First in Flight Read online

  Salley’s opinion that the Wrights wouldn’t fly if they knew a reporter was anywhere in the vicinity was quickly proven wrong, as Wilbur made the last and longest flight of the day—covering a little less than half a mile in about a minute—after their visitor departed camp.

  In his dispatch that day, Salley also told of seeing a herd of cattle scared into Roanoke Sound by the noise from the Wrights’ motor. He further reported that they were planning a flight fifteen miles south to Oregon Inlet and back, a tidbit nearly as fantastic as the proposed jaunt to Cape Henry.

  Another mixture of fact and fiction, Salley’s telegram of May 8 stands as the first eyewitness account of the Wrights by a representative of a major news source.

  The story was suddenly judged too hot for Bruce Salley. His first account—the absentee story of May 6—appeared on the front page of the New York Herald and was also picked up by the New York Times. His account of May 8 was telegraphed to the Herald and then distributed nationally by that paper, picking up embellishments along the way according to the whims of the editors whose desks it crossed.

  A handful of major publications thought enough of the events at Kill Devil Hills to send staffers. Byron Newton of the Herald and Bill Hoster of the New York American were the first to arrive, checking into the Tranquil House on May 10. Newton and Hoster were on hand to accompany Bruce Salley the next time the Wrights took to the air, Monday, May 11. How Salley—in Manteo at the behest of the Herald—felt about being one-upped by star reporter Byron Newton is a matter for speculation.

  The forty-six-year-old Newton was a native of Allegany County, New York, and had attended Oberlin College in Ohio, which was also Katharine Wright’s school. He was well traveled as a journalist, having begun his career in Buffalo in 1887 and served as an Associated Press correspondent covering the Spanish-American War in 1898. He had been at the Herald since 1902. As for his opinion of the Wright brothers, he was skeptical that they had ever achieved sustained flight.

  Perhaps feeling the effects of his difficult trip from Elizabeth City to Manteo, Newton initially looked upon coastal North Carolina with big-city disdain. In an article most definitely not intended for local consumption, he pronounced the citizens of Roanoke Island “well nigh as ignorant of the modern world as if they lived in the depths of Africa. The sound of a steam locomotive is as unknown to them as the music of Mars. The automobile is as much a myth to them as Noah’s Ark and the flying machine across the sound they regarded as a sea serpent yarn invented by Yankee reporters, the first strangers since the Civil War to invade their island domain.”

  Newton, Salley, and Hoster rose at four in the morning on May 11 for the boat ride to the Outer Banks. Perhaps enlarging on his African theme, Newton described the walk to the observation point near the Wrights’ camp as a perilous safari through “noisome swamps and jungle” and among “thousands of moccasins, rattlers and black-snakes, the blinding swarms of mosquitoes, the myriads of ground ticks and chiggers, the flocks of wild turkey and other fowl, the herds of wild hogs and cattle and the gleaming white sand mountains.” Indeed, according to Newton, “two of the men narrowly escaped the poisonous fangs of moccasins.” Once in hiding, they lay “devoured by mosquitoes and ticks, startled occasionally by the beady eyes of a snake.” The local folk would have been amused.

  And that was before the real action began. “As we crept into our hiding place we could see the doors of the aerodrome were open and the machine standing on its monorail track outside,” Newton wrote.

  Three men were working about it and making frequent hurried trips to the aerodrome. Presently a man climbed into the seat while others continued to tinker about the mechanism. Then we saw the two propellers begin to revolve….

  For some minutes 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. As it neared us we could plainly see the operator in his seat working at the upright levers close by his side. When it was almost squarely over us there was a movement of the forward and rear guiding planes, a slight curving of the larger planes at one end and the machine wheeled about at an angle every bit as gracefully as an eagle flying close to the ground could have done….

