Man made fire. Man learned language. Man cast the wheel. Man flew.

The press missed the first three milestones but made up for it with the last.

News of Orville and Wilbur Wright's astonishing feat of manned, powered flight on Dec. 17, 1903, was leaked to reporters at The Virginian-Pilot hours after it happened. Pilot reporters seized on the sizzling tip fed to them from a Norfolk telegraph operator, or Kill Devil Hills surfmen, or both.

"Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest flight 57 seconds inform press home Christmas Orevelle Wright," the telegram read.

Transmitted from the Kitty Hawk weather station to Norfolk by operator Joseph Dosher without punctuation, with Orville's name misspelled and with the time off by 2 seconds, the telegram the Wrights sent to their father in Dayton, Ohio, was meant for his eyes only. Perhaps inspired by the words "inform press," the Norfolk telegrapher asked if he could share the news with a reporter friend at The Virginian-Pilot.

No, the Wright brothers shot back.

The brothers had earlier worked out a plan with their family about reporting their success to the Dayton newspapers, said Larry Tise, the Wilbur and Orville Wright visiting distinguished professor at East Carolina University.

The brothers had not expected the leak, which they later characterized as being "dishonestly communicated" to The Virginian-Pilot. The need to protect their pending patent application made them even more nervous about publicity.

"Initially, they did not trust the press at all," Tise said. "They thought the press could not do anything right and could not do things accurately."

Later, Tise said, the Wrights developed friendships with several reporters. That the telegraph operator - alternately named as C.C. Grant or James Gray - ignored Wilbur's answer appears certain.

A convincing and colorful story concocted by Manteo resident and telegraph operator Alpheus Drinkwater about how he had transmitted the Wrights' message, told repeatedly to publications, including Reader's Digest, has since been refuted by historians.

The Virginian-Pilot was the sole newspaper in the country to play up the story the next day. A shortened version had been sent to The New York American, The Washington Post, the Chicago Record-Herald, the Philadelphia Record and The Cincinnati Enquirer. Only the Ohio and New York papers ran it on their front pages the next morning.

Splashed across the width of The Virginian-Pilot's front page, the Dec. 18 headline shouted, "Flying machine soars 3 miles in teeth of high wind over sand hills and waves at Kitty Hawk on Carolina coast."

No fewer than five smaller headlines followed.

Reporters had not been there to witness the flight. But The Virginian-Pilot's city editor cobbled his knowledge about the Outer Banks together with information from two reporters.

Suffused with poetic liberties buoyed by a few basic facts, the story was so riddled with errors and embellishments that in a statement to The Associated Press on Jan. 5, the Ohio inventors condemned it as "a fictitious story incorrect in almost every detail."

Despite the bumbled reality, the story had enough veracity to survive a century as a stellar example of profound history caught as it broke.

"Wrights fly first airplane" was voted No. 4 in the Newseum's "Stories of the Century 1900-2000." The top vote-getters were the U.S. dropping the atomic bomb, the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Aviation enthusiasts have noted that the first three could not have happened without the fourth.

"I think it is a real feather in our cap," said Kay Tucker Addis, vice president and editor of The Virginian-Pilot. "It certainly set a high standard in today's world for getting a worldwide scoop."

Twenty-three-year-old city editor Keville Glennan, whose father was a founder of the old Virginian, which had merged with the Daily Pilot in 1898, wrote the banner, the sub-headlines and the opening paragraphs of the story.

Nineteen-year-old cub reporter Harry P. Moore and staff reporter Edward O. Dean, in his early 20s, scrambled to fill in the blanks.

Moore later said that C.C. Grant, the assistant weather observer at Norfolk, had fed him a message from lifesaver Dan Simpson at 11:40 a.m. But he also had claimed that it was W.S. Dough and J.T. Daniels, witnesses to the flight, who had wired him with the news. Moore said he had seen the Ohio pioneers with their gliders during earlier visits to the Outer Banks and kept close tabs on their experiments.

Dean wrote in the Aug. 6, 1927, Editor & Publisher that he had heard about the flight when he made his routine 5 p.m. call to the weather bureau. After he told Glennan, the editor put in a call to his contacts at the lifesaving service.

