From earliest childhood, says his mother, Charles Hamilton (the
aviator), has given unmistakable evidence of his desire to leave
the earth and invade the skies. The mother--who, with perfect
confidence in his ability, saw her son go aloft in an aeroplane
for the first time and immediately wanted to take a trip on it
with him--dates her first realization of this fact to the day
when Charles, but eight years old, surreptitiously borrowed her
best parasol, climbed with it tightly clutched in his hands
to the eaves of the barn, and then jumped off, employing the
parasol parachute-wise to break his fall.
He not only broke his fall, but he completely smashed the
parasol in that little escapade. But his mother did not have the
heart to punish the child for his act because, as she put it, “I
realized that, after all, it was only the budding desire to fly
that I myself have felt since early girlhood. How could I punish
my boy for doing what I always had wanted to do?”
The interim between that barn-and-parasol episode of Hamilton’s
achievement of his insatiable ambition--to fly--was the matter
of only a few years. He managed to get a balloon man, who was
giving exhibitions in a spherical gas bag just outside of New
Britain, to take him up. From that moment his fever to invade
the sky knew no bounds, and, as he himself put it only a few
days ago, never is he happier than when up in his aeroplane
doing the now-famous Hamilton dip.
After a lapse of several years, during which he left his beloved
machinery and aerial paraphernalia long enough to get in some
schooling, Hamilton turned his attention to ballooning on his
own account. Then kites of all fashions, shapes and sizes took
up his attention. The dirigible balloon coming in, he turned
to that, and for four years gave exhibitions that startled the
world by their daring and success. Then he returned to the kite
end of the game, working with Israel Ludlow along those lines
of aviation. Finally he made his first aeroplane ascension, and
since then he has done almost everything possible to do with a
heavier-than-air machine of the present-day type.
(3196)