For his part Bishop Wright kept them regularly posted on events at home, his health (which was good), Carrie Grumbach’s cooking (also good), his travels on church work, the weather, and the fact that he was “not a bit lonely.” He had too much to do. He had begun work on an autobiography and had already produced fourteen typewritten pages. A few weeks later, he was up to fifty pages.
As noted in the press, the airfield at Pont-Long continued to shine as a “place of pilgrimage for men of eminence.” In the last week of February, the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, arrived to witness “the miracle.” He watched Wilbur take off and fly high above in great circles, never taking his eye off the spectacle. Afterward, as his entourage, Orville, Katharine, and others crowded around, he stood close to hear Wilbur explain each of the control mechanisms on the machine. The king, who spoke English and clearly knew a good deal about aviation, had many questions for Wilbur. At one point, turning to Katharine, he asked, “And did you really ride it yourself?” When she said she had, he said he wanted very much to go up with Wilbur but had promised his wife he would not. Katharine judged him “a good husband.”
Turning to Wilbur, the king inquired whether it would be asking too much to request another demonstration. “I have seen what you can do,” he said. “I want to see what one of your pilots can do.”
Wilbur at once consented, taking off this time with the Comte de Lambert for a flight of twelve minutes, during which Wilbur never once touched the levers. That a student pilot could have learned to handle the plane with such skill in such a short time seemed to impress the king more than anything.
Orville had told the press he would do no flying while in France. Nor did he plan to go up with Wilbur. But only days later Wilbur took Katharine for another ride, this time for a thirteen-mile flight cross-country. “It was great,” she told her father. Not long after that she would take off in a balloon with a French count, and this time Orville went, too, sailing some thirty miles to land at Ossun in the Pyrénées.
That accomplished, Katharine gave out. Close to collapse from “too much excitement,” she stayed in her hotel room for two days.
On March 17, the most beautiful day yet—“royal weather,” as people were saying—the king of England arrived, having driven more than seventy miles over to Pau from his customary holiday headquarters at Biarritz and with a considerable royal party accompanying him in a stream of gleaming black automobiles.
Edward VII was in his sixty-eighth year, a stout, white-bearded, affable figure whose enjoyment of life, whose manner of dress—the homburg hats, tweed suits, the habit of never buttoning the bottom button on his vests—along with his love of fast automobiles and unmasked enthusiasm for beautiful women, had led to his being taken as a kind of emblem for the years since 1900, the Edwardian Era. The oldest son of Queen Victoria, he was an altogether refreshing personification of escape from the Victorian Age. That he was also keenly interested in aviation and had come in person to witness for himself the wonder of Wilbur Wright seemed entirely in keeping.
The crowd at the airfield was large, the excitement great. Katharine was presented to the king, who, as noticed, was wearing a small bunch of shamrock in his buttonhole in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.
He was taken first to see the Flyer inside the shed. Wilbur apologized for the plane’s worn appearance, but was proud to point to the very spic-and-span new Flyer being built right beside it, which, Wilbur explained, was to be used in Rome.
As Wilbur saw to the positioning of his plane on the field and did his final inspection, Orville explained its workings to the king. Then Wilbur took off, performed to perfection, and after about seven minutes made a perfect landing at the point where he took off. The king watched it all with “bated breath,” as he said.
As he had for King Alfonso, Wilbur offered to go again to show how he carried a passenger, and once again, Katharine went with him. She had by now flown longer and farther than had any American woman.
Later that same day, much to the pride of all three Wrights, and to every French man and woman in the crowd, the Comte de Lambert performed a solo flight.
The clamor and amazement over what the Wrights had achieved—all they had shown to be true time after time at Le Mans and Pau—was by no means limited to Europe. At home in the United States, newspapers and magazines from one end of the country to the other gave the story continual attention. Nor was the potential of so miraculous a creation lost sight of.
In a long article in the Waco, Texas, Times-Herald on “The Monarchs of the Air,” James A. Edgerton wrote as follows:
Most of us can remember when the automobile was a novelty. The writer is under forty, yet recalls the time when the first “horseless wagon” was used, and it was only about a score of years ago. . . . The machine was a big clumsy affair, with large wheels, uncertain steering apparatus, and was run by a very noisy steam engine. This was so great a failure that it was some years before another crossed my field of vision. Now they are as common as millionaires.
If the automobile could be so vastly improved in so short a time, who can predict what may occur in the field of aerial navigation now that the principle has actually been discovered and is before the world? Is it not possible that it will revolutionize human affairs in as radical a way as did the discovery of the use of steam?
In all this stupendous change going on before our very eyes the Wright brothers are the chief magicians. They are the leaders and pioneers.
It had been announced that the Aero Club of America would present the brothers with a gold medal on their return. Congress, too, had voted a medal to be presented by President William Howard Taft, and Dayton was making preparations for the biggest celebration in its history.
But for all the attention being paid to the Wrights, there was at the same time increasing realization of how much else was happening in aviation in France. Six months earlier the number of builders of airplanes in Paris and vicinity amounted to less than a half dozen. On April 25, the New York Times reported that no fewer than fifteen factories were now in full operation. If the Wrights were front and center in the show of inventive change, the cast onstage in France was filling rapidly.
Scores of inventors are constructing their own machines [the Times article continued]. There is an aerodrome where pupils are taught to fly. Three new papers devoted to aviation have been founded within the past six months. There are three societies in France for the encouragement of aviation, and over $300,000 in prizes will be open to competition in the course of the year.