  After the first turn it drove straight toward one of the sand hills as if it were the intention of the operator to land there, but instead of coming down there was another slight movement of the planes and the machine soared upward, skimmed over the crest of the mountain, 250 feet high, and disappeared on the opposite side. For perhaps ten seconds we heard distinctly the clatter of the propellers, when the machine flashed into view again, sailed along over the surf, made another easy turn and dropped into the sand about one hundred yards from the point of departure.

  Summarizing the experience, Newton gave the opinion that “thinking men and women of our generation have in store a great treat when they shall have the good fortune first to witness this marvel of man’s creation…. It brings a special exhilaration. It is different from the contemplation of any other marvel human eyes may behold in a life time.”

  What Newton, Salley, and Hoster had seen was a flight by Orville covering a little more than half a mile. An hour later, around nine o’clock, they saw Wilbur make a flight of nearly two miles, lasting two and a half minutes. At eleven, they saw Orville make a flight a quarter-mile short of that.

  They also saw the first recorded instance of taxiing in history. Newton described how, at the end of each flight, “two wide tired trucks … were placed under the machine, the motor started and the aeroplane at once became a wind-wagon rolling itself back to the starting track with the power of its own propellers.” Bruce Salley confirmed this in his dispatch that evening.

  As for the newsmen’s secret hiding place, Wilbur Wright noted in his diary that same day, “It is said that Salley, the newspaperman, spent the day in the woods over by Ha[y]man’s old place.”

  With a few days’ hard experience, Bruce Salley was for the moment perhaps the most seasoned newspaper reporter in the world on the subject of aeronautics. His May 11 telegram to the Herald showed it. While Byron Newton was forgetting his watch in the excitement of witnessing flight, Salley was putting his own to good use in measuring the time the Wrights were in the air. He also estimated distance by means of the telegraph poles spaced along the sand, thus providing an independent record of the length of the flights that day. He even calculated the airplane’s average speed, and to three decimal places at that—on Wilbur’s flight, the longest of the three, he made the speed to be 46.774 miles per hour.

  But it seems that the more professional Salley became, the less his stories were believed.

  Understanding the controversial nature of his material, he attached a postscript to his May 11 dispatch: “Editor Herald: Stories you are getting from Manteo are accurate. Should you wish to substantiate correctness of my information wire Mr. Drinkwater, officer in charge Weather Bureau service here, or Captain Jesse Ward keeper of Kill Devil Hill Life Saving station. Big fakes have been concocted in Norfolk. If you want to know anything about me personally write S. S. Nottingham editor Norfolk Landmark.”

  The reference to the “big fakes … concocted in Norfolk” presumably means the Virginian-Pilot, where the staff was busy finagling more stories on the Wrights. It is interesting to note how that paper, having run the fantasy flying story that resulted in Bruce Salley’s being sent to the Outer Banks on behalf of the New York Herald, did not dispatch a reporter to cover a major event in its home territory. Editor Keville Glennan later claimed he proposed going himself or having someone else sent, but was told it wasn’t worth the expense.

  Making the best of their situation, Glenna
n and a Virginian-Pilot reporter named Benjamin Myers, who knew Morse code, supposedly made nightly visits to the Weather Bureau office in Norfolk. According to Glennan, it so happened that the men’s room was close enough to the telegraph machine for someone to spy on the incoming transmissions. Glennan and Myers would repair to the bathroom, leave the door ajar, and make a transcription.

  Back at the Virginian-Pilot, Glennan would “rewrite Salley’s stuff, enlarging and embellishing,” as he put it. It was a matter of pride to Glennan that his paper “got better stories than the New York Herald because I could fill in with more background than the New York Herald’s rewrite staff.”

  Meanwhile, Bruce Salley’s reputation was suffering. His May 11 dispatch, sent to the Herald and then offered nationally, received a strong negative response from the Cleveland Leader, which refused to pay the telegraph toll on the story, amounting to a third of a cent per word at night rates. The Leader apparently bypassed the Herald and wired Salley directly in Manteo, admonishing him to “cut out the wild cat stuff.” Salley promptly fired back, “Where did you get idea I have been filing you wild cat stuff. Am not in habit of filing such matter.”

