Until now both of the Wright brothers had had close scrapes with death. Wilbur had crashed two times with slight injuries, Orville four times, twice at Kitty Hawk and twice at Huffman Prairie. But as Wilbur wrote to their father, this was “the only time anything has broken on any of our machines while in flight, in nine years experience.” Nor had either of them ever plunged “head foremost” straight to the ground from an elevation of about 75 feet. For Katharine especially, the one member of the family there at Orville’s side seeing the condition he was in, it was truly a miracle he had escaped
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