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HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR
BASED ON OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS
BY DIRECTION OF THE HISTORICAL SECTION OF
THE COMMITTEE OF IMPERIAL DEFENCE
THE WAR IN THE AIR
Being the Story of
The part played in the Great War
by the Royal Air Force
VOL. I
BY
WALTER RALEIGH
OXFORD
THE CLARENDON PRESS
1922
Oxford University Press
_London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen
New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town
Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai_
Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY
PREFACE
The History of which this is the first volume is, in the main, the
history of the part played in the war by British air forces. It is based
chiefly on the records of the Air Ministry collected and preserved at
the Historical Section. The staff of the Section have spared no trouble
to collect an immense amount of material and arrange it for use, to
consult living witnesses, to verify facts down to the minutest details,
and to correct any errors that may have crept into the narrative. Their
main purpose has been to secure that any statement of fact made in this
book shall be true and demonstrable. If in any particular instances they
have failed in this purpose, it has not been for lack of pains and care.
Official records do not in themselves make history. They are colourless
and bare. In the business of interpreting and supplementing them we have
been much helped by the kindness of many military and naval officers and
of many civilian experts. Their help, most of which is acknowledged in
the text, has supplied us with the liveliest things in this book. We
could wish that we had more of it. Naval and military officers do not
advertise, and are reluctant to speak publicly of the part that they
played in the war. They are silent on all that may seem to tell to their
own credit or to the discredit of others, and this silence easily
develops into a fixed habit of reticence. We are the more grateful to
those who have helped us to a true account by telling of what they saw.
The best part of the book is yet to come; if the theme is to be worthily
treated, it must be by the help of those who remember and of those who
know.
The writer of this history has endeavoured to make his narrative
intelligible to those who, like himself, are outsiders, and, with that
end in view, he has avoided, as far as possible, the masonic dialect of
the services. For the few and cautious opinions that he has expressed he
alone is responsible. In controverted questions, though he has not
always been careful to conceal his own opinion, he has always tried so
to state the grounds for other opinions that those who hold these other
opinions may think his statement not unfair. If his own opinion is
wrong, the corrective will usually be found near at hand. The position
of an outsider has grave disabilities; if a measure of compensation for
these disabilities is anywhere to be found, it must be sought in freedom
from the heat of partisan zeal and from the narrowness of corporate
loyalty.
Some of the men who early took thought for their country's need, and
quietly laboured to prepare her against the day of trial, are here
celebrated, and their names, we hope, rescued from neglect. The men who
flew over the fire of enemy guns were so many that comparatively few of
their names, and these chosen almost by accident, can here be mentioned.
There were thousands of others just as good. The heroes of this story,
let it be said once and for all, are only samples.
Some apology perhaps is necessary for the variety which has been found
inevitable in naming particular men. A man's christian name and surname
are his own, but change and promotion were rapid during the war, so that
the prefixes to these names varied from year to year. Where we are
describing a particular deed, we give the actors the rank that they held
at the time. Where we speak more generally, we give them the rank that
they held when this history was written.
WALTER RALEIGH.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION pp. 1-14
New means of warfare in the Great War--submarines and aircraft. The
first free flight of an aeroplane, December 17, 1903. Attitude of the
peoples; English stolidity. The navy and the air. The German menace
hastens the making of our air service. The British air force at the
outbreak of the war, and at its close. The achievement of the British
air force. Uses of aircraft in war extended and multiplied--reconnaissance,
artillery observation, photography, contact patrol, battle in the air,
bombing. Naval developments--kite balloons, coast patrol, convoy of
vessels, seaplanes and seaplane-carriers, work against submarines.
Secret dropping of agents. Development of machines. New scientific
devices. Men of science and men of action. The supremacy of the
infantry in war. The making of its tradition by the Royal Air Force.
CHAPTER I. The Conquest of the Air. pp. 15-66
Our ignorance of man's history. The conquest of the sea and the conquest
of the air. Pioneers of flight. The physical basis of flight. Essential
features of an aeroplane. Two kinds of aircraft--floating machines and
soaring machines. Early legends and adventures. Progress the reward of
risk. Wilbur Wright's view. Progress towards aerial navigation in the
age of Louis XIV, and of the French Revolution. The Royal Society and
Bishop Wilkins. Joseph Glanvill's prophecies. Sir William Temple's
satire. Study of the flight of birds by Borelli. Lana's aerial ship. The
discovery of gases. Soap-bubbles filled with hydrogen in 1782. The
Montgolfier hot-air balloon, 1783. The hydrogen balloon of Professor
Charles. The first aeronaut--Pilatre de Rozier. First ascents in Great
Britain; James Tytler and Vincenzo Lunardi. Lunardi's narrative. Dr.
Johnson and Horace Walpole on balloons. The _Great Nassau_. The balloon
as a spectacle. Scientific work of James Glaisher. His highest ascent,
September 5, 1862. Pioneers of aviation--Sir George Cayley, John
Stringfellow. Foundation of Aeronautical Society, 1866. Francis Wenham's
paper on aerial locomotion. Fermentation of ideas. The study of soaring
birds--Cayley, M. Mouillard. The gliders; stories of Captain Lebris; the
work and writings of Otto Lilienthal; his death and influence. Percy
Pilcher and his work. Other experiments--Montgomery, Chanute, Phillips,
Maxim, Ader. Laurence Hargrave; his inventions; his public spirit.
Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley; his whirling table; his discoveries.
His flying machine of 1896. His design of a machine to carry a man;
failure of trials in 1903. Wilbur and Orville Wright; their method of
attacking the problem; practice in equilibrium. The history of their
experiments; difficulties and disappointments. Their perseverance, and
their great discovery--the combination of wing-warping with a movable
rudder. Their glider of 1902--the victory machine. Their perfect
control. Their first power machine. Their flights on December 17, 1903.
The age of the flying machine had come at last.
CHAPTER II. The Aeroplane and the Airship. pp. 67-109
The Wrights improve their machine, and practise it in many flights over
Huffman Prairie. Indifference of the neighbouring farmers; and of
American, French, and British Governments. Wilbur Wright's visit to
France, 1908. Record flights. Struggle to secure patents. Death of
Wilbur Wright.
European pioneers. Ellehammer. German airships and French aeroplanes.
Mr. Haldane's prophecy. French airship experiments. Successful voyage of
_La France_, 1884. German airships of Woelfert and Schwarz. Brutality of
the crowd. Alberto Santos Dumont; his airships. Controversy on the
rotary principle. Santos Dumont's successes. Disasters to the airships
of Severo and Bradsky. Count von Zeppelin. His first airship. Advantages
and disadvantages of the rigid type. Early trials. List of pre-war
Zeppelins. Wrecks and progress. Parseval airships. Schuette-Lanz
airships. French aviation. Captain F. Ferber. The Antoinette engine. The
Voisins. Delagrange, Farman, Bleriot, Esnault-Pelterie. First aeroplane
flight over French soil by Santos Dumont. Diverse experiments. French
improvements. The monoplane. Tractors and pushers. Ailerons. Centralized
control. The wheeled undercarriage. The horizontal tail-plane. Early
French flights. Wilbur Wright at Le Mans. Competitions and prizes.
Bleriot's cross-Channel flight. Grahame-White and Paulhan. Glenn
Curtiss. The _Circuit de l'Est_. Aviation meetings. The Champagne week.
The Gnome engine. Blackpool and Doncaster. Chavez flies across the Alps.
Record-making and record-breaking.
CHAPTER III. Flight in England. pp. 110-45
English aviation late and sporadic. Private adventure and sport as
against continental organization. Prospect of war the cause of the
formation of the Royal Flying Corps. A few pioneers encouraged by the
Government--Mr. Cody, Lieutenant Dunne. The Dunne aeroplane. The history
of Mr. A. V. Roe. He makes the first flight over English soil, in 1907,
at Brooklands. Receives notice to quit. Is refused the use of Laffan's
Plain. Is threatened with prosecution for flying over Lea Marshes. His
perseverance and success. The famous Avro machine, 1913. Dependence of
England on private effort. The Aero Club. Mr. Sopwith and Mr. de
Havilland. Their famous machines. Mr. Jose Weiss and his gliders. Mr.
Howard Wright sets up the first aeroplane factory in 1908. The Hon. Alan
Boyle makes the first cross-country trip, 1910. The Short Brothers at
Shellness, Isle of Sheppey. Their work for the Aero Club. Mr. Cecil
Grace and the Hon. Charles Rolls. Mr. Moore-Brabazon flies a circular
mile, 1909. Mr. Frank McClean establishes the aerodrome at Eastchurch.
Mr. G. B. Cockburn teaches four naval officers to fly. Beginnings of the
naval air service. Mr. Holt Thomas brings Paulhan to Brooklands, where
an aerodrome is made. Paulhan makes a flight of nearly three hours.
Beginners at Brooklands. Mr. Alan Boyle's story. The Arcadian community
at Brooklands. Foundation of the London aerodrome at Hendon. Aeroplane
races. The 'Circuit of Europe' and the 'Circuit of Britain'. Crowds of
spectators at Hendon. Promoters of flight; Mr. Holt Thomas. The Larkhill
aerodrome. Military flying; Captain Fulton; Captain Dickson, his skill
as a pilot, his appearance at the army manoeuvres of 1910, his
patriotism, his death in 1913; Lieutenant Gibbs, his adventures in
Spain. Civilians at Larkhill; Mr. Robert Loraine, Mr. Barber, Mr.
Cockburn. The Bristol Flying School at Larkhill; M. Henry Jullerot, Mr.
Gordon England, Mr. Harry Busteed. Creation of the Air Battalion, Royal
Engineers, in February 1911. Debt of the nation to Captain Fulton and
Mr. Cockburn. Private enterprise more useful to military than to naval
flying.
CHAPTER IV. The Beginnings of the Air Force. pp. 146-97
English respect for precedent. The air force developed by stages from a
balloon detachment of the Royal Engineers. The balloon in war. Balloon
experiments at Woolwich and Chatham. Balloons in Bechuanaland, 1884; in
the Soudan, 1885. Success of balloons at Aldershot manoeuvres, 1889.
