Davenport Man Witnesses Wilbur Wright Flying At Le Mans France

 

The Daily Times. February 1, 1909.

In February 1909, the Davenport Daily Times talked with Dr. A. L. Hageboeck, who’d seen something few Americans could imagine—an airplane in flight.

 

Hageboeck had spent three days in Le Mans, France, watching Wilbur Wright fly, and what he saw left him shaken.

 

He said the real secret of the Wright brothers’ success was simple, almost too simple. The canvas wings of the machine could be tilted up or down at either end, allowing the pilot to adjust to the wind—just like a bird shifting its wings in flight.

 

That one idea changed everything.

 

He said Wilbur Wright wasn’t polished or impressive in the usual sense. He was thirty-five years old, tall, awkward, and quiet. There was nothing graceful about him. He barely spoke.

He wasn’t university-trained. Had no formal education in aeronautics. No laboratory. And no investors.

 

He ran a small bicycle shop in Ohio with his brother, Orville.

 

And yet, this “lanky, uncommunicative American” knew more about flight than anyone alive. His airplane stood far ahead of anything else.

 

The French understood that quickly. After watching Wright’s demonstration, three investors put down $100,000 for the rights to build his flying machine in France.

 

Hageboeck tried to explain what it looked like when the machine took off.

 

There was no sudden leap into the air like a balloon. No dramatic launch. The airplane had to earn its way into the sky.

 

It started by sliding along the ground—“sledwise,” for what seemed like a full city block. The propellers turned, slowly at first, then faster. The machine gathered speed, pushing forward until it reached about twenty-eight miles an hour.

 

Only then did it rise.

 

Not all at once.

 

First an inch. Then a little more. Then higher still.

 

He compared it to a turkey trying to fly—running hard before finally lifting off. It was an awkward, almost clumsy beginning, but once airborne, everything changed.

 

The machine smoothed out.

 

It climbed.

 

It circled.

 

And suddenly, it didn’t look awkward at all.

 

“It made cold shivers run through me,” he said. “It is all so wonderful.”

 

The airplane weighed about 2,000 pounds, yet it skimmed through the air as if it weighed nothing. Watching it felt like witnessing a miracle—until you realized how mechanically simple it really was.

 

That simplicity was part of its genius.

 

Hageboeck watched Wright keep the airplane in the air for two hours and five minutes, circling again and again, rising and dipping, completely under control.

 

The investors in France were already planning to build fifty of these machines within a year. They expected to sell them for $5,000 apiece—a high price, but not unthinkable in an age when automobiles were spreading across the country.

 

Some even wondered if airplanes might one day become just as common.

 

Still, there were limits—at least for now.

 

“Do you think they will ever be able to carry more than three or four people?” the reporter asked.

 

Hageboeck shook his head. “That hardly seems probable today. It would make the craft too bulky.”

 

At the time, that seemed like a reasonable answer.

 

After all, the idea of a machine carrying dozens—or even hundreds—of people through the sky would have sounded just as impossible as flight itself had only a few years earlier.

 

But standing there in 1909, watching a bicycle mechanic from Ohio circle the skies over France, one thing was already clear.

 

The world had changed. And it wasn’t going back.