Harper’s Weekly, “The Journal of Civilization,” would feature on its next cover a dramatic photograph of Wilbur and the plane circling the Statue of Liberty with the caption, “A New Kind of Gull in New York Harbor.”
“Goes pretty well, Charlie,” Wilbur was reported to have said to Charlie Taylor, when, after a smooth landing, he climbed from the plane back on Governors Island. “Looks alright to me, Will,” replied Charlie.
The next day came news from Potsdam, Germany, that Orville had flown to an altitude of 984 feet, higher than anyone had yet flown in an airplane.
Stiff winds out of the north kept both Wilbur and Glenn Curtiss grounded on Governors Island for two days, Saturday and Sunday, and by then Curtiss announced he had to leave to keep a contract in St. Louis. This left only Wilbur to make the flight up the Hudson River that had been promised and all were waiting for.
The morning of Monday, October 4, though the wind out of the north had eased off to a degree, it was still blowing at 16 miles per hour, or more than Wilbur would have preferred. Sensing it was only going to increase again, he decided to fly. The plane was brought out of the hangar and he looked it over. Finding the gasoline tank not full, he took an old can and filled it himself.
At 9:53, he took off from Governors Island, the emergency canoe still hanging from beneath the plane. The one difference this time was a tiny American flag fixed to the rudder. It had been sent to him by Katharine with the request that he fly it over New York.
Again the wireless messages went off. Again signal flags were flying, and again whistles shrieked, foghorns sounded. Work came to a standstill in much of the city and there was a “stampede” to the windows and rooftops of office buildings to see the spectacle in the sky of “wonderful Wilbur Wright, the Dayton aviator,” as one New York paper was calling him.
From the new skyscrapers like the Metropolitan Life Tower the view of the harbor and the Hudson River was panoramic. Most spectacular of all was the outlook from the upper floors of the forty-seven-story Singer Building on Broadway, which, once completed, would be the tallest skyscraper on earth.
When Wilbur headed across the harbor and turned northward into the wind heading for the Hudson River the excitement grew even greater. He had climbed by then to about 150 feet and was moving at a speed of about 36 miles per hour. But on reaching the river, as he later recounted, he began getting air currents such as he had never had to cope with. They were coming off the skyscrapers and so strong and dangerous he had to drop elevation “considerably” and hug the west, or New Jersey, side of the river.
“I went to a height just a little above the ferryboats until I reached the battleships, and then I skimmed over their funnels. I passed so close to the funnels that I could smell the smoke from them.”
Asked later if one of the British battleships fired a salute in his honor, Wilbur said he did not know what it was, but something made an “awful noise.”
Seeing the dome of Grant’s Tomb on the right side of the river at West 122nd Street, he decided he had gone far enough, and after making a large 180 degree turn, he started south, back down the river, this time moving considerably faster with the wind behind him. “I think I came back in half the time. . . . I hugged the water much closer and kept further toward the Jersey shore as I passed the downtown skyscrapers.”
His return trip was greeted with enthusiasm as great or greater than that upriver. Now the Jersey hills were black with people, and piers and building roofs on the Manhattan side were packed to capacity. It was estimated a million people were watching.
At precisely 10:26 A.M., Wilbur landed at Governors Island within a few feet of the spot where he had taken off. His time in the air was 33 minutes and 33 seconds. The distance traveled to Grant’s Tomb and back was approximately 20 miles, his average speed 36 miles per hour.
In spite of stiff winds, skyscraper gusts, whistles, horns, shrieking crowds, and battleship salutes, he had done it. How formidable the wind problem had been could be measured by the small American flag Katharine had given him. Brand-new at the start of the flight, it had returned in shreds.
Charlie Taylor told reporters how extremely concerned he had been the whole time Wilbur was “up.”
I was staring with both eyes square at that big flag over the Singer building. Sometimes it layed down and hugged the pole, and then I knew Wilbur was having it good. And sometimes it stood out pretty near even and I knew he was having his troubles. And once it flipped right out and the tip began to point upward like it did all day Saturday. I began to tremble. For I didn’t know what Wilbur could do against a gust like that.
No, he had not conquered the air, Wilbur remarked to the press as he walked away. “A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.”
Shortly afterward, to much surprise, he announced he would fly again that afternoon and this time it would be much farther, an hour-long flight in which he would circle Manhattan. But about four o’clock as he and Charlie Taylor were cranking up the plane the head of one of the engine’s piston rods blew off with a terrible roar, and the head, which was about six inches long and four wide, “flew like a cannon ball” no more than 20 inches from Wilbur’s head.
To Charlie Taylor he said, “It’s a darn good thing that didn’t happen up in the air.” The plane was taken away. The New York performances were over.
Talking with a correspondent for Scientific American magazine a little later, in the gathering dusk of the October afternoon, Wilbur was asked what the explosion of the engine indicated and what direction the development of aviation would take in the future. The broken cylinder was only “an incident,” Wilbur said. As for the future, direction was the thing: “High flying.”
We must get up clear of the belt of disturbed air which results from the irregularities of the earth’s surface. From now on you will see a great increase in the average elevation at which aviators will take their flights; for not only will they find in the higher strata more favorable atmospheric conditions, but in case of motor trouble, they will have more time and distance in which to recover control or make a safe glide to earth.
“On Monday I made a flight up the Hudson to Grant’s Tomb and back to Governor’s Island,” Wilbur wrote to his father three days later from College Park, Maryland. “It was an interesting trip and at times rather exciting.” And that was that. He had come to College Park to begin training U.S. Army pilots.