Days as hot as summer had returned to the Outer Banks, and that afternoon, when Wilbur went up alone, the heat was nearly unbearable. Flying at something over 50 miles per hour, he made one big circle and was starting into another when, still unfamiliar with the new control levers, he made a mistake with the rudder and suddenly plunged to the ground about a mile from camp.
“I was watching with the field glass,” Orville would recount. “The machine turned on end—the front end—with the tail in the air. There was a big splash of sand—such a cloud that I couldn’t see from where I was exactly what had happened. . . . It was probably thirty seconds before Will appeared.”
He had been violently thrown against the underside of the top wing and had to be pulled from the wreckage. There was a cut across his nose, and though hit hard and bruised on both shoulders, an arm, and one hand, he was not seriously injured. No bones were broken.
The plane, however, was a total wreck, and thus as Wilbur announced, the tests had come to an end. Two days later he was on his way again. It was agreed he would go to France to proceed with the required demonstrations there, and that Orville would do the same in Washington.
During little more than a week of test flights at Kill Devil Hills, he and Orville had been the subjects of far more attention and praise in the press than they had ever known. They had become a popular sensation. Still no major public performance had yet been made. The rabbit had still to be pulled from the hat for all to see.
Passage was arranged for him on the Touraine, Wilbur reported to Katharine from New York. “I hate like anything to go away without first coming home.”
“Write often,” she told him in response. “Don’t come home without getting me several pairs of gloves—number six—black and white, short and long. . . . Don’t get them unless they are cheap.”
II.
The voyage to Le Havre proved uneventful—“smooth but foggy much of the time” was about all Wilbur had to say of the crossing. He reached Paris on May 29, and for the next week he and Hart Berg were on the move, touring possible sites for the public demonstrations, including Fontainebleau and Vitry, but found nothing suitable.
The French press, aware of Wilbur’s return, had a “tendency” to be hostile, he reported to Orville. But to almost anyone else it would have seemed considerably more than a “tendency.” The popular L’Illustration, as an example, ran a heavily retouched photograph of the Flyer taken at Kitty Hawk, saying, “Its appearance seems quite dubious and one finds in it every element of a ‘fabrication,’ not especially well done moreover.”
Further, there was a resurgence of popular enthusiasm over French aviators and their daring feats. Earlier in the year Henri Farman had flown for nearly two minutes, and that spring at the end of May, Farman made news when he took a passenger up for a ride. As Wilbur reported to Orville, Farman and Delagrange were also putting on demonstrations elsewhere in Europe and with much success.
As for themselves, Wilbur wrote, “The first thing is to get some practice and make some demonstrations, then let the future be what it may.”
Hart Berg assured a correspondent for L’Auto that within two months the Wright plane would fly before the people. The period of secret trials was over, Berg said. The French public would be the first to see with their own eyes.
But where? On June 8, he and Wilbur went by train to Le Mans, a quiet, ancient town of some 65,000 people on the Sarthe River in the department of the Sarthe, 125 miles southwest of Paris. A prominent automobile manufacturer, ballooning enthusiast, and leading local citizen named Léon Bollée, hearing of Wilbur’s need for a suitable field, had sent a message to Berg suggesting Le Mans, where there was plenty of flat, open space.
Bollée met Wilbur and Berg at the station in one of the largest and handsomest of his automobile line and took them off on a tour. As it turned out, no one could have been more genial or helpful or generous with his time than Léon Bollée.
Short and dark bearded, he was extremely fat, weighing 240 pounds. The physical contrast with Wilbur was more pronounced even than between Wilbur and Hart Berg. Like Wilbur, Bollée had not attended a university, but instead joined his father’s bell foundry business and eventually began building automobiles with much success. (“Léon Bollée automobiles are constructed using only top quality materials in the vast and beautiful factories of Le Mans,” read a recent advertisement.) His English was reasonably good and Wilbur liked him at once. As things turned out Bollée would do more to help Wilbur than anyone, and never asked for anything in return.
Of possible sites, the Hunaudières horse racetrack, about five miles out from town, seemed to Wilbur most suitable. The course was entirely enclosed by trees and the ground was rough. Still, as he would report to Orville, he thought it would serve their purpose. Bollée said he would see what could be arranged. He also offered Wilbur full use of a large room at his factory in which to assemble the Flyer, in addition to the help of some of his workers.
Three days later, back in Paris, Wilbur received word from Bollée that the Hunaudières racetrack was available, and the day after Wilbur was busy getting ready, buying overalls, work shoes, and a straw hat.
One evening in the elegant Louis XVI salon of Berg’s apartment, Wilbur sat for an interview with a young French aviation journalist, François Peyrey, who knew it was the first interview Wilbur had agreed to do in France. Berg had made the arrangements. They talked of the experiments at Kitty Hawk, of motors and patents, and why Le Mans had been the choice for the demonstrations. But it was Wilbur himself, about whom Peyrey had had his doubts, who became the subject of greatest fascination.
“Mr. Hart O. Berg warmed up for the interview by offering me a cup of coffee and laid out a box of cigars,” Peyrey would write. “I felt my doubts fly away one by one in the blue smoke. Through curls of smoke I examined Wilbur Wright, his thin, serious face, lit by the strangely gentle, intelligent and radiant eyes. . . . I had to admit: no, this man is not a bluffer.”
The interview marked an important beginning. In the months to come, François Peyrey was to provide some of the most insightful, firsthand observations about Wilbur ever published.
Wilbur arrived back in Le Mans close to midnight, June 16, and settled in at the Hôtel du Dauphin in a room overlooking the main square, the Place de la République. Eager to get started on the reassembly of the Flyer, he began opening the crates at the Bollée factory first thing the following day and could hardly believe what he saw. At Kitty Hawk two months before, he had found the old camp a shambles. Now he was looking at the Flyer in shambles and could barely control his fury.