After Orville had joined Wilbur at the Hotel Meurice, the brothers did not find their business affairs too pressing to do a lot of sight-seeing. Neither one spoke French, but Orville had acquired a fair reading knowledge of it. Oddly enough, Wilbur, who had learned Greek and Latin easily, made no effort to learn French. He jokingly said it was a convenience not to know it, as it saved him from a lot of talking.
As they went about their sight-seeing, Wilbur, always a reader of history, was especially fascinated by all places of historic interest. Orville found himself spending much time each day in the Louvre. Those days gave him an appreciation of good paintings that he never lost.
Negotiations with the French Government dragged on. For weeks the Wrights were kept in uncertainty. They never saw any of the people they were dealing with. Their only contact with anyone at the War Ministry was through Fordyce, and they had no way of knowing, except from what he told them, whether any progress was being made.
Nothing came of the long negotiations. The Wrights were not alone in being disappointed. Commandant Bonel, not long afterward, perhaps as a consequence of the failure of his recommendations to be accepted, resigned from the Army.
Late in the summer of 1907, the Wrights left Paris. Orville went first to London, at the suggestion of Flint & Co. to have a talk with the receiver of the Barnum & Bailey circus and the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, then in bankruptcy. The receiver wondered if the Wright plane could be flown within an enclosure where an admission fee could be charged.
Wilbur Wright had set out with Berg for St. Petersburg. They changed their minds about going to Russia, however, and, instead, stopped at Berlin where Orville shortly afterward joined them.
As the train on which Wilbur and Berg traveled was passing through Belgium, Wilbur noticed a sign indicating that they were in the little town of Jemappes. Then he recalled that a great battle took place there back in 1792. He began to discuss the battle with an exact knowledge of details that astounded Berg. Wilbur had read about it in his youth. Over and over again, Berg and others who dealt with Wilbur Wright, were similarly impressed not only by the range of his reading but by the fact that no knowledge he had once acquired ever seemed to grow dim.
In Berlin, the brothers were able to gain direct contact with top flight men—with the minister of the Kaiser’s war department,[8] and also with the minister of the department of transportation. These German officials were highly intelligent and not slow about recognizing the tremendous importance of the Wright machine if it would perform as the brothers said it could. The Wrights had proposed a contract in which they would agree to furnish a machine capable of carrying, at a speed of forty miles an hour, two men and a supply of fuel for a flight of 125 miles, and to make a demonstration flight of one hour fulfilling every requirement of the contract before one pfennig should be paid to them. The German officials could not deny the fairness of this offer, and could see no reason why the Wrights should have made it unless they could carry it out. Besides, they were not altogether unacquainted with the earlier work of the Wright brothers, accounts of whose glider and power flights had been appearing for five or six years in German technical publications. But in spite of all this the officials were in a quandary. They could not bring themselves to believe that what the Wrights now offered could be possible. They were afraid to sign their names to a contract that generally would be considered as foolish as a contract for a perpetual motion machine. They might become the laughingstock of the world.
On the other hand, these officials did not want to let an invention of such potentialities, if it really existed, slip through their fingers. They therefore gave, instead of a signed contract, their solemn verbal promise that if the Wrights would make a flight before them, such as had been offered in the proposed written contract, they would buy planes on the terms the Wrights had offered.[9]
The Wrights felt that these officials, being at the head of important departments, could be relied upon, and they were willing to take their verbal guarantee to buy planes upon the successful demonstration of the machine. When they left Germany, they fully expected to return the next March to make such a demonstration. (They could not foresee that they would have too many other engagements in definite contracts elsewhere before another four months had passed.)