Salley reached Manteo on May 4, and the Wright brothers’ records show that he came to their camp the next day. He told the brothers he had been asked by a New York paper to investigate the story of their flight over the ocean. The day after Salley’s visit, the Wrights did make their first flight of the season, and though Salley did not see it, he learned about it by phone from one of the men at the Kill Devil life-saving station. His informant told him that one of the Wrights had flown at least 1,000 feet, at about sixty feet above the ground.
Salley immediately sent a query from Manteo, giving briefly the gist of the story, to a list of papers he hoped would be interested. Most of the papers ignored the message; but the telegraph editor of the Cleveland (Ohio) Leader not only wasn’t interested but was indignant that his intelligence should be insulted by the offer of so improbable a tale. He declined to pay the telegraph toll for the short message, even though at the night press rate of only one-third of a cent a word the cost could hardly have been more than a dime. His only reply to Salley was an admonition to “cut out the wild-cat stuff.” Salley, now equally indignant, wired back offering to give names of well-known persons who could testify to his reliability; but the Cleveland editor paid no further attention.
When Salley’s query reached the office of the New York Herald, it put the editors in a quandary. Though they had printed the brief report about a flight that hadn’t occurred, now they were beginning to wonder if all the reports about the Wrights weren’t fakes. Yet they knew that the owner of the paper, James Gordon Bennett, living in Paris, would almost certainly discharge any editor responsible for omitting the story if it were true. They decided, with misgivings, to print the story and it appeared the next morning on the first page of the Herald, though not in the most prominent position.
Then the editors determined to send a staff man to Kitty Hawk for the facts. They picked for this job their star reporter, brilliant, lovable Byron R. Newton—later to become Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and afterward Collector of Customs in New York—one of the ablest newspapermen of his time. If the Wrights proved to be fakers no one could do a better job than “By” Newton at exposing them.
Other editors, too, decided that the time had come to get the “lowdown” on the Wright brothers. By the time Newton reached the little boarding place, the Tranquil House, in Manteo, he had been joined by two other correspondents: William Hosier, of the New York American, and P. H. McGowan, of the London Daily Mail. The next day two others arrived: Arthur Ruhl, writer, and James H. Hare, photographer, for Collier’s Weekly.
The newly arrived correspondents, noting the desolate isolation of Kitty Hawk, thought it probable enough that the Wrights must prefer to be let alone. Perhaps, they thought, if intruders came, the Wrights wouldn’t fly at all. They decided that if the Wrights were secretive, they themselves would be no less so. They would hide in the pine woods, as near as possible to the Wright camp, and observe with field glasses what happened. That meant a short walk to a wharf on Roanoke Island, five miles by sailing boat to Haman’s Bay, across the sound, and then a walk of a mile or so over the sand to the place where they should secrete themselves. They made a dicker with a boatman to take them all back and forth each day and act as their guide. Provided with food and water, field glasses, and cameras, they set out about 4 o’clock each morning from May 11 to May 14 to keep their vigil. Hour after hour they fought mosquitoes and woodticks and sometimes were drenched by rain. But to their astonishment they several times witnessed human flight.
The first flight any of them witnessed was early in the morning of May 11. “For some minutes,” wrote Newton, “the propeller blades continued to flash in the sun, and then the machine rose obliquely into the air. At first it came directly toward us, so that we could not tell how fast it was going except that it appeared to increase rapidly in size as it approached. In the excitement of this first flight, men trained to observe details under all sorts of distractions forgot their cameras, forgot their watches, forgot everything but this aerial monster chattering over our heads.”
However, “Jimmy” Hare got a good photograph of that flight.
On May 14, the correspondents saw what no person on earth had ever seen before—a flying-machine under complete control carrying two men. First Wilbur made a short flight with Charles W. Furnas as passenger, and then Orville flew with Furnas for nearly three minutes.
Newton predicted in his diary just after that: “Some day Congress will erect a monument here to these Wrights.”[11]