Balloon Factory established at South Farnborough, 1894. Balloons in
South African War, 1899-1900. Energy of the factory. Colonel Templer and
Colonel Capper. The first British army airship, the _Nulli Secundus_,
1907. Appointment of Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1909, to
combine theory and practice. The National Physical Laboratory. Growth of
the factory under Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, 1909-16. Its services to
aviation. Private makers of aircraft stand aloof. The designing office
at the factory. Its services during the war. Famous factory types of
aeroplane--the B.E., the F.E., the S.E., the R.E. The question of
stability; work of Mr. Lanchester and Professor Bryan. The story of Mr.
Busk. Workmanship and safety. Notable devices invented at the factory.
The navy employs private firms of aircraft makers. The Short brothers.
Factory airships from 1908 to 1913. All airships assigned to the navy in
1913. The _Mayfly_ fiasco, 1908-11. Captain Murray Sueter and Captain
Bertram Dickson on the command of the air. The true doctrine--freedom
and the open highways.
French military aviation in 1911. Reports of Lieutenant Glyn and Captain
Sykes. German aeronautics in 1912. Report of Captain Sueter and Mr.
O'Gorman. Changed conditions of naval warfare. British naval airship
section reconstituted. Purchase of foreign airships. British rigid
airships ordered in 1913, too late for the war. German belief in the
airship. Private efforts of British naval officers. Commander Oliver
Swann first gets off the water in an Avro aeroplane fitted with floats,
1911. Lieutenant C. R. Samson flies off the deck of H.M.S. _Africa_,
1911. Lieutenant Samson's first seaplane. The first flying boat.
The problem of the making of an air force. The need of discipline. Early
doings of the Air Battalion, 1911. Difficulties of policy. Lighter than
air and heavier than air. Aeroplanes few; airships unpopular. Royal
Engineers and others. Mr. Cockburn teaches the battalion to fly. They
fly from Larkhill to Farnborough. Cross-country flights. Army manoeuvres
of 1911; adventurers of the Air Battalion. The accident to Lieutenant
Reynolds. Record flight of Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett. Death of
Lieutenant Cammell. Our apprenticeship in the air. The English fashion.
CHAPTER V. The Royal Flying Corps. pp. 198-276
Institution of the Royal Flying Corps. Plans prepared by General
Henderson, Captain Sykes, and Major MacInnes. History in the making.
Choice of the squadron as the unit of the new force. Pressure of time.
Institution of the Central Flying School. The question of the rank of
pilots. The question of the independence of the Flying Corps. The
attitude of the navy. The Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps becomes
the Royal Naval Air Service. The Naval Flying School at Eastchurch. The
case against the independence of the air force; and the case for it. The
temper of the air. The language difficulty. The Air Committee of 1912
and its functions. Need for an Air Ministry. Experimental work of the
Naval Air Service. Uses of the Military Wing of the Royal Flying Corps.
Debt to the Royal Engineers. Training and establishment. Variety of
trades enrolled. The group of early officers, under Captain Sykes.
Captain Patrick Hamilton. The first two aeroplane squadrons, commanded
by Captain Brooke-Popham and Captain Burke. The Airship Company of the
Air Battalion becomes No. 1 Squadron of the Flying Corps. The story of
Major Maitland. The airships handed over to the navy, 1913. Development
of wireless telegraphy. A brief history and description of wireless
telegraphy. Experiments in adapting it for the use of aircraft. The work
of Captain Lefroy; and of Lieutenant Fitzmaurice. Success of wireless at
the manoeuvres of 1912. Improvement of apparatus. Wireless in seaplanes;
successes of 1913. Wireless in aeroplanes.
Work of the headquarters staff of the Military Wing. The beginnings of a
great tradition. The experimental branch. The story of Major Musgrave.
The work of the aeroplane squadrons. Captain Eustace Loraine. Fatalities
of 1912. The ban on monoplanes. Mr. Howard Flanders. Work at the Central
Flying School. Fatal accidents. Formation of new squadrons.
No. 3 Squadron on Salisbury Plain. Co-operation with artillery and
infantry. Military aeroplane trials. 'Military airmen also flew.'
Co-operation with cavalry. No. 3 Squadron at the manoeuvres of 1912.
Lessons of the manoeuvres. Winter difficulties. Manoeuvres of 1913.
Reports by Major Brooke-Popham and Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett.
Details and efficiency. Experiments with machine-guns; and with cameras.
The first night flight. Non-commissioned pilots. Major McCudden on No. 3
Squadron.
No. 2 Squadron. Major C. J. Burke; his story and character. His maxims.
His famous machine, the first B.E. The squadron moves by air from
Farnborough to Montrose. Practice at St. Andrews. The Irish Command
manoeuvres of 1913. Statistics of the squadron. Captain Longcroft's long
flight. Major Burke's diary.
Other squadrons. The Concentration Camp at Netheravon. Reconnaissance in
war. Other uses of aeroplanes at first claimed for airships. Uses
ultimately found for aerial acrobatics--the loop, the spin. The
machine-gun and the pusher machine. Aerodynamical knowledge. The S.E. 5.
The 'Christmas tree'. Importance of engine power.
The Naval Wing. Problems of defence. Coastal stations. Seaplanes at the
naval manoeuvres of 1913. Mr. Churchill's programme. Detection of
submarines. Bomb-dropping experiments. Anti-airship experiments.
