U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [429]
$20,000,000 worth of building operations with as little fuss or flurry as ordinarily accompanies the act of a pas-senger on a trol ey car in handing a nickel to the conductor. THE CAMPERS AT KITTY HAWK
On December seventeenth, nineteen hundred and
three, Bishop Wright of the United Brethren onetime editor of the Religious Telescope received in his frame
-278-house on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, a telegram from his boys Wilbur and Orvil e who'd gotten it into their heads to spend their vacations in a little camp out on the dunes of the North Carolina coast tinkering with a homemade glider they'd knocked together them-selves. The telegram read:
SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY
MORNING ALL
AGAINST TWENTYONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL
WITH ENGINEPOWER ALONE AVERAGE
SPEED THROUGH
AIR THIRTYONE MILES LONGEST FIFTYSEVEN SECONDS
INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS
The figures were a little wrong because the tele-graph operator misread Orvil e's hasty penciled scrawl but the fact remains
that a couple of young bicycle mechanics from
Dayton, Ohio
had designed constructed and flown
for the first time ever a practical airplane.
After running the motor a few minutes to heat it up I released the wire that held the machine to the track and the machine started forward into the wind. Wilbur ran at the side of the machine holding the wing to balance it on the track. Unlike the start on the 14th made in a calm the machine facing a 27 mile wind started very slowly. . . . Wilbur was able to stay with it until it lifted from the track after a forty-foot run. One of the lifesaving men snapped the camera for us taking a picture just as it reached the end of the track and the machine had risen to a height of about two feet. . . . The course of the flight up and down was extremely erratic, partly due to the irregularities of the air, partly to lack of experience in handling this ma- chine. A sudden dart when a little over a hundred and twenty feet from the point at which it rose in the air
-279- ended the flight. . . . This flight lasted only 12 sec- onds but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started. A little later in the day the machine was caught
in a gust of wind and turned over and smashed, almost kil ing the coastguardsman who tried to hold it down; it was too bad
but the Wright brothers were too happy to care
they'd proved that the damn thing flew.
When these points had been definitely established we at once packed our goods and returned home know- ing that the age of the flying machine had come at last. They were home for Christmas in Dayton, Ohio,
where they'd been born in the seventies of a family who had been settled west of the Al eghenies since eighteen fourteen, in Dayton, Ohio, where they'd been to grammarschool and highschool and joined their father's church and played basebal and hockey and worked out on the paral el bars and the flying swing and sold news-papers and built themselves a printingpress out of odds and ends from the junkheap and flown kites and tink-ered with mechanical contraptions and gone around town, as boys doing odd jobs to turn an honest penny. The folks claimed it was the bishop's bringing home a helicopter, a fiftycent mechanical toy made of two fans worked by elastic bands that was supposed to hover in the air, that had got his two youngest boys hipped on the subject of flight
so that they stayed home instead of marrying the
-280-way the other boys did, and puttered al day about the house picking up a living with jobprinting,
bicyclerepair work,
sitting up late nights reading books on aero-dynamics. Stil they were sincere churchmembers, their bicy-cle business was prosperous, a man could rely on their word. They were popular in Dayton.
In those days flyingmachines were the big laugh
of al the crackerbarrel philosophers. Langley's and Chanute's unsuccessful experiments had been jeered