The time the brothers devoted to playing diabolo so publicly did not go unnoticed and added still more to the growing puzzlement over les frères mystérieux. The “mystery” of the Wrights, wrote the Paris Herald, remained as dense as ever, and quoted an American visitor who frequently observed them in the garden of the Tuileries and became convinced they had laid aside their flying machine and quit thinking about it. “Everybody knows,” the man had said, “that when a person has contracted the diabolo habit he cannot possibly attend to anything else.”
Apparently the brothers caught on quickly to the diabolo art and became quite good at it. But for Charlie Taylor, the spool kept falling to the ground nine tries out of ten. As for what else Charlie Taylor may have been doing to pass the time, besides diabolo, there is no record.
When Katharine read about the hours spent in the park, she bristled as a schoolteacher must. “You never told me whether you learned to talk any French,” she wrote to Orville. “Instead of sitting around in the park everlastingly, it seems to me that I would have been getting around to see everything about Paris. Couldn’t you get someone to talk French with you?” Just the same, she asked them to “be sure” to bring home a diabolo for her.
His sense of humor plainly in play again, Orville told her he had indeed met a Frenchman in the park who spoke English, but that he thought it hopeless to try to learn both diabolo and French at the same time.
Schools had reopened in Dayton, Katharine was back in the classroom, and all was well at home, the atmosphere entirely different from what it had been. She and father were “getting along famously.” He had bought a new typewriter. She had ordered a new stove. “You can stay as long as you please,” she told the brothers.
“What plans do you suggest?” Wilbur asked Orville at the end of September in a letter from Berlin, where he had returned again. “We cannot afford to spend much more time on negotiations, nor can we afford to return to America without some arrangements for our European business.”
So stay they did and for a while Orville joined Wilbur in Berlin. Not until the start of November, back in Paris, did they decide it was time to go.
But not before going with Hart Berg to see a demonstration put on by the French aviator Henri Farman, “Monsieur Henri,” a former artist, champion bicycle rider, and automobile racer, who was considered Europe’s outstanding pilot. Large crowds gathered at Issy-les-Moulineaux southwest of Paris. Farman had been getting a great deal of publicity, and even in the United States. (“Aren’t you getting worried over ‘Farman’s flights’?” Katharine had asked.) Farman flew a biplane made by a French aircraft manufacturer, Voisin Frères. Many of his trials were unsuccessful. On the longer flights, he had trouble getting off the ground, and the same was true when trying to make a circle. But in one flight he covered more than half a mile and flew an almost complete circle.
Yet from what he saw, Orville felt he and Wilbur had no cause to worry. When asked by a reporter what he thought, Orville said only that he and his brother never liked to pass criticisms on the work of others, and that time would show whether the methods used in the Farman machine were sufficient for strong winds.
French aviation enthusiasts had no doubt, however, that France was now clearly in the lead. France could boast of the Voisin brothers, Gabriel and Charles, who had formed their aircraft company only that year, and other French aviators beside Henri Farman, including Léon Delagrange, who also flew a Voisin biplane, and Louis Blériot, who had taught himself to fly in a monoplane of his own design. Like Henri Farman, these French pilots flew in public and greatly to the public’s delight.
Also, quite unlike the Wright brothers, most of the pilots in France—Farman, Santos-Dumont, Delagrange, Blériot, Comte Charles de Lambert—were men of ample private means for whom the costs of their aviation pursuits were of little concern.
“It seems that to the genius of France is reserved the glorious mission of initiating the world into the conquest of the air,” said the president of the Aéro-Club. To his eminent fellow member of the club, Ernest Archdeacon, the Wright Flyer was no more than a “phantom machine.”
For the time being, the Flyer III and all its parts would remain in storage at the customs house at Le Havre. Wilbur and Charlie Taylor left for home first. Orville followed soon after.
Writing from on board the RMS Baltic, his spirits high, Wilbur told his father:
We will spend the winter getting some more machines ready for the spring trade. Then we will probably put out a sign, “Opening day, all goods below cost.” We will probably return to Europe in March, unless we make arrangements with the U.S. Government before that.
While Charlie went directly to Dayton after arriving in New York, Wilbur stopped off in Washington to check on developments there before reaching home in time for Thanksgiving. He was extremely pleased to report that at long last the U.S. Army was seriously interested in doing business.
With the onset of a new year, all that the brothers had worked to achieve in the way of sales agreements began to happen. On February 8, 1908, their bid of $25,000 for a Flyer was at last accepted by the War Department. Less than a month later, on March 3, they signed an agreement with a French company, to be known as La Compagnie Générale de Navigation Aérienne, with the understanding that public demonstrations of the Flyer in France would follow by midsummer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Triumph at Le Mans
Gentlemen, I’m going to fly.
WILBUR WRIGHT
I.
“I am on my way to Kitty Hawk to get a camp in shape for a little practice before undertaking the official trials at Washington and in France,” Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute from Elizabeth City on April 8, 1908. The decision to proceed for the first time with large public demonstrations of their Flyer—as important and difficult a step as the brothers had yet faced—had finally been made, and “a little practice” was indeed called for. Neither had flown a plane for two and a half years, not since the fall of 1905.
Though he had been forewarned that the camp at Kill Devil Hills was in shambles, what Wilbur found was worse than he had imagined. Of the original building, only the sides still stood. The new building was gone, carried off by violent storms or vandals who figured the brothers were never coming back. The water pump was gone. The floors of both buildings had disappeared under more than a foot of sand and debris. Walking among the ruins he kept turning up pieces and parts of the 1901, 1902, and 1903 machines.