Machine-guns. The Central Air Office, Sheerness. Poor supply of
munitions. Separation of the naval and military wings. The Royal Naval
Air Service at the Naval Review, 1914. War orders.
German aviation British report on the 'Prince Henry Circuit', May, 1914.
The coming of the war.
CHAPTER VI. The War: The Royal Flying Corps from Mons to
Ypres. pp. 277-356
The Prussian doctrine of war. The Serajevo murders. Austria and Serbia.
Germany refuses mediation and makes war on Russia and France. Great
Britain declares war, August 4, 1914. The cause of civilization. The
German plan of campaign. The British army in France. Mobilization of
Royal Flying Corps. The Aircraft Park. The squadrons. List of officers
of the four squadrons. The machines. Amiens. Maubeuge. Flying Corps
fired on by British troops. Union Jack markings. The German wheel
through Belgium. French strategy. The retreat from Mons. First aerial
reconnaissances. The reconnaissances of August 22. Sergeant-Major
Jillings wounded in the air. Lieutenants Waterfall and Bayly brought
down. Aerial reconnaissance on its trial. Early mistakes. List of places
occupied by H.Q., R.F.C., during retreat. German movements observed. A
typical air report. The western wind. The finding of Sir Douglas Haig.
Help to General Smith-Dorrien at Le Cateau. The detection of enveloping
movements. The British army escapes from von Kluck. Von Kluck wheels
towards the Oise. His change of direction observed from the air. One of
the reports. British retreat continues. The Sixth French Army on the
Ourcq. Summary of British aerial work during the retreat. Alarms.
Experiences of pilots. High spirits. Early bomb-dropping. First German
machine seen by British at Maubeuge. Fighting in the air. German
machines brought down. The battle of the Marne. Machines assigned to
corps commands, September 6.
Observation of the battle. Advance of headquarters to Fere-en-Tardenois.
General Joffre's thanks to the Flying Corps. Storm of September 12. The
battle of the Aisne. Adventure of Lieutenants Dawes and Freeman.
Position warfare. Artillery observation. Wireless--Lieutenants Lewis and
James. An early wireless message. The clock code. Popularity of
wireless. Photography. The dropping of darts. German 'Archies'. The race
for the sea. British army moves north; Flying Corps shifted to St. Omer.
No. 6 Squadron arrives. Strategic reconnaissance. Long-distance flights.
The battle of Ypres. Union Jack marking abolished. Photography and
wireless. Earlier methods of ranging. Their inferiority. Fighting
quality of British aeroplanes; German prisoners' evidence. The losses of
Ypres. Withdrawal of German troops observed from the air. Sympathy of
Flying Corps for the infantry. The German officer and his pilot.
CHAPTER VII. The Royal Naval Air Service in 1914. pp. 357-409
Strength of the Naval Wing. Progress in wireless and in armament.
Uncertain purposes. The stimulant of war. Mr. F. K. McClean. Coastal
patrols. Channel patrols. Airship logs. A Zeppelin sighted. Hardships of
North Sea patrols. Squadron Commander Seddon's experience. Practice
value of patrols. Seaplanes at Scapa Flow. Seaplane-carriers--_Empress_,
_Engadine_, and _Riviera_. Imperfections of the seaplane. The doctrine
of the initiative in war. Offensive policy of the Royal Naval Air
Service. The Eastchurch Squadron under Commander Samson goes to Ostend,
August 27, 1914. Their motor-car reconnaissance to Bruges. They are
ordered to return to England. Delayed by an accident. The Admiralty
changes its policy, and orders them to operate from Dunkirk against
Zeppelins. Adventures in armed motor-cars. Fight with Germans between
Cassel and Bailleul. The expedition to Lille. Armoured cars. Marine
reinforcements. The fight outside Doullens. Advanced base at Morbecque.
Attacks designed on German communications in co-operation with French
territorials and cavalry. The affair at Douai--Commander Samson's story.
Diverse activities of Naval Air Service. Shortage of machines. Storm of
September 12. The Naval Air Service co-operates on the Belgian coast
with the Seventh Division of the British army. Air raids on Duesseldorf.
The evacuation of Antwerp. The British Empire and 'side-shows'.
Naval aeroplanes work for the British army. The base at Dunkirk; its
importance, and its influence on the war.
The air raid on Friedrichshafen, November 21, 1914. Secret preparations.
The course from Belfort to Lake Constance. Lieutenant Sippe's log.
Effect of the bombs. Squadron Commander Briggs taken prisoner. German
alarm and later costly defences. The praise of the Avro. The question of
Swiss neutrality.
The air raid on Cuxhaven, Christmas Day 1914, supported by light
cruisers and destroyers. The purposes of the raid. The supporting force
unmolested in the Bight of Heligoland. Inspected by Zeppelins. Commodore
Tyrwhitt's remarks on Zeppelin tactics. Reconnaissance flight of
seaplane No. 136 over the German navy.
The war in 1914. Increase of British responsibilities, and of the air
force. The temper of the air force. The Epic of Youth.