While he and Glennan were excitedly discussing the story, Moore burst in and declared that he had the information about the flight. Dean, modestly, said the story ended up being a collaboration between Glennan and Moore.

In a 1950 interview, Glennan took credit for writing the headline and the story and having the news sense to play it big. He also said Dean found the story first and had contributed to the reporting and writing.

"Though the account published was fantastically inaccurate, one must credit Glennan and the other Virginian-Pilot editors with recognizing how important the news was and giving it a headline clear across the page," wrote Wright biographer Fred Kelly in "Miracle at Kitty Hawk."

Unfortunately, the most glaring inaccuracies were in the main headline: "soaring 3 miles" (it was 120 feet) "over sand hills" (it flew about 10 feet above ground) "and waves" (not even close).

But many of the details in the subheadlines were correct. Clearly, there was solid information gleaned from sources other than the telegram.

And the story's lead sentence - "The problem of aerial navigation without the use of a balloon has been solved at last" - has stood the test of time.

As was the practice at the time, the story was not bylined. Moore unabashedly claimed most of the credit for what he called "my story" during his long newspaper career.

He secured his slot with detailed accounts in The Virginian-Pilot at the 25th and 50th anniversaries of the flight about how he found and wrote the story.

But Moore's account of his exclusive role was later disputed by Robert Mason, the editor of The Virginian-Pilot through much of the 1960s and '70s. Mason wrote front-page articles in 1950 and 1978 detailing Glennan's and Dean's contributions, painting a picture of Moore as a newsman perhaps overcome by the narcotic of his own celebrity.

"About all I can add is comedy and bitterness I chose not to include," Mason said about the 1903 coverage in a 2001 letter to Temple West, an English instructor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

West said Mason died before she could ask him for specifics.

Moore, in a 1933 letter to the editor, did credit Glennan for writing the story but clung to his exclusive claim to finding it.

Years later, family members of Glennan and Moore have not budged.

"My father retired around 1940, and there were a great string of editors to whom Harry Moore sold his version of the story," said Virginia Ferguson, 87, Glennan's daughter. "And they bought it."

Ferguson, who lives in Virginia Beach, said her father had left the paper to go north in the 1920s. While back in Norfolk before the 25th anniversary of the flight, he realized that Moore had been stealing all the thunder for the Wright story.

"He was mad as hell, and I don't blame him," she said. "I mean, in those days, a scoop was a scoop, and he was very proud of it. He recognized it, and his was the only paper that did."

Glennan died in 1956 at age 76; Moore died in 1965 at age 81.

While growing up with Moore in Norfolk, Robert Harnly, 72, said he remembered that his grandfather's house was filled with memorabilia of the 1903 story. Harnly, who also lives in Virginia Beach, added that his family soon tired of having to defend Moore as the author of the story.

"We had plenty of proof around the house that he did what he said he did," Harnly said.

Before she died last December, Moore's daughter and Harnly's mother, Eleanor Moore Harnly, gave most of Moore's documents to Steve Fritts, a Dunwoody, Ga., collector of historic newspapers and journalism memorabilia.

Included in the Moore collection, Fritts said, are letters from the reporter's colleagues supporting his view of his role in the story, as well as Moore's penciled notes of the 1903 story. Henry Ford reportedly had offered to buy the notes, but Moore declined.

Fritts had met Moore's daughter in 1989, after placing an ad looking for original copies of the Dec. 18, 1903, Virginian-Pilot. He said that in 30 years of collecting historic newspapers, he has never seen one on display or for sale.

Barely beyond the "yellow journalism" period of the late 1890s that thrived on scandal and corruption, journalism in 1903 was working to establish credibility, said David Sloan, a professor of journalism history at the University of Alabama. Journalism was not considered a profession, and news writing was less objective and more personal, Sloan said.

Some reporters, paid by the word, often wrote sprawling accounts of an event, elaborating and exaggerating as they stretched the story. Few newspapers published corrections. Writers who got their facts wrong were neither fired nor censured.

But at the turn of the 20th century, newspapers were the sole source of breaking news. Magazines were becoming wildly popular, but they lacked immediacy.

Unchallenged by other news media, Sloan said, newspapers established the record that often stood, right or wrong, for many years. It wasn't until decades later, when Wright biographer Kelly contradicted Moore's - and telegrapher Drinkwater's - versions of events that the record changed.