  Even Byron Newton was having difficulty with editors. In addition to his reporting for the Herald, he tried to sell longer versions of the story to some of the leading magazines of the day. One of the rejection letters he later received went as follows: “While your manuscript has been read with much interest, it does not seem to qualify either as fact or fiction and we are therefore returning it with thanks for your consideration of us.” Newton grew so frustrated that he put the story in a trunk and made no further effort to sell it for twenty-four years.

  As for his status at the Herald, some accounts have it that on his return to New York, Newton was briefly suspended from the staff for his exaggerated reporting.

  When Newton, Salley, and Hoster arrived back at the Tranquil House after the flights of May 11, they found that three more colleagues had arrived during the day: writer Arthur Ruhl and photographer Jimmy Hare, both representing Collier’s weekly magazine, and P. H. McGowan of the London Daily Mail. Arthur Ruhl was already known and liked by the Wrights, having made their acquaintance in New York in the fall of 1907.

  The newsmen’s predicament was growing more curious all the while. Arthur Ruhl described the routine beginning with the daily boat trip from Manteo:

  At five the next morning you catch the launch that chug-chugs out to Nag’s Head and Kitty Hawk with the mail…. Out of the chug-chug half a mile from shore and into a skiff, across the gunwales of which, as it is poled miraculously shoreward with one oar, the rollers sleepily climb and deposit themselves in your lap. If you stand, the skiff will sink, and to sit requires fortitude and repose of manner almost superhuman. At the precise moment of swamping, the boat conveniently touches bottom and you wade ashore.

  Then comes the tramp through the woods to the Kill Devil sand-hills. Geographically, this may be only four or five miles, but measured by the sand into which your shoes sink and which sinks into your shoes, the pine-needles you slip back on, the heat, and the “ticks” and “chiggers” that swarm up out of the earth and burrow into every part of you, it seems about thirty-five.

  Ruhl also told how the newsmen wrestled dead limbs through the forest to try to bridge a boggy area, and how they hotfooted it across sparsely vegetated sections to keep the Wrights from seeing them.

  All this to set up a spy post about a mile from the brothers’ camp, to suffer insects, heat, and humidity, and to face rainstorms unprotected, with no guarantee that the Wrights would even take a notion to fly that day. Jimmy Hare’s memorable photographs show the reporters tramping across the sand in various stages of undress, struggling up a dune, camping in the woods, and, pant legs rolled, applying medication to their badly bitten legs.

  Of course, these hardships were endured in the belief that the Wrights would do no flying if they knew reporters were nearby. Yet Bruce Salley had already been to camp twice, and the brothers had received at least one report of his hiding in the woods. In case there was any doubt, Arthur Ruhl left cover and walked into camp after witnessing his first couple of flights.

  It was a painful charade for the men of the press. The Wrights were in a position where they had to get in flying practice no matter who was watching.

  It might be supposed that sharing such an experience would have led the newsmen to mutual understanding and a common sense of purpose—a kind of brotherhood of misery—but that was not entirely the case. They were covering a big story in a competitive market.

  In later years, Alf Drinkwater was fond of telling of hot tempers in his telegraph office. According to Drinkwater, P. H. McGowan managed to scratch out his story in pencil on the boat ride back to Manteo one day and was therefore the first to deliver his completed copy to the telegraph office. Drinkwater dutifully transmitted McGowan’s eighteen-hundred-word story while the other newsmen were arriving with their copy.

  McGowan had only recently arrived in the United States after serving as a correspondent in Japan and Russia, where it was the custom that the first man in line could occupy the transmitter as long as he cared, effectively blocking his competitors from getting their stories on the wire. While his copy was flashing northward, McGowan picked up a magazine, marked off a couple of pages for Drinkwater to send, and informed the other newsmen that his story was to be an “exclusive” that day.

