It was an altogether discouraging prospect to face, and particularly, one might imagine, for somebody who had so recently resided at the Hôtel Meurice.
He arranged to room temporarily at the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station and, with the help of two local carpenters, began building anew. High winds, driving rain, and a severe attack of diarrhea made things no easier. “Conditions are almost intolerable,” he wrote in his diary. Nor did the fact that so many of those he and Orville worked with in earlier years had either died or moved away. Bill Tate was tied up with work of his own; John T. Daniels had transferred to the Nags Head Life-Saving Station; Dan Tate had died.
A Dayton mechanic the brothers had hired to help, Charlie Furnas, appeared on the scene and by Saturday, April 25, the day Orville arrived, bringing the crated parts of the Flyer, the camp was close to ready.
Spent afternoon cleaning out trash and making the building habitable [Wilbur recorded in his diary]. I slept in a good bed of regular camp pattern. Orville slept on some boards thrown across the ceiling joist. Furnas slept on the floor. Each pronounced his own method a success.
The morning of Monday, April 27, was spent uncrating boxes, brushing off wings, and setting up a workbench. That afternoon they repaired a few ribs broken in transit and began sewing the lower sections together. Mounting the engine and chain guides, and work on the launching track occupied another several days.
The big change this time was that the Flyer had been modified to carry two operators. They were to ride sitting up side by side, primarily to provide better control over the wing warping. It also meant no more stretching flat on their stomachs straining their necks to see ahead. The wind resistance would be greater but the advantages counted more.
In the three weeks since Wilbur arrived on the Outer Banks not a single reporter had appeared. Then the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot ran a wholly fabricated story picked up by newspapers everywhere that the Wright brothers, back again at Kitty Hawk, had already made a 10-mile flight out to sea against a wind of 15 miles an hour. In no time the rush of the press was on to the Outer Banks. In the lead was a young freelance reporter for the New York Herald, D. Bruce Salley, who could now be seen crouching among the scrub pine on a distant hill, spying on the camp with field glasses.
Test flights got started on May 6. Orville went first and flew just over 1,000 feet. Two days later, taking turns, he and Wilbur both were making flight after flight until interrupted by Salley, who came rushing into camp unable to contain his excitement over what he had seen. Once he left, Wilbur took off again and flew more than 2,000 feet.
A stream of reporters kept arriving. The advance of the press on their lives, a factor the brothers would have to contend with for years to come, had begun in force. The reporters to be seen hanging about on the hills with field glasses and telescopes represented the New York Times, the New York American Weekly, the New York World, Collier’s, Technical World, the Paris Herald, and the London Daily Mail.
A writer named Byron Newton, sent by the Paris Herald, did full justice to the wild and unimaginably remote setting he and the others found themselves confronted by after landing at Manteo on Roanoke Island:
The Wrights we found were some twelve or fourteen miles distant from that point, among the great sand dunes on the coast near Kitty Hawk life saving station. Their place was on the narrow stretch of marsh and jungle that lies between the Atlantic and the mainland. . . . I have never viewed or traversed a more forbidding section of country. To reach this stretch of land we had to cross Roanoke Sound in an open boat and then walk about six miles, at times climbing over great mountains of gleaming white sand . . . and other times we were forced to pick our way through swamps and jungle infested with poison snakes, mosquitoes, wild hogs, and turkeys, with the air heavy with fever breeding vapors.
Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk seemed “the end of the world,” wrote the correspondent for Collier’s Weekly, Arthur Ruhl, who then stressed that this end of the world had in fact become “the center of the world because it was the touchable embodiment of an Idea, which, presently, is to make the world something different than it has ever been before.”
It was not newspaper reporters, he said, but the world’s curiosity that had ridden, climbed, waded, and tramped all those miles and now lay hiding there, hungry and peering across the intervening sands. “There was something weird, almost uncanny about the whole thing,” wrote another correspondent. “Here on this lonely beach was being performed the greatest act of the ages, but there were no spectators and no applause save the booming of the surf and the startled cries of the sea birds.”
Wilbur and Orville wondered why the reporters remained at such a distance. Only later were they told that it had been said the brothers kept rifles and shotguns at the ready to guard their machine. Asked what he and Wilbur would have done had the correspondents come into camp and sat there to watch, Orville replied, “We couldn’t have delayed our work. There was too much to do and our time was short.”
Describing what the scene looked like from where they were posted, another of the correspondents wrote of “dazzling white sand dunes, almost monumental, to the right, and to the left in the distance more sand dunes, and a glimpse of the sea, and the Carolina sun, pouring down out of a clear blue sky, immersed everything in a shimmer and glare.” The two brothers, moving their machine about near the shed, looked like “two black dots.” The engine, when it started up, sounded like that of “a reaper working a distant field.” The propellers “flashed and whirled,” and the next thing the plane swept by “fast as an express train.”
“[We were] all seasoned campaigners in the field of unexpected events,” wrote the Paris Herald correspondent, Byron Newton, “but for all that, this spectacle of men flying was so startling, so bewildering to the senses in that year 1908, that we all stood like so many marble men.”
A photographer for Collier’s Weekly, James Hare, snapped what would be the first photograph ever published of a Wright Flyer in the air.
Early the morning of May 14 the onlookers were treated to a sight never before seen anywhere—two men in a motor-powered flying machine—when Wilbur took Charlie Furnas up for a short ride.
To the newsmen from their distant vantage point, it appeared Wilbur and Orville had taken flight together and so some of their dispatches reported. But the brothers, ever conscious of the risks involved, had already decided they must never fly together. That way, if one were to be killed, the other could still carry on with the work.