Despite the constraints of distance and the reporters' lack of aeronautic knowledge, the story of the first flight caught the meaning of the event and revealed the ingenuity and courage of The Virginian-Pilot's staff, Lenoir Chambers and Joseph E. Shank wrote in 1967 in "Salt Water & Printer's Ink," the story of Norfolk's newspapers from 1865 to 1965. Chambers and Shank concluded that "in an odd but effective sort of united effort, the news story is a classic. It deserves more recognition from American journalism than it has yet received."

The Virginian-Pilot
© December 17, 2003
(By Rob Morris, Editor)

A story and headline in the Dec. 18, 1903, Virginian-Pilot contained errors.

Orville Wright was the pilot for the first flight of the Wright Flyer. It was not Wilbur, whose name is not spelled Wilber.

The plane's wing span was 40 feet, 4 inches. The wings were 6 feet 2 inches apart vertically and 6 feet, 6 inches from front to rear. They were covered in muslin, not canvas.

The engine rested on top of the lower wing. It did not hang below it.

The propellers had two blades each, not six. They both were mounted on the rear side of the wings. There was no propeller providing upward force.

Rudders in the front and rear and warping of the wings controlled the plane. There was not a single, huge fan-shaped rudder that could be moved side to side and raised and lowered.

The pilot lay prone on the lower wing. There was no pilot's car.

The Wrights have always said they were equal inventors of the machine. Wilbur never took credit as the chief inventor. The brothers had no plans to build a much larger machine and never did.

Their success came after four years of work, not three.

They took one trip to the Outer Banks in the summer and two trips in the fall prior to 1903. They did not spend almost the entire winter, fall and early spring on the Outer Banks for three years.

They arrived on Sept. 26 in 1903, not on Sept. 1.

The plane took off under its own power after traveling 40 feet down a rail on flat land. It was not sent down a slope after Orville Wright released a catch. The engine was started before takeoff. It was not started after the plane had rolled halfway down a 100-foot hill.

The plane flew 120 feet, 8 to 10 feet off the ground in a straight line on the first of four flights. It did not soar 60 feet in the air. It did not circle and fly 3 miles over breakers and dunes. It did not tack to port, then to starboard.

The plane's ground speed was 8 to 10 mph. Its air speed was 30 to 35 mph. It did not fly at 8 mph.

The plane hit the ground nose-first after its fourth flight, damaging the front rudder mechanism, and was later destroyed by a gust of wind. It did not descend gracefully and rest lightly at a spot chosen by the aviator after one attempt.

Five onlookers helped the brothers and watched the flights. A small crowd did not run after the plane and give up after it outpaced them.

The flight took place at the foot of Kill Devil Hill. Orville Wright did not declare the flight a success before a crowd on the beach after the first mile. The flights were not on the beach.

Wilbur Wright was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. His eyes were blue-gray and his hair dark brown. He was not 5 feet 6 inches tall and did not weigh 150 pounds. He did not have raven-hued hair. His eyes were not deep blue.

Orville Wright was 5 feet 8 inches tall and had blue-gray eyes and dark brown hair. He did not have black eyes. He did not have sandy blond hair.

Editor: To celebrate further, here's a small album of photographs from my collection and from that of the Library of Congress.

Wilbur and the Flyer on December 14th, 1903. As you can see, this one failed so it was Orville's turn when they tried again on the 17th. Incidentally, this outcome was more the norm and is exactly what happened when historian Ken Hyde and his group tried to duplicate the flight on December 17th, 2003. Having insufficient wind that day, the Flyer just ran off the track without liftoff. Until they added a catapult at Huffman Prairie, Ohio, the Wrights ended a majority of their attempts there this same way.

Preparing to fly, December, 1903. Notice their "helpers."

Flying at Huffman Prairie, 1904.

The "Boys" at home. Huffman Prairie, 1904.

*** A note about these glass plate pictures: I have not "Photoshopped" them. These, including those from my personal collection, appear here as they exist in the Wright collection at the Library of Congress. Notice in particular that the famous picture of the first flight is missing the lower left edge of its plate. The imperfection is usually "cropped" for publication. I thought you'd like to see them as they really are. Enjoy.

Jim Slade December, 2006

Click here for a previous Left Seat column.