The leaders of the second school, who ac tually built and tried power-driven aeroplanes, were Clement Ader (1890-97) ; Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (1890-94) and Samuel Pierpont Langley (1895-1903). Clement Ader was the first to construct an aeroplane large and power ful enough to carry a man, and the French gov ernment considered the craft of immense value and employed him to build some for the army, but as each of the two experiments toppled over at the trial and wrecked, the government refused to further finance the enterprise. While Ader was making his experiments in France, Sir Hiram Maxim was at work constructing a large multiplane for the English government, which he fitted with two steam engines of 175 horse-power. But like Ader's experiment, it toppled over at the first trial and was badly damaged, and the British government refused further backing. The experience of Samuel Pierpont Langley in America is not unlike the experience of Ader in France and Maxim in England. He was employed by the Board of Ordnance and Fortification of the United States army to construct the cAerodrome° of his own invention. Congress appropriated $50,000 for the purpose. Langley's machine was a tandem monoplane, 48 feet from tip to tip and 52 feet from bowsprit to the end of its tail. It was fitted with a 50 horse-power engine and weighed 830 pounds. The trials of his aerodrome, two attempts to launch it, were made on 7 Oct. and 8 Dec. 1903. On both occasions the aerodrome became entangled in the defective launching apparatus, and was thrown headlong in the Potomac River—on which the launching trials were made. Fol lowing the last failure, when the aerodrome was wrecked, the press ridiculed the whole enterprise, and Congress refused to appropriate money for further experiments. The Langley aerodrome, partly reconstructed and fitted with a Curtiss motor and Curtiss controls, flew in 1913-14.
As with the experimenters of the first school, they did not attain practical results. Their machines were usually wrecked at the first trial without giving any clue to the nature or where abouts of the trouble. Just how much each of these contributed toward the final success it is hard to say. The matter has not yet been de fined, and, possibly, only one man Orville Wright —is qualified to say. Most of these men made valuable additions to the knowledge of the science, but all of them mixed the practi cable with the impracticable in such a way as to make it risky to adopt their conceptions as to the basis of actual flight, a fraction of error being enough to spoil the unity of truths that must be present, and so to end an experiment in a catastrophe. Wilbur Wright, having made exhaustive tests and dissected the theories and notions of all these pioneers, knew the exact worth of each. He could have made the valua tion, but died before he had done so. In a paper on Lilienthal, which he wrote for Flying a few days before his death, he defined the causes of previous failures, and made a general rule by which all could be judged and their works valued. The realization of power flight was thus left to the 20th century — and to the Wright brothers. In view of the complex problems to be solved, this achievement was stupendous.
Wilbur Wright and his brother, Orville Wright, two men of remarkable characteristics, sons of the Rev. Milton Wright, were presented in their boyhood, 30 odd years ago, with a toy helicopter, a butterfly-shaped contrivance, con sisting of paper wings fitted with a tin pro peller which, when made to revolve by twisted rubber, caused the toy to shoot forward through the air. That toy fired their imaginations, and they saw it, in magnified form, capable of carry ing a man.
Their attempt to fly large helicopters con structed on the idea of the toy did not bring practical results, and until 1896, they did not give the matter of artificial flights more than passing attention. In the summer of that year, however, the news of the accident and death of Otto Lilienthal, the German champion of gliding flight, stirred them to action, and they set themselves to study aerodynamics and the works of Lilienthal, Mouillard, Chanute, Maxim and Langley, the most prominent experimenters at that time. Their experiments with a glider began in the fall of 1900 at Kitty Hawk, N. C There, on the barren sand dunes of North Carolina, these two intrepid investigators took all the theories of flight and tried them one by one— only to find, after two years of hard, discouraging work, that they were based more or less on guesswork. Thereupon they cast
aside old theories and patiently put the ap paratus through innumerable gliding tests, ever changing, adding, modifying—changing again and again, advancing inch by inch, until they had, at last, developed a glider wonderfully exact, which, when fitted with a light motor, also built by them, made initial flights on 17 Dec. 1903, of from 12 to 59 seconds' duration. This, then, was the birth of the aeroplane, the flimsy, iconoclastic thing which seems to evade Newton's laws, eliminates frontiers and prom ises to expand civilization as much as have the steamship, the railway and electricity.
The Weights' Success Created New In
The Wrights did not make their achievements public at the time; in fact, until 1908, they flew only in private. But the report of their wonderful achievement, nevertheless, went far and wide, and stimulated those who had given up experimenting and inspired others to take up experiments. Octave Chanute, in 1902, went to France and related the early suc cesses of the VA'rights with their glider, and described the general shape of the Wright machine. The result of this trip was that half a dozen enthusiasts, including Louis Bleriot. Capt. Louis Ferber, Ernest Archdeacon, and later the Voisin brothers and Albert' Santos Dumont took up the work, thus founding the mighty French school which has increased so greatly and done so much since. The first of this school to succeed was Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aeronaut sportsman. He constructed a machine of original design, and in 1906 made short sustained flights of from 50 to 700 feet in straight line, which created a world-wide sensation at the time. Meantime others of the French school graduated and won honors. The Voisin brothers turned constructors and teachers, and with their co-operation Leon Delagrange, Henry Farman, Louis Bleriot and other prosecuted practical experiments and succeeded in getting their creations to leave the ground for modest flights. At this juncture, in the summer of 1908, the Wrights started out to give public demonstrations, and their methods supplied and suggested to the French experi menters the means to modify and improve their aeroplanes, particularly the means of balancing them which had, until then, been a perplexing problem. Some months before this some American enthusiasts had combined under the auspices of Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and Mrs. Bell, and organized the Aerial Experiment Association. Glenn H. Curtiss, one of the experimenters, developed a suitable type of aeroplane, and in 1908-09 became proficient in piloting it, and founded a school which did much in the fol lowing years to popularize and develop avia tion in America. Consult Zahm, A. F.,
Large airships in the war have proved dis appointing when compared with the aeroplane, because they are in a cruder state of develop ment. They have almost the size of a battle ship, offering a large target, without the bat tleship's armor or guns. The seaplane has had many achievements to its credit in the naval operations and the types which will be equipped with aerial torpedoes will constitute a real dynamic force in the future. The development of aerial locomotion during 1914-16 has ex ceeded the expectations of the most sanguine enthusiast — no man can prophesy what the next decade will produce. See AEROPLANE