Few things have more charm for man than flight. The soaring of a bird
is beautiful and the gliding of a yacht before the wind has something
of the same beauty. The child's swing; the exercise of skating on
good ice; a sixty-mile-an-hour spurt on a smooth road in a motor car;
even the slightly passé bicycle: these things have all in their time
appealed to us because they produce the illusion of flight--of progress
through the intangible air with all but separation from the prosaic
earth.
But these sensations have been only illusions. To actually leave the
earth and wander at will in aerial space--this has been, scarcely a
hope, perhaps rarely even a distinct dream. From the days of Dædalus
and Icarus, of Oriental flying horses and magic carpets, down to
"Darius Green and his flying machine," free flight and frenzy were
not far apart. We were learnedly told, only a few years since, that
sustention by heavier-than-air machines was impossible without the
discovery, first, of some new matter or some new force. It is now
(1911) only eight years since Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, with the
aid of the new (?) matter--aluminum--and the "new" force--the gasoline
engine--in three successive flights proved that a man could travel
through the air and safely descend, in a machine weighing many times
as much as the air it displaced. It is only five years since two
designers--Surcouf and Lebaudy--built dirigible balloons approximating
present forms, the _Ville de Paris_ and _La Patrie_. It is only now
that we average people may confidently contemplate the prospect of an
aerial voyage for ourselves before we die. A contemplation not without
its shudder, perhaps; but yet not altogether more daring than that of
our grandsires who first rode on steel rails behind a steam locomotive.