CHAPTER VIII. The Expansion of the Air Force. pp. 410-89
The squadrons take to France, in August 1914, all efficient pilots, and
all serviceable machines. What was left. Further call for fighting
aeroplanes. The making of the new air force. British mastery of the air
by July 1916.
British power of organization. Early control of military aviation. The
Military Aeronautics Directorate. Sir David Henderson takes command in
France. Major Trenchard and Major Brancker take charge at home.
General Trenchard and the Royal Flying Corps. His previous history.
Given command of the Military Wing at Farnborough, to make something out
of nothing. Helped by Major Brancker, who is appointed Deputy Director
of Military Aeronautics. Previous history of Major Brancker. His flight
as observer during cavalry manoeuvres in India, 1911. Returns to
England, learns to fly, and joins Military Aeronautics Directorate.
Lord Kitchener at the War Office asks for new squadrons. Bold action of
Directorate. Enlistment of mechanics. Agreement with Admiralty for
allotment of machines and engines. The placing of orders. Avoidance of
standardization. Opinion of pilots on their machines liable to error.
Examples--the Sopwith Tabloid and the D.H. 2. Sudden demands of the
war. Machines ordered. New firms employed.
Training scheme for pilots. New aerodromes all over England. Lord
Kitchener's energy. Formation flying. Fifty new squadrons demanded.
Official objections. 'Double this. K.' Good repute of British aviation
for safety, quality, and performance. The architecture of the new air
force. Institution of wings to co-operate with army corps, November
1914. Transfers and promotions. Wings paired to form a brigade. Army
wings and corps wings. Introduction of equipment officers who do not
fly. Race for efficiency in machines. The importance of morale. Harmful
newspaper agitations. General Trenchard's achievement. Lessons of
experience. Fighting aeroplanes; wireless; anti-aircraft guns;
photography. Experimental machine with every squadron. Training of
pilots at the Central Flying School. Training of observers begins late
in the war. Meaning of the observer's badge.
General Henderson relinquishes command. His death, 1921, and character.
Continuous growth of Flying Corps. Observation and fighting. Bombing
raids and night-flying. Programmes of the Royal Flying Corps command.
Contrast between German and British artillery observation. Need for
British anti-aircraft guns. Number of machines in a squadron raised to
eighteen in 1916. Programmes of 1916 and 1917. The war ends before the
latter is completed. Small early reinforcements. The supply of pilots.
French supply machines to us during earlier years of the war. Military
and naval officers posted to Paris to arrange supply.
The expansion of the Royal Naval Air Service. The problem of helping the
navy from the air. The seaplane. The vessels designed to carry aircraft.
Difficulty of landing an aeroplane on the deck of a moving vessel. The
feat first accomplished, August 1917.
Kites and balloons. The Parseval kite balloon. The Drachen and the
Cacquot. Wing Commander Maitland's report. Kite-balloon centre
established at Roehampton. The first kite-balloon ship--the _Manica_.
Experiments with kite balloons towed by ships. Demand of the army for
kite balloons on the western front. This demand supplied by the navy.
The invention of the type of small airship called the Submarine Scout.
The flying boat. Sopwith Bat boat. Work of Colonel J. C. Porte at
Felixstowe. His earlier career. Achievements in 1918 of Felixstowe
flying boats.
Torpedo aircraft. Experiments. Use of the torpedo seaplane at Gallipoli.
Slowness of its practical development. Causes of this delay. Operational
difficulties. The _Cuckoo_, a torpedo aeroplane, produced in 1917. The
_Argus_ built to carry torpedo aeroplanes, 1918. The value of torpedo
aircraft. Dreaded by Dreadnoughts. Unpopular with pilots.
The navy and private firms. Need for fighting machines, and for powerful
engines. Rivalry between military and naval air services. Demand for
squadrons on western front. Two naval squadrons offered in 1914, and
refused. Development of aerial fighting, and of bomb-dropping. The
Fokker menace in 1916. Admiralty lend four Nieuport scouts to help No. 6
Squadron. Success of the experiment. A naval squadron on the western
front near Amiens, October 1916. Four fighting naval squadrons on the
western front in 1917. The achievements of these squadrons.
The problem of unity of control. The War Office and the Admiralty.
Director of the Air Department responsible to each of the Sea Lords. The
Central Air Office at Sheerness, under the Nore Command, abolished in
February 1915, and the Royal Naval Air Service placed under the orders
of the Director of the Air Department. Points of difficulty raised by
Commander-in-Chief of the Nore. Verdict of the naval law branch. The
question of discipline. Rapid growth of Naval Air Service. Small
professional training of officers entered from civil life. The navy
absorbs the Royal Naval Air Service into itself, August 1915.
Consequences of this. Appointment of senior naval officers to air
service commands. Discipline and science. Some advantages of the
change--establishment of training depot at Cranwell, and of the famous
Fifth Group at Dunkirk.
Naval plan for long-distance bombing raids over Essen and Berlin. No. 3
Wing at Luxeuil formed for this purpose. The army's needs; the Luxeuil
Wing broken up. Probable effects of such raids. Believers in
frightfulness are very susceptible to fright.
The emergence of the new air force. How the air will come into its
own.
