Nor was the excitement limited to France and the rest of Europe, as was clear from the American press. “The great meeting at Reims has been an electrifying, delirious success” (New York Sun); “The scoffers scoff no longer” (Washington Herald); “The aviation tournament is only a hint of what the future will soon witness when the sky shall become the common highway” (Cincinnati Times-Star); “This week at Reims marks a new epoch and one of the most ambitious phases of human history” (Atlanta Constitution).
Overnight Curtiss was the new American hero. But only a week later crowds as large as 200,000 turned out at Tempelhof Field in Berlin to see Orville fly, and in the course of his demonstration flights over the next several days, Orville, accompanied by a student pilot, flew for an hour and 35 minutes, a new world’s record for a flight with a passenger. And at the same time Wilbur had signed on to make his first-ever public flight in the United States, in New York. It was to be part of a celebration commemorating the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s ascent of the Hudson River and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first steamboat on the Hudson. Wilbur was to be paid $15,000. Glenn Curtiss, too, was to participate in the event.
Writing to Orville aboard the train to New York on September 18, Wilbur reviewed some of the precautions he might take, on the chance he would be forced to land his plane in the waters off Manhattan. An idea he had of using rubber tubes no longer made sense. “So I have gone back to my old plan of mounting a canoe under the center of the machine, well forward,” he wrote, adding, “Of course, I do not expect to come down, but if I do I will be reasonably safe.” The canoe would be purchased in New York. The plane had already been shipped to the army base of Governors Island in New York Harbor, where Charlie Taylor would be joining him.
The great sweep of New York Harbor and the Hudson River had become a spectacle beyond anything ever seen there, with twenty American battleships at anchor, a squadron of the Royal Navy, naval vessels from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Argentina, in addition to ferryboats, tenders, colliers, all manner of river craft, and the giant luxury liner Lusitania—no fewer than 1,595 vessels.
Added to all this was the promise that for the first time New Yorkers were to witness airplane flights over their waters.
On Governors Island in Upper New York Bay, half a mile southeast of Manhattan, two hangars had been provided, almost side by side, one for Wilbur, the other for Curtiss. When Curtiss arrived to look things over, he and Wilbur greeted each other cordially enough and talked for five minutes or so, mainly about the events at Reims. Wilbur excused himself from shaking hands, saying his hands were too greasy. At about this point Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph, appeared on the scene and was so thrilled to meet Wilbur he insisted on shaking his hand, greasy or not. It had been arranged that whenever Wilbur or Curtiss was about to take flight, Marconi would send a wireless message from Governors Island to the warships in the harbor and they in turn would raise flags as a signal to other ships and all on land.
Curtiss soon departed for Hammondsport in upstate New York, where he was to be honored with an all-out homecoming.
One day the reporters who hung about as close as permitted hoping for a chance to talk to Wilbur saw some small boys from the garrison approaching the guards and expected to see the children rebuffed as they had been. Instead they saw Wilbur, “a kindly smile” on his face, welcome them, then through the open doors watched as he “explained every detail on the machine.”
“I have been here about a week and have the machine almost ready to fly,” Wilbur wrote Katharine on September 26. He was staying at the stylish Park Avenue Hotel, but getting his lunches at the Officers Club on Governors Island.
Yesterday was the big naval parade. . . . In the evening the boats were illuminated with millions of electric lights and the same was true of many of the great buildings. For ten miles the river was an almost solid mass of steamboats and but for the fact that they were nearly all outlined with electric lights, it would have been impossible to navigate.
To reporters who descended on him, Wilbur said he had not come to astonish the world but to give everybody a chance to see what the airplane was like in the air. Asked if he thought it would be perilous to fly over a harbor so filled with ships, he said an airplane ought to be able to go anywhere.
Glenn Curtiss returned from upstate late in the day on September 28, and camped that night in the hangar with his plane on Governors Island, in order to make an early test flight the next morning. As it was he made his flight shortly after six o’clock, with only a friend and one army officer as witnesses. He flew 300 yards, then went back to upstate New York.
Wilbur, who had spent the night at his hotel in the city, did not get started with his preliminary tinkering until eight o’clock then, about nine o’clock, took off on a 7-minute practice run, circling Governors Island, the white-and-silver Flyer looking much as always except for the 14-foot, canvas-wrapped, red canoe that hung beneath. Thus the newest form of transportation was making its debut over American waters with one of the oldest of all forms conspicuously in readiness, in case of trouble.
Soon after landing, Wilbur announced he would fly again. Wireless signals went out, signal flags went up, and off he went. Instead of heading toward the mouth of the Hudson, as expected, he swung to the west into the wind and, flying over two ferryboats, headed straight for the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, circled the statue, and sailed low over the Lusitania, which was then heading down the harbor, outward bound to Liverpool. Thousands of people were watching. Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan was thick with spectators, and passengers on deck on the Lusitania frantically waved hats, scarfs, handkerchiefs as Wilbur passed over their heads.
He maneuvered his plane with perfect control through a whole series of dips and turns. But it was the spectacle of Wilbur Wright and his flying machine circling the Statue of Liberty that made the most powerful impression, which would be talked about, written about, and remembered more than anything, as a writer for the New York Evening Sun tried to express in a front-page account:
Once his great aeroplane, so near the horizon that it seemed one with the ocean gulls among which it flew . . . [was] just above the level of the feet of the Statue of Liberty. An instant later it appeared at the level of the statue’s breast and then passed in front on an even keel.
In the air Wright seemed to pause for a moment to pay the homage of an American aviator to the lady who attests his country’s destinies. Then suddenly turning eastward with the wind, he sped rapidly over the waves while the harbor craft shrieked their welcomes, and the cheering men and women ashore bore witness that our Lady of Liberty had been visited by one of her children in a vessel needing only the winds on which to sail.