It was in 1905 that the Wright Brothers had first offered to the Army a license to use their patents; but nothing came of it. Reports coming from Dayton during the next two years, concerning their flying activities, caused the newspapers to publish a number of articles about them.
Theodore Roosevelt, then our President, was a diligent reader, and several articles about the Wrights attracted his attention. One day he clipped one of these articles from a newspaper and scribbled across it one word: “Investigate!” He passed it along to his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft. In a short time the almost forgotten Wright Brothers had a call from Brigadier General James Allen, U. S. Army Signal Corps. In the autumn of 1907 Wilbur Wright appeared in Washington to confer with the War Department.
A few months later, in July, 1907, an aëronautical division was established in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer of the Army. In December of that year the Army asked for bids on the construction of an airplane. The specifications called for a machine that could carry a weight of 350 pounds. It had to be able to remain in the air continuously for one hour with two passengers. During the flight the machine was required to remain under perfect control and to be capable of being steered in all directions. Its speed should be 40 miles per hour. The machine had to be built so that it could be taken apart and packed for transportation in army wagons. Then it had to be reassembled and put in flying condition in one hour.
By this time inventors everywhere were working on flying machines, but the Wright Brothers were the only ones who put in an appearance with an airplane for the Army trials in September, 1908.
Unfortunately the trial was a failure. The huge crowd gathered at Fort Meyer, Virginia, was horrified to see a propeller fly off and the machine crash, killing Lieutenant Tom Selfridge, the Army observer, and injuring Orville Wright. Tom Selfridge thus became the first American air martyr, and the future dimmed for the Wright Brothers and the airplane.
