Orville wrote out the following message to their father: “Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one-mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 59 seconds inform press home Christmas. Orville Wright.” What Orville meant when he wrote “against twenty-one-mile wind” was that the wind was at least twenty-one miles an hour during each of the flights. At the time of the first flight it was, as already noted, between twenty-four and twenty-seven miles an hour--probably about twenty-six miles. After handing the message to Joseph J. Dosher, the weather bureau operator, Orville joined Wilbur over in a corner of the room to examine the record on an instrument that recorded the wind velocity. Dosher got an almost instantaneous connection with Norfolk, and while the Wrights were still looking at the wind record, he said: “The operator in Norfolk wants to know if it is all right to give the news to a reporter friend.” But the Wrights replied: Absolutely no! They preferred to have the first news of the event come from Dayton. Dosher clicked out the refusal. The operator at Norfolk, however, did not heed the warning. When they left the weather bureau after sending their message, the Wrights went over to the Kitty Hawk life-saving station, a few steps away, and chatted with members of the crew there. Captain S. J. Payne, in charge of the station, declared that he had seen one of the flights with the aid of a pair of binoculars. Then the Wrights walked to the post office at Kitty Hawk; and before returning to camp they stopped for a farewell visit at the home of Captain Hobbs, who had often done hauling and other work for them. Meanwhile, the telegraph operator at Norfolk, disregarding the Wrights’ adverse response to his request, had promptly gone ahead and given a tip about the flights to a young friend, H. P. Moore, of the Norfolk _Virginian-Pilot_. Moore was connected with the circulation department of the paper but was breaking in as a reporter and was in the habit of calling at the weather bureau. He made a desperate effort to reach by telephone over the government line someone at Kitty Hawk or elsewhere along the coast who could furnish details about what the flying-machine looked like, and about this Mr. Wright who was supposed to have operated it. Whatever information he got did not come from eyewitnesses of the flights, or from anyone who had ever seen the machine, and the account published the next morning was about ninety-nine per cent inaccurate. It described a flight of _three miles_ by Wilbur and told of Orville then running about yelling “Eureka.” The machine had one six-blade propeller beneath it, to elevate it, so the story ran, and another propeller at the rear to shove it forward. “Very little can be learned here about the Wrights,” the story said. “They are supposed by the natives of Kitty Hawk to be people of means and are always well dressed.”