The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

The last flight on May 14, made by Wilbur Wright, ended in an accident. Wilbur had pulled a wrong lever. Repairs would have taken a week, and as the time the brothers could spare had elapsed, the experiments stopped. But after removing the engine and other machinery for shipment to Dayton, the Wrights left the plane in the shed at Kitty Hawk, thinking they might return. The ending of these trials brought no grief to the correspondents who had been getting up before daylight each morning, and returning to Manteo late each afternoon, footsore and tired, with their dispatches still to be written.

One night’s dispatches had brought unexpected trouble for “By” Newton. Though his report had been filed ahead of McGowan’s, in plenty of time to be relayed from his paper’s New York office to Paris and appear in the next morning’s issue of the Paris edition, a needless delay occurred in New York. In consequence, Newton, through no fault of his own, was “scooped” by McGowan the next day in the continental edition of the London Daily Mail. When James Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York Herald, observed that his Paris Herald failed to have any account of the sensational flights at Kitty Hawk the day before, as reported in the rival Daily Mail, he was furious. During the two seasons when the Wrights had flown a total of 160 miles at Huffman prairie, Bennett, with scores of reporters at his disposal, had failed to learn the truth of what the Wrights had done. But now when he thought a reporter had missed a story about them, he did not wait to make inquiries but promptly sent a cable to New York ordering Newton suspended from the staff. Under Bennett’s way of conducting his papers, suspension usually was a preliminary to permanent discharge.

Though he was reinstated after he had sent to Bennett a review of the facts, along with some affidavits, Newton, all the rest of his life, felt a grievance against Bennett and the Herald.

Incidentally, McGowan’s “scoop” in the continental edition of the Daily Mail which had so disturbed Bennett, was not accepted as truth by everyone who read it. Charles A. Bertrand, in one of the Paris papers, May 15, published this comment: “He [McGowan] depicts the flight in a manner that does honor to his imagination. If the Wrights hadn’t been seen in Europe, one would be justified in believing their very existence as uncertain as their apparatus.”

During the several days the correspondents were at Kitty Hawk, the Wrights knew they were being observed. From time to time they caught glimpses of men’s heads over the hilltop in the distance. Moreover, they heard each day, from members of a life-saving crew, just how many visitors had come. But they simply thought it was a good joke on the mysterious observers, whoever they were.

Arthur Ruhl, of Collier’s, had met the Wrights in Dayton about a year before. On May 14, before the final flight, he came over to the camp. But he said nothing about being a member of the group that had been observing the flights.

The Wrights invited Ruhl to stay for lunch. But he declined. He seemed to the Wrights ill at ease and anxious to get away. At a meeting with him some time afterward they learned why. He had come against the wishes of the other correspondents and was afraid he might give away the fact that they were in the near-by woods.

On May 15, the day after the crash, when it was evident that there would be no more flights, McGowan, of the Daily Mail, went to the camp, accompanied by still another correspondent who had just arrived, Gilson Gardner, of the Washington office of the Newspaper Enterprise Association. McGowan remarked that he had once visited Octave Chanute’s camp at Dune Park, near Chicago, in 1897 for the Chicago Tribune. Another visitor at the camp, a day or two before that, was a young man named J. C. Burkhardt, dressed in a brand-new outfit of hunting togs. He was a college boy who had come all the way from Ithaca just to satisfy his curiosity.

“What would you have done,” Orville Wright was asked, afterward, “if all those correspondents had come right to your camp each day and sat there to watch you?”

“We’d have had to go ahead just as if they weren’t there,” he replied. “We couldn’t have delayed our work. There was too much to do and our time was short.”