The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

“Take her back to the shed,” he said. “There is always an element of uncertainty in aviation as far as it has advanced,” Wilbur explained to a writer for the Washington Post. “People must remember that this machine has never been flown before, and also that my brother has not been up in the air since his accident last year. They can’t blame me for wanting the first flight to be made under conditions as nearly ideal as possible.” No one with a keen sense of dramatic effect, wrote the Washington Herald, could have created a better scene to demonstrate the “utter immunity of the two brothers from the fumes of importunity and the intoxication of an august assemblage.” Uniformed army signalmen gathered “like pallbearers” and wheeled the plane away, and four thousand spectators departed, many expressing opinions, including one senator, who was heard to say of the brothers, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.”