Obscure photos of Wright flight go on display

Early images go on exhibit today

The definitive image of the Wright Brothers' world-first flight has been a sepia-toned photograph, faded by time, from those scant airborne seconds of Dec. 17, 1903.

There is Orville Wright, supine and centered on the lower wing of the fragile heavier-than-air craft, gliding a few feet above the flat sands near Big Kill Devil Hill. His brother, Wilbur, is ground-bound, a few feet from the right wing tip, frozen in chase. It is a famous frame, the inspiration for postage stamps and the silhouette forever in flight above the numbers of North Carolina license plates.

"We in North Carolina pay homage to that famous photograph of that first flight," said Larry Tise, the Orville and Wilbur Wright distinguished professor of history at East Carolina University.

It was the first picture taken, but not the first published of the aviation pioneers in flight. That distinction belongs to an image captured May 14, 1908 -- 100 years ago on Wednesday -- by one of America's first photojournalists, James H. Hare, according to Tise's tireless research into all things involving the Wright Brothers.

Taken at long range -- paparazzi-style but in an age before massive telephoto lenses -- it shows a tiny image of a Wright machine, an airborne speck above the dark sand, with Big Kill Devil Hill rising ghostly gray in the distance.

There's a reason Hare didn't get a better shot from a shorter distance, said Tise. The secretive brothers, jealously guarding the technical key to their fragile success, weren't ready for a worldwide close-up.

So, in classic tabloid style that would be easily recognized today, Hare and reporters from London, New York, Chicago and Norfolk, Va., staked out the Wrights at a distance to record photographs and a story the Wrights didn't authorize, braving sand and biting insects that reached everywhere.

"That's as close as they got, but that was enough to send the story around the world," said Tise, who will present Hare's images today at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh.

Hare took his glass-plate images. An enhanced and doctored image -- typical of the times and a precursor of PhotoShopped alterations of today -- ran in the New York Herald on May 20, 1908, said Tise. It appeared in Collier's Weekly Magazine a week later.

Taken nearly five years after the first flight, Hare's image went around the globe, said Tise, eclipsing the now-famous image of the Wright Brothers' triumph snapped by local lifesaver John T. Daniels the moment it happened.

Daniels' photograph of the Wright Flyer wasn't published until September 1908, four months after Hare's photograph provided independent record that the brothers' machine could fly, creating a global sensation. The lifesaver's image -- he was one of the locals employed by the brothers when they came to Kitty Hawk from Dayton, Ohio, to test their designs -- didn't rise to prominence until nearly 20 years later, in the midst of the acrimonious discussions about whether to credit the Wright Brothers for their first flight, let alone build them a monument.

As Daniels' photograph became iconic, becoming both a piece of Americana and a source of chauvinistic North Carolina pride, Hare's image faded into obscurity. Tise knew it existed but searched fruitlessly until he located a uncatalogued collection of Hare's work at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, a research library at the University of Texas specializing in the 20th century.

For two years, he exchanged letters and phone calls with library researchers, who were uncertain whether the Wright photos were in their collection because they hadn't organized it.

Tise then bought a plane ticket to Austin, Texas. Within three hours of arriving at the library and poring through the Hare collection, he hit photographic paydirt.

"Sure enough, I found them, and they're fabulous," he said.

What Tise discovered were 31 small glass slides copied directly from the camera's glass plate negatives. Dubbed lantern slides, Hare used these in a traveling lecture tour he called "On the Trail of the Wright Brothers."

Of those, 18 slides were of the journalistic safari to the Outer Banks to capture the Wrights in flight, catching big-city reporters in their best attire, unaware of the sand and biting insects to come.

Only four of those images are of the airborne Wright machine, a second-generation airplane much heavier and more sophisticated than the first-flight machine. It represented a bid to win military contracts in America and Europe. Different, too, was the position of the pilot and an added observer -- seated upright rather than supine, steering the aircraft with a rudimentary control stick.

Tise's discovery is now on display at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills. Hare's images resurrect how the world discovered the Wright Brothers could fly.

"Our great and famous photograph was kind of an afterthought," he said.