They carried the airplane back to camp and set it up a few feet west of the hangar. While the Wrights and onlookers were discussing the flights, a sudden gust of wind struck the plane and turned it over a number of times, damaging it badly. The airplane could not be repaired in time for any more flights that year; indeed, it was never flown again. Daniels gained the dubious honor of becoming the first airplane casualty when he was slightly scratched and bruised while caught inside the machine between the wings in an attempt to stop the plane as it rolled over. Subsequent events were vivid in Daniels’ mind while reminiscing of his “first—and God help me—my last flight.” He relates:
I found myself caught in them wires and the machine blowing across the beach heading for the ocean, landing first on one end and then on the other, rolling over and over, and me getting more tangled up in it all the time. I tell you, I was plumb scared. When the thing did stop for half a second I nearly broke up every wire and upright getting out of it.
Orville made this matter-of-fact entry in his diary: “After dinner we went to Kitty Hawk to send off telegram to M. W. While there we called on Capt. and Mrs. Hobbs, Dr. Cogswell and the station men.” Toward evening that day Bishop Milton Wright in Dayton received the telegram from his sons:
Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 57 seconds inform press home Christmas. Orevelle Wright.
In the transmission of the telegram, 57 seconds was incorrectly given for the 59-second record flight, and Orville’s name was misspelled. The Norfolk telegraph operator leaked the news to a local paper, the Virginian-Pilot. The resulting story produced a series of false reports as to the length and duration of the December 17 flights. Practically none of the information contained in the telegram was used, except that the Wrights had flown.
The Bishop gave out a biographical note:
Wilbur is 36, Orville 32, and they are as inseparable as twins. For several years they have read up on aeronautics as a physician would read his books, and they have studied, discussed, and experimented together. Natural workmen, they have invented, constructed, and operated their gliders, and finally their ‘Wright Flyer,’ jointly, all at their own personal expense. About equal credit is due each.
The world took little note of the Wrights’ tremendous achievement and years passed before its full significance was realized. After reading the Wrights’ telegram, the Associated Press representative in Dayton remarked, “Fifty-seven seconds, hey? If it had been fifty-seven minutes then it might have been a news item.” Three years after the first flight an editorial appeared in the December 15, 1906, issue of the Scientific American, which included the following:
In all the history of invention, there is probably no parallel to the unostentatious manner in which the Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, ushered into the world their epoch-making invention of the first successful aeroplane flying-machine.
