Orville circled the field one and one-half times on that first test and was in the air only one minute, eleven seconds; but the crowd “went crazy.” “When the plane first rose,” said Roosevelt, Jr., in describing the event, years afterward, “the crowd’s gasp of astonishment was not alone at the wonder of it, but because it was so unexpected. I’ll never forget the impression the sound from the crowd made on me. It was a sound of complete surprise.” When he landed after this flight it was Orville’s turn to be astonished. Three or four supposedly “hard-boiled” newspapermen who rushed up to interview him had been so stirred by witnessing the “impossible” that each of them had tears streaming down his cheeks. (Those who witnessed this flight might have been prepared for what they saw and less surprised, since Wilbur Wright for more than a month had been making flights in France--told about in a later chapter--and some of these were reported in the newspapers. But the brief newspaper accounts of Wilbur’s flights seldom if ever had first page display and were not treated as important news. On August 9, the day after Wilbur’s first flight, the New York _Times_ had no mention of the event, though it gave first page space to a dispatch from Canton, Ohio, about a balloon trip, and to a dispatch from Berlin about the German Kaiser contributing to a fund for building another Zeppelin airship.) Nor did newspapers show too much excitement about this great public demonstration of practical aviation. It was not considered front page news even by Washington papers. The New York _World_ account was on page five and most of the report was not about the wonder of the flying-machine, but about the behavior of the crowd, described as in fear of being hit by what the _World_ called “the vessel.” Many thousands were present on the second day of the tests when Orville flew about three miles in four minutes, fifteen seconds. After one of these flights, a reporter, it was said, got in touch with Professor Simon Newcomb who, a few years before, had so irrefutably explained why flying was impossible. The reporter wanted to know if Professor Newcomb thought passenger planes would be the next step. “No,” Newcomb was reported to have replied, “because no plane could ever carry the weight of anyone besides the pilot.” It might have been expected that by this time Professor Newcomb would have become more cautious!