Later they went to the Wright home. Of that visit Weaver wrote: “The elder brother, Wilbur, I found even quieter and less demonstrative than the younger. He looked the scholar and recluse. Neither is married. As Mr. Wright expressed it, they had not the means to support ‘a wife and a flying-machine too.’” Weaver was completely convinced before he left Dayton, and on December 3, cabled to Lahm: “Claims completely verified.” A few days later, on December 6, back at his home in Mansfield, he rushed a letter to Lahm giving his evidence of what the Wrights had done. In a little more than a week after Weaver’s visit to Dayton, another investigator appeared there, Robert Coquelle, representing _L’Auto_, of Paris. He had been in New York attending the six-day bicycle races and arrived in Dayton on December 12. Since his paper and _Les Sports_ had taken opposite sides regarding the possibility that the Wrights had flown, and _L’Auto_ had been pro-Wright, Coquelle wished to report on these “_deux marchands de cycles_” in a way to make a sensation. The imaginative tale he wrote about how “mysterious” were the Wrights was almost worthy of his compatriot, Dumas. The Wrights gave him names of people who had witnessed flights but it is believed he didn’t bother to consult many of them, evidently feeling sure he could invent a better story than they could tell him. However, Coquelle was convinced that the reports about the Wrights’ flights were not exaggerated and he cabled a preliminary dispatch to his paper: Wright brothers refuse to show their machine but I have seen some witnesses it is impossible to doubt. On December 13, the day after Coquelle’s visit to Dayton, the Wrights sent another letter to M. Besançon, editor of _L’Aérophile_, in reply to questions of his, and gave him details of their recent flights, distances, height at which they flew, size of field, and so on. Incidentally the closing paragraph of that letter contained a statement in contradiction of a myth, still widely accepted: The claim often made in the 19th century that the lack of sufficiently light motors alone prohibited man from the empire of the air was quite unfounded. At the speeds which birds usually employ, a well-designed flyer can in actual practice sustain a gross weight of 30 kilograms for each horsepower of the motor, which gives ample margin for such motors as might easily have been built 50 years ago. Before Besançon could have received this letter, with its details of recent flights, Robert Coquelle arrived in Paris, having taken a boat from New York only a day or two after his stay in Dayton, and his sensational story was published. Much of this report seemed so incredible that one member of the Aéro Club said it almost made him wonder if the Wright brothers existed at all. [Illustration: THE U. S. ARMY TEST. Preparing the Wright plane for a test at Fort Myer.]