I had been with the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station for six years, which means I had spent six years watching the ocean and pulling men out of it when ships went wrong on the shoals. The Outer Banks in December is not a comfortable place — cold, windy, the sand getting into everything, the horizon grey in all directions. I was accustomed to it. It was my work.
The Wright brothers had been coming to Kill Devil Hills for three years with their machines. We at the station had watched them from a distance, mostly — two quiet men from Ohio who said little, worked constantly, and seemed to understand something about wind that the rest of us used only to predict weather. In 1902 their glider had flown impressively. In 1903 they had added an engine.
Wilbur came to the station on the morning of the 17th and asked if any of us would come and witness an attempt. Five of us went. It was cold — about 27 degrees Fahrenheit — and the wind was strong out of the north, which they said was good, which we accepted without fully understanding why.
The Camera
Before the first attempt, Orville set up a camera on a tripod near the end of the launching rail and showed me how to operate it. There was a rubber squeeze-bulb connected to the shutter. He said: if the machine leaves the ground, press the bulb. He said it as if this was a simple and obvious thing to do, and I said that I would, and he seemed satisfied.
I want to be honest: I was not thinking about history. I was a thirty-two-year-old surfman from the Outer Banks standing in cold wind holding a rubber squeeze-bulb, watching two men prepare a machine that no one had ever built before. The category of 'historic moment' was not available to me in that form. What I had was: this is strange and interesting and possibly about to go badly wrong.
The First Flight
Orville lay face-down on the lower wing. Wilbur steadied the right wingtip. The engine — a small gasoline engine they had built themselves, mounted on the lower wing — started with a sound like a large angry sewing machine, and the propellers began to turn.
The machine moved down the rail slowly, slowly, and then it was off the rail and it was in the air and I pressed the bulb. The whole thing happened so quickly that I am not certain I pressed the bulb at exactly the right moment — I pressed it when I saw daylight under the wheels, which was the first moment I was certain it was actually flying and not about to crash immediately.
Twelve seconds. The machine came down in the sand about 120 feet from where it had lifted. Orville climbed out. Both brothers walked to where it had landed and stood looking at it for a moment without speaking, the way men look at something they have been trying to make happen for a very long time.
They flew three more times that day. The fourth flight, Wilbur flying, lasted almost a minute and covered most of the length of a city block. Then a gust of wind caught the machine after landing and rolled it, and that ended the day's flying. They asked us to help carry the pieces back to the shed.
What the Photograph Showed
They developed the photograph when they returned to Dayton. When I eventually saw a print of it — years later, after the brothers became famous and the photograph became the photograph — I looked for myself in it and could not find myself. The camera had been pointing at the machine. I had been behind the camera. What I had taken was a picture of a moment I was also inside, which is why I do not appear in it.
I have been asked many times what it felt like to witness the first flight. I always say: cold. People laugh when I say this, thinking I am being modest or evasive. I am not. It was December on the Outer Banks. It was 27 degrees. The wind was strong from the north and it had been blowing all morning. What it felt like was cold.
And also: like something new had entered the world. Small, uncertain, lasting twelve seconds, covering the length of a tennis court. But new. A thing that had not existed before and now existed. I pressed the bulb at the right moment, or close enough to the right moment, and what I caught in the camera was the instant between the world that had the machine on the ground and the world that had the machine in the air, which turns out to be the most important instant of the whole twentieth century.
Narrator's note: John T. Daniels was a real person — he did take the photograph and did say it was the first he had ever taken. The details of the day (temperature, wind direction, four flights, distances, the gust that damaged the Flyer) are documented in Orville Wright's diary entry for December 17, 1903, and David McCullough's The Wright Brothers (2015). The dialogue attributed to Orville is fictional.