Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 235, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1911 — MAN'S MASTERY OF THE AIR [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MAN'S MASTERY OF THE AIR

THE navigation of the air! How the very idea of it thrills! To rise above the earth and flit from city to city and from continent to continent! To travel free and untrammeled as do the birds! This has been the dream of mankind for ages.

Impossible of accomplishmeht? Do not be too sure. Tremendous strides toward this splendid, this alluring goal have been made within the past three years. Already have daring men of the air pierced the blue vault of heaven to astonishing altitudes, already have they dashed from metropolis to metroimlis with a speed rivaling the fastest express train, already have they leapfed oyer mountain ranges and crossed bodies of wlater which separate nations. If the progress is to be as great during the next three years, then, indeed, will marvels have been accomplished beyond anything of which today we permit ourselves to dream. Much depends upon the attitude and activity of those daring and ingenious men who already have elevated the science of aviation from the purely experimental and speculative to something at least approaching the practical. If their talents and the talents of such scientific men as now are or hereafter may be attracted to the problem of aerial flight are devoted to the making of aviation more nearly safe and therefore more useful, rather than toward outdoing the marvelous records already made in altitude, distance, speed and duration, then will the world be the gainer and travel and commerce be helped through this new means of communication. Safety! That is now the thing to be aimed at. Not till a full measure of it is reached can the conquest of the air really be claimed or aviation be lifted from the spectacular to the utilitarian. - Considering what has already been accomplished in aerial navigation, is it too much to say that even greater discoveries will be made and applied in the near future? Where shall we place the limit upon an age which has produced a machine that talks and sings, which propels loaded cars up and down hill by means of an invisible fluid, which takes protographs through solid substances, which has instant communication by wire between the most widely separated continents, which has made conversation possible between New York and Chicago and which thinks nothing of sending wireles messages from land to vessels hundreds of miles away at sea? After all, is a certain and safe passenger and freight service through the air more improbable .to our near future than was the automoblld and the electric express train to the future of the man of the ox-cart and the pole propelled flatboat? / ' The Drifting Balloon. The balloon is the elder brothher of the aeroplane and its discovery was the cause of fully as great a sensation. Compared, however, with the later air craft, it is very simple and its possibilities are limited. To Stephen and Joseph Montgolfier belong the distinction of making the first balloon. They were papermakers of Annonay, France, and they experimented for years before they succeeded in causing a silk bag to rise to the ceiling of their workshop. The first men to make a balloon ascension were Pilatre des Rosiers and the Marquis d’Arlandes. They went up from Paris* on November 31, 1783 .and remained aloft 25 minutes. . The efforts to construct an airship subject to control has been a long and persistent one, but the necessarily enormous bulk of gas balloons has

been a discouraging obstacle. Such a tremendous surface presented to the wind more than offsets the power of the, rudder to control, except in a comparative calm, and the invariable disaster which has overtaken the most elaborate and expensive attempts—those of Count Zeppelin of Germany—presumably will discourage further effort along this line and concentrate inventive genius upon the aeroplane. The dirigible balloon, however, is by no means a complete failure. The ordinary balloon retains the pear-shape of the original, but the dirigible is elongated or cigar-shaped and braced along the sides to give it stability. The control is gained from a rudder extending from the suspended car, which contains an electric or gasoline motor. Walter Wellman’s fruitless attempt to reach the north pole and’ later to .cross the Atlantic were among the interesting but gigantic failures of the dirigible balloon. The Flying Machine. Genuine aerial navigation, or Independent flight as distinguished from aimless floating in the air, really had its birth when men abandoned the balloon idea and sought to mimic the birds. Otto Lllienthal In Germany, Hiram Maxim in England and Samuel P. Langley in the United States experimented and constructed machines with planes and wings and rudders, but their success was inconsiderable, for their machines were too heavy of too frail. Different inventors constructed winged machines, large and small, light and heavy, but the most they accomplished were short and uncertain flights or glides from elevated starting places. Finally in 1903 Octave Chanute began to attract attention with his long glides among the sand dunes in the vicinity of Chicago, but his machine had no motive power and was never anything more than a plaything. In Dayton, 0., two brothers named Wright, bicycle repairers, bad been experimenting with planes. Chanute turned over to them all his ideas and they helped much in solving the problem of equilibrium. In 1903 the Wrights took a machine to Kitty Hawk, N. C., and on December 17, after several trials and carrying Wilbur Wright, it left the rails on which tt gained its momentum and flew 852 feet in 59 seconds—the first actual flight by man in an aeroplane. Since then the Wrights have remained prominent in the work of air navigation and their names must always take front rank in any history of aerial flight. It would require many columns merely to mention the marvels performed by nearly 3,000 aviators who have flown during the past three years. Record after reoord has been broken, wonder has piled on wonder with bewildering swiftness, until today the people are not surprised at any feat which the birdmen may perform. During this brief period the progress has been truly staggering and the last 12 months have been richer in achievement than any preceding similar period. Such names as Santos-Dumont, Glenn H. Curtiss, Charles K. Hamilton, Louis Paulhan, James C. (Bud; Mars, Grahame-White, Walter Brookins, Hubert Latham, Louis Bleriot, Count Jacques de Lesseps, Stewart Rolls, John B Moissant, J. Armstrong Drexel, Eugene B. Ely, Alfred Le Blanc, Louis Delagrange, Henry Farnham, J. A. D. McCurdy, Eugene Lafebvre, Clifford Harmon, Ralph Johnstone. Archie Hoxsey, Lincoln Beachey, Harry A.-Atwood and a host of others are familiar to all. Distance to these birdmen is limited only by the amount of fuel they can cany.