  Bill Hoster grabbed a chair and threatened to break it over McGowan’s head.

  Drinkwater threatened to make Hoster pay for the chair if he did.

  Byron Newton and Bruce Salley intervened to separate McGowan and Hoster.

  Agitated, Drinkwater informed the newsmen that he was operating a government office that was only required to remain open until four o’clock, and that he was continuing to transmit well after that only as a courtesy to them. From that point onward, he told them, stories would be limited to five hundred words.

  Alf Drinkwater was very much at the center of things in 1908. He later claimed to have transmitted forty-two thousand words related to aeronautics that May. It was not an easy job. Once all six newsmen were on the scene, Drinkwater was sometimes occupied until two in the morning, relieved occasionally at the telegraph key by his wife or Bruce Salley. When the wire to Norfolk got damp at night, he found it almost impossible to transmit.

  As usual, Drinkwater’s slant on the events is not without controversy. The claim that Byron Newton was suspended from the Herald for his reporting of the Wrights’ activities may have originated with the Manteo telegrapher. The more popular view is that it was Newton who severed the tie, over the Herald’s sensationalized coverage of the brothers. Drinkwater further claimed to have sent an affidavit to the paper testifying to the Wrights’ long flights, which got Newton his job back. And in one interview, he even stated that, due to illness, Newton was confined to the Tranquil House during his entire visit and never made it to Kill Devil Hills at all; Drinkwater claimed he went in Newton’s place.

  In fact, Alf Drinkwater did make a visit to the Wrights’ camp that month. After the morning flights of May 11, he showed up with a Mr. Grant, whom he introduced as an attaché of the Weather Bureau office in Norfolk—most likely the Charles C. Grant who was on the receiving end of the famous telegram in 1903, and who was now being spied on from the men’s room by Keville Glennan and Benjamin Myers of the Virginian-Pilot. Drinkwater and Grant told the Wrights they were in the area to make repairs on the telegraph line, but when they learned the brothers would be doing no flying that afternoon, they departed quickly. Wilbur found the visit suspicious.

  Tuesday, May 12, was the first day the full complement of reporters made the early-morning trip from Manteo to Kill Devil Hills. It wasn’t worth the effort. As Wilbur put it in his diary, “The wind was high all day, and as we were very sore after the long hauls of yesterday we did not get the machine out.”

  The following day proved more fruitful, though exceedingly long. T
he Wrights made the first of their four flights early in the morning and the last, owing to wind conditions, at nearly seven o’clock at night. The longest was a flight by Orville of nearly two and a half miles. This was the day Arthur Ruhl left cover and walked to camp after his first experience of flight.

  That night in his dispatch, in a dark bit of foresight the inventors themselves hadn’t even considered, Bruce Salley postulated that an airplane might “soar over any given point, such as a man of war, upon which it may drop a destroying explosive.”

  Though he noted that “at no time today did the machine ascend to a greater elevation than twenty feet above the ground,” Salley speculated that it could fly “at least 1000 miles” and that it could soar “five miles above ground.”

  May 14 was the Wrights’ best day on the Outer Banks in 1908. Just before eight o’clock that morning, Wilbur took Charlie Furnas up for the world’s first two-man flight, covering a little less than half a mile in a little less than half a minute. Furnas then accompanied Orville on a circular flight covering over two and a half miles and lasting more than four minutes.

  Of course, the historic event of a two-man flight was already old news, Bruce Salley having erroneously announced it in his absentee story of May 6, and the Virginian-Pilot having proclaimed it four days before that. Now, witnessing the event with his own eyes, Salley still didn’t get it quite right, remarking on “the presence of both the Wrights in the machine. They were unmistakably seen in it as the machine soared by a group of responsible observers and they were seen to step from the machine when it lit.”