Oddly enough, one of the first public announcements by word of mouth about the Wrights’ Kitty Hawk flights was in a Sunday-school. A. I. Root, founder of a still prosperous business for the sale of honey and beekeepers’ supplies at Medina, Ohio, taught a Sunday-school class. One morning shortly before the dismissal bell, observing that the boys in the class were restless, he sought to restore order by catching their interest. Perhaps he wished to show, too, that miracles as wonderful as any in the Bible were still possible. “Do you know, friends,” he said, “that two Ohio boys, or young men rather, have outstripped the world in demonstrating that a flying-machine can be constructed without the aid of a balloon?” He had read a brief item about the Wrights in an Akron paper. The class became attentive and Root went on: “During the past two months these two boys have made a machine that actually flew through the air for more than half a mile, carrying one of the boys with it. This young man is not only a credit to our state but to the whole country and to the world.” Though this was several weeks after the Wrights had first flown, no one in the class had ever heard about it, and incredulously they fired questions at the teacher. “Where do the boys live? What are their names? When and where did their machine fly?” Root described, not too accurately, the Kitty Hawk flights, and added: “When they make their next trial I am going to try to be on hand to see the experiment.” An important part of Root’s business was publication of the still widely circulated magazine, _Gleanings in Bee Culture_, and in his issue of March 1, 1904, he told of the episode in the Sunday-school. By printing that story, the Medina bee man may possibly have been the first editor of a scientific publication in the United States to report that man could fly. (The _Popular Science Monthly_ in its issue of March, 1904, had an article by Octave Chanute in which the flights were mentioned.) Root a little later even predicted: “Possibly we may be able to fly over the North Pole.” The Wrights were more amused than disturbed by the lack of general recognition that flying was now possible. They inwardly chuckled when they heard people still using the old expression: “Why, a person could no more do _that_ than he could fly!” But they knew they had only begun to learn about handling a flying-machine. VIII EXPERIMENTS OF 1904-’05 In all their work on their power plane the Wrights’ main incentive had been to gain the distinction of being the first of mankind to fly. They had not designed the machine for practical use. Now, however, even though they did not yet foresee many of the uses for which the airplane was destined, they began to think it could be developed into a machine useful for scouting in warfare, for carrying mail to isolated places, for exploration; and that it would appeal to those who could afford it for sport.