INTRODUCTION
When Great Britain declared war upon Germany in August 1914, she staked
her very existence as a free nation upon an incalculable adventure. Two
new means and modes of warfare, both of recent invention, enormously
increased the difficulties of forecast and seemed to make precedents
useless. Former wars had been waged on the land and on the sea; the
development of submarines and aircraft opened up secret ways of travel
for armed vessels under the sea and promised almost unlimited
possibilities of observation and offence from the heights of the air.
Of these two new weapons the submarine was brought earlier to a state of
war efficiency, and because it seemed to threaten the security of our
island and the power of our navy, it excited the greater apprehension.
But the navigation of the air, whether by airship or aeroplane, is now
recognized for the more formidable novelty. The progress of the war has
proved that within the narrow seas the submarine can be countered, and
that the extension of its capabilities on the high seas is beset with
difficulties. For aircraft the possibilities are immense. It is not
extravagant to say that the 17th of December 1903, when the Wright
brothers made the first free flight through the air in a power-driven
machine, marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the world.
The differences to be looked for in this new era were both
over-estimated and under-estimated, according to the temper of those who
considered them. Imaginative people, and sentimental people, looked for
the speedy fulfilment of Tennyson's vision:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the World.
The Germans, who as a people fall easy victims to agreeable sentiment,
indulged extravagant hopes from war in the air, and expected great
achievements from their Zeppelins. On the other hand, the English, who
are less excitable, were comparatively slow as a nation to appreciate
the importance of the new invention. Conservative and humorous minds are
always conscious chiefly of the immutable and stable elements in human
life, and do not readily pay respect to novelty. Those who were
responsible for the naval and military defences of the country preserved
great coolness, and refused to let judgement outrun experience. They
knew well that the addition to man's resources of yet another mode of
travel or transport does not alter the enduring principles of strategy.
They regarded the experiment benevolently, and, after a time, were
willing to encourage it, but 'up to the end of the year 1911', says an
official report, 'the policy of the Government with regard to all
branches of aerial navigation was based on a desire to keep in touch
with the movement rather than to hasten its development. It was felt
that we stood to gain nothing by forcing a means of warfare which tended
to reduce the value of our insular position and the protection of our
sea-power.' When the Wright brothers offered to sell their invention to
the British Admiralty, the offer was refused.
It is natural enough that believers in the new art, who devoted years of
disinterested thought and labour to getting it recognized, and who truly
foresaw its enormous importance, should be impatient of so cautious an
attitude. But the attitude itself was also natural and excusable. The
British navy is a great trust, responsible not so much for the progress
of the nation as for its very existence. Untried courses, new
investments, brilliant chances, do not commend themselves to trustees.
By adherence to a tried policy and to accustomed weapons the navy had
ridden out many a storm that threatened national wreckage; what it had
done so often it believed that it could do again; and it was slow to
grasp at new weapons before their value was proved. So the progress of
aerial science followed what, in this country, is the normal course. We
have had many great poets and many great inventors. We sometimes starve
our poets, but we make classics of their works. We sometimes leave our
inventors to struggle unaided with difficulties, but when they succeed
we adopt their inventions as part of the national inheritance, and pay
to their names a respect greater than bounty-fed dependence can ever
command or deserve. Their failures are their own, their successes
belong to their country; and if success brings them no other reward,
they can at least claim a part in the honour universally paid to
soldiers and sailors, whose profession is sacrifice.
As soon as it became clear that no nation could without extreme peril to
itself neglect the new weapon, the Government took up the problem in
earnest. Private enterprise might, no doubt, have been trusted to
improve and develop aircraft for the various uses of peace, but the
question was a question of war. The purposes and ambitions of the German
Empire had again and again been freely expressed, in no moderate
language, and the German menace lay like a long vague shadow across the
peace of Europe. Peaceful citizens, with many other things to think of,
might fail to see it, but no such blindness was possible for those who
had charge of the defences of the country. The Committee of Imperial
Defence, in the few years before the war, took expert advice. The
Government, acting on this advice, furnished us with the nucleus of an
air force. They made their own flying school, and established their own
factory for the output of aircraft. They organized an air service with
naval and military wings. They formed advisory and consultative
committees to grapple with the difficulties of organization and
construction. They investigated the comparative merits and drawbacks of
airships and aeroplanes. The airships, because they seemed fitter for
reconnaissance over the sea, were eventually assigned wholly to the
Naval Wing. No very swift progress was made with these in the years
before the war. The expenses of adequate experiment were enormous, and
the long tale of mishaps to Zeppelins seemed to show that the risks were
great. The experts who were consulted pointed out that the only way to
test the value of the larger type of airship was to build such airships
ourselves, that Germany had patiently persevered in her airship policy
in the face of disaster and loss, and that if we were to succeed with
airships it would be necessary to warn the public that heavy losses, in
the initial stage, were unavoidable. Opinion in this island, it is right
to remember, was strong against the airship, or gas-bag, and Germany's
enthusiastic championship of the Zeppelin made the aeroplane more
popular in England. So our airship policy was tentative and
experimental; a few small airships were in use, but none of the large
size and wide range required for effective naval reconnaissance. Good
and rapid progress, on the other hand, was made with aeroplanes and
seaplanes, and when war broke out we had a small but healthy service,
both naval and military, ready to take the air.
