the commission still believed, though, that when Bonel and Fordyce were back in Paris and presented all the facts to the War Ministry, there would be an extension of time and the deal carried out. But it never was. The French Minister of War agreed, however, that the Wrights were entitled to receive the forfeit money of 25,000 francs held in escrow by J. P. Morgan & Co.

Before leaving Dayton, the Frenchmen said they believed they knew what was back of the failure to close the deal. They said frankly that it was probably the present attitude of Captain Ferber, the man who had been instrumental in starting the negotiations. Ferber, they thought, with the Moroccan question no longer pressing, had now decided that with his knowledge of the Wright plane he could build one himself, and so become the French pioneer in aviation—a greater honor than being merely the instrument of introducing the aeroplane into France.

During the time the Frenchmen were at their hotel in Dayton, it might have been expected that their presence would become known to local newspapermen and that the world would have learned of what was going on. To avoid attracting attention they had taken the precaution to avoid the Hotel Algonquin where Fordyce had stayed on his earlier visit, and were at the Beckel House. They were unmolested there until an employee of one of the telegraph offices “tipped off” a reporter friend. The telegrapher had noticed various cables in code going to France and felt sure the Frenchmen must be carrying on an important deal. A reporter nabbed Fordyce and Bonel one evening in the hotel lobby on their return from a theater. As Bonel spoke no English, Fordyce parried the reporter’s questions. He thought a plausible explanation of their presence would be that they were studying the water system of a typical American city. But what he said was that they were studying Dayton’s “water pipes.” That satisfied as well as amused the reporter and nothing about the French commission got into the papers.

The local newspapermen had failed to note that, after Fordyce’s previous visit, the New York Herald of January 4 had printed a brief item about his having seen the Wrights to discuss a contract. It never occurred to anyone in Dayton that the Wright brothers could have attracted visitors from across the Atlantic, for the Wrights still were not “news.” If the Frenchmen had made a statement that they were there dickering with the Wrights for a $200,000 contract, it is possible that the local papers would not have printed it. They might not have believed such a tale.

Only a few days after the French commission had left Dayton, another foreign visitor dropped in on the Wrights—the Englishman, Patrick Y. Alexander.

After some casual talk, he inquired with seeming innocence, as if just to make conversation: “Is the French commission still here?”

The Wrights were startled. So great had been the secrecy about the visit of the Frenchmen that not many even in the French Government were permitted to know about their trip to Dayton. How did this mysterious Britisher know about it? The Wrights assumed that he must have been a volunteer worker in the British secret service. It was now obvious that he had crossed the Atlantic for no other purpose than to call on the Wrights and had hoped to burst in upon them while the Frenchmen were still there. After a stay of only one day in Dayton he hastened back to New York to sail on the next boat. His call made it all the more clear that the British were then more interested in what other European governments were doing about planes than in acquiring an air fleet of their own.

Incredulity about the Wrights’ power flights continued at the Aéro Club and in newspaper circles in France. In November, 1906, the Wrights received a visitor in Dayton, Sherman Morse, representing the New York Herald. His introduction was a cabled message to his managing editor from the owner of the paper, James Gordon Bennett, in Paris. The message said: Send one of your best reporters to Dayton to get truth about Wright brothers’ reported flights.

The reporter got the truth and wrote intelligent articles that appeared in the New York Herald. These included reports of men who had witnessed flights. Parts of the Morse articles appeared in the Herald’s Paris edition on November 22 and 23. But evidently those in charge of the Paris Herald still were not convinced by the reports from Dayton by their own man. On November 28, the Paris Herald had an editorial about the Wrights which included the statement that in Europe curiosity about their machine was “clouded with skepticism owing to the fact that information regarding the invention is so small while the results which its inventors claim to have achieved are so colossal.” And the next day, the Paris Herald gave space to a news item in which Santos-Dumont was reported as saying that he “did not find any evidence of their [the Wrights] having done anything at all.”

Late in 1906, Frank S. Lahm, who had cabled his brother-in-law, Weaver, to make an investigation, was in the United States, and he, accompanied by Weaver, went on November 22 to see the Wrights in Dayton. He was convinced, of course, that their statements could be relied upon, but he made further investigation of his own, interviewing witnesses not previously seen by Weaver. After his return to Paris, he prepared a long letter to the Paris Herald, in which he expressed his belief in the reported flights. The newspaper devoted a column to the Lahm letter on February 10, 1907. But having distrusted what their own representative had written, it was not to be expected that the editors would give full belief to what Lahm now told them. In the same issue as his letter, was an editorial headed “Flyers or Liars.” “The Wrights have flown or they have not flown,” the paper profoundly stated. “They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either flyers or liars.... It is difficult to fly; it is easy to say ‘we have flown.’”