The Paris edition of the
New York Herald summed up Europe's opinion of the Wright brothers in an editorial on February 10, 1906: "The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It's easy to say, 'We have flown.'"
[97]
In 1908, after the Wrights' first flights in France,
Archdeacon publicly admitted that he had done them an injustice.[