Four squadrons of the Military Wing, or Royal Flying Corps, that is to
say, forty-eight machines, with a few additional machines in reserve,
bore a part in the retreat from Mons. A detachment of the Naval Wing, or
Royal Naval Air Service, was sent to Belgium, and after bearing a part
in the defence of Antwerp, established itself at Dunkirk, which remained
throughout the war a centre for aerial operations. These were the
beginnings; in the four years and three months of the war the air
service grew and multiplied a hundredfold. At the date of the armistice,
the 11th of November 1918, there were operating in France and Belgium
ninety-nine squadrons of the Royal Air Force. In August 1914 there had
been less than two hundred and fifty officers in the service, all told;
in November 1918 there were over thirty thousand. In August 1914 the
total of machines, available for immediate war service, was about a
hundred and fifty; in November 1918 there were more than twenty-two
thousand in use, almost all of them enormously more powerful and
efficient than the best machines of the earlier date. In the course of
the war our air forces accounted for more than eight thousand enemy
machines; dropped more than eight thousand tons of bombs on enemy
objectives; fired more than twelve million rounds of ammunition at
targets on the ground; took more than half a million photographs;
brought down nearly three hundred enemy balloons; and suffered a total
of casualties not far short of eighteen thousand. Not less important in
its influence on the fortunes of the war than any of these achievements,
perhaps more important than all of them, was the work done by aircraft
in detecting movements of the enemy and in directing the fire of our
gunners upon hostile batteries. This work cannot be exactly assessed or
tabulated, but the German gunner knew where to look for the enemy he
most dreaded.
A rapid summary of this kind shows that the history of the war in the
air is inseparable from the history of the development of the art of
flying. Of those who were competent to handle a machine in the air
during the years before the war by far the greater number served with
the colours. With the outbreak of war civilian flying, except for
training purposes, abruptly ceased. The necessities of war compelled and
quickened invention. When a nation is fighting for its life, money and
energy are expended without check, and it may be doubted whether in the
whole history of mankind any art in its infant stage has been so
magnificently supported and advanced by war as the art of flying was
supported and advanced by the greatest war of all.
No history can be expected to furnish a full record of all the acts of
prowess that were performed in the air during the long course of the
war. Many of the best of them can never be known; the Victoria Cross has
surely been earned, over and over again, by pilots and observers who
went east, and lie in unvisited graves. The public dearly loves a hero;
but the men who have been both heroic and lucky must share their
honours, as they are the first to insist, with others whose courage was
not less, though their luck failed them. There is a quaint system, in
use in the air service, of reckoning the activities of the service in
terms of hours flown, taking as the unit for addition every single hour
flown by each individual machine. By this method of calculation, the
hours flown by the air service, on all fronts, during the war can be
shown to be much over a million. The work of an ant-hill, reckoned on
the same basis, would present a stupendous total. If the heroism of the
air service, that is to say, their deeds of surpassing courage and
devotion, could be thus computed, the figure would run into thousands;
and this would be the fairest, though not the most dramatic, statement
of the case. The officers in command have always been unwilling to pay
regard to 'star turns'; what they have coveted for the service is not a
low range of achievement rising now and again into sharp fantastic
peaks, but a high tableland of duty and efficiency. They obtained their
desire, in a result more surprising than any single exploit can ever be.
They made courage and devotion the rule, not the exception. The work of
the air service on a war front consists of often-repeated short periods
of intense strain. One pilot described it well by saying that it is like
going to the dentist every day. To exact the highest standard of conduct
under this strain, not as an ideal to be aimed at, but as a working
rule, might well seem to be winding up human nature to a point where it
must break. The commanders of the air service did not hesitate to take
the risk. They trusted human nature, and were amply rewarded. The
experiences of the war revealed, to a generation that had almost
forgotten them, the ancient and majestic powers of man, the power of
his mind over his body, the power of his duty over his mind. When the
builders have been praised for their faith and for their skill, the last
word of wonder and reverence must be kept for the splendid grain of the
stuff that was given them to use in the architecture of their success.
Those matters are fittest for history which exhibit a process of growth.
The great periods of human history are not the long periods; they are
those times of change and crisis when the movements of humanity are
quickened and made visible, when the stationary habits and conservative
traditions of mankind are broken up, and one phase of civilization gives
place to another, as the bud, long and slowly matured, suddenly bursts
into flower. The story of the war in the air is a perfect example of
this quickening process, whereby developments long secretly prepared,
and delayed until hope is saddened, are mysteriously touched with life,
and exhibit the tendencies of ages condensed in the events of a few
crowded years. The flying machine, which at the end of the nineteenth
century was a toy, ten years later was added to the most valuable
resources of man, and ten years later again bid fair to alter the
conditions of his life on the surface of the earth. The war, though it
did not cause this great change, accelerated it enormously. War is
exacting, and it is difficult to think of any peaceful uses of aircraft
which do not find their counterpart in naval and military operations.
