OCR Text |
Show Reporter Recalls Scoffing At Wright Brothers The 45th anivcrsary of the first flight by the Wright Brothers Bro-thers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Car-olina, was observed throughout the nation, with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington formally form-ally accepting the famous plane which has been returned to this country after staying in England for 20 years. At the time of the Wright experiments, ex-periments, nobody expected that the contraption would fly and when the news of the first flight got into newspaper offices, the spectacular story was disbelieved. disbe-lieved. One reporter, who almost witnessed the initial flight, was Ora L. Jones, who admits that his assignment was to "poke fun at the thing." Mr. Jones, who now lives in Florida, recalls that the last story he wrote on the assignment ended this way: "If the Good Lord wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings in the first place." The philosophy expressed by Mr. Jones has been the stock argument ar-gument advanced by millions of people throughout hundreds of years. Practically every new device, de-vice, form of treatment or bit of revolutionary information has been treated by the skeptics with the same philosophy, which has done the world considerable harm. Mr. Jones is refreshing in his frank disbelief of 45 years ago. This is rather unusual. As a rule, men like to recall the times thpv were right without admitting that they were, upon an equal number of occasions, emphatically emphatic-ally wrong. |