When General Townshend was besieged in Kut, there came to him by
aeroplane not only food (in quantities sadly insufficient for his
needs), but salt, saccharine, opium, drugs and surgical dressings,
mails, spare parts for wireless plant, money, and a millstone weighing
seventy pounds, which was dropped by means of a parachute. In the actual
operations of the war the uses of aircraft, and especially of the
aeroplane, were very rapidly extended and multiplied. The earliest and
most obvious use was reconnaissance. To the Commander-in-Chief a
detailed knowledge of the enemy's dispositions and movements is worth
more than an additional army corps; aeroplanes and balloons furnished
him with eyes in the air. As observation was the first purpose of
aircraft, so it remains the most important. During the war it was
developed in many directions. The corps machines operating on the
western front devoted themselves among other things to detecting enemy
batteries and to directing the fire of our own artillery. As soon as a
wireless installation for aeroplanes came into use, and the observer was
thus brought into close touch with his own gunners, this kind of
observation became deadly in its efficiency, and was the chief agent in
defeating the German scheme of victory by gun-power. When once a hostile
battery was located, and our guns, by the aid of observation from the
air, were ranged upon it, the fire of that battery was quickly silenced.
Other branches of observation, developed during the war, were
photography from the air and contact patrol. Complete photographic maps
of Hun-land, as the territory lying immediately behind the enemy lines
was everywhere called, were made from a mosaic of photographs, and were
continually renewed. No changes, however slight, in the surface of the
soil could escape the record of the camera when read by the aid of a
magnifying glass. Contact patrol, or reports by low-flying aeroplanes on
the exact position of the advancing infantry, came later, and
supplemented the use of the telephone, which was liable to be destroyed
by shell-fire. Our contact patrols saved us from a world of those most
distressing of casualties, the losses inflicted on troops by their own
guns.
Serious battle in the air, which was engaged on no large scale until
the second year of the war, was, in its essence, an attempt to put out
the eyes of the other side. In the early days officers often took a
revolver, a carbine, or a rifle, into the air with them, but machines
designed expressly for fighting, and armed with Lewis or Vickers guns,
did not appear in force until it became necessary to counter the attacks
made by the Fokker on our observation machines. Then began that long
series of dramatic combats, splendid in many of its episodes, which
fascinated the attention of the public, and almost excluded from notice
the humbler, but not less essential, and not less dangerous, duties of
those whose main business it was to observe.
Lastly, the offensive powers of aircraft have been so rapidly developed,
especially during the latest period of the war, that it was only the
coming of the armistice that saved mankind from a hurricane of
slaughter. In 1914 a few small bombs were carried by officers into the
air, and were gingerly dropped over the side of the machine. Accuracy of
aim was impossible. In the large modern bombing machine the heavier
bombs weigh almost three-quarters of a ton; they are mechanically
released from the rack on which they are hung, and when the machine is
flying level, at a known pace and height, good practice can be made, by
the aid of an adjustable instrument, on any target. Even more desolating
in its effect is the work done by low-flying aeroplanes, armed with
machine-guns, against enemy troops on the march. Raids on the enemy
communications, for the destruction of supplies and the cutting off of
reinforcements, played a great part in the later phases of the war; and
long-distance raids over enemy centres served to bring the civil
population into sympathy with the sufferings of the army.
All these activities belong to war on the land, and the aeroplanes of
the Royal Naval Air Service bore a part in them. Members of the naval
squadrons at Antwerp carried out the earliest bombing raids into
Germany. The kite balloons, which rose like a palisade behind our lines
and kept the enemy under observation, were, in the early time of the
war, supplied by the navy. Moreover, the navy had work of its own to do
in the air. The business of coast defence and patrol, the convoy of
vessels--in short, all the office-work that would fall to an
Inspector-General of the Seven Seas had to be done by the navy. The
seaplane and the flying boat can come to rest on the surface of the sea,
but it is no secret that they are not always comfortable there, and
there were attached to the Naval Air Service certain special vessels,
constructed or adapted to be seaplane-carriers. The credit of defeating
Germany's submarine campaign belongs, in part at least, to the air
service, working in co-operation with the destroyers and a swarm of
smaller craft. In favourable weather submarines below the surface of the
water can sometimes be seen from the air, and the depth-charge, another
invention of the war, dropped by surface craft, is the means of their
destruction.
An occasional duty of aircraft may fitly be mentioned here. It is
sometimes desirable that a missionary should be deposited at a quiet
spot behind the enemy lines, and when he wishes to communicate with
those who sent him out it sometimes becomes necessary to supply him with
a basket of pigeons. When communication is interrupted on the troubled
surface of the earth, it can often be renewed in the air.
As the uses of aircraft multiplied, so did their designs, and where many
various tasks were performed, in the beginning of the war, by a single
type of machine, good in its day, there are now many types of machine,
each with special fitness for its own purpose. How far these
developments may yet go, no man can tell, and prophecy is idle; what is
certain is that many operations of war and peace which have never yet
been performed are within the reach of the aircraft that are now at our
disposal. A beleaguered city could be victualled. A force of a thousand
men, with rations and ammunition, could be landed, in a few hours, to
operate in the rear of an invading army. But the world is tired of war,
and the advances of the immediate future will rather be made in the
direction of peaceful traffic and peaceful communication.
The history of the war in the air is the history of the rapid progress
of an art and the great achievements of a service. In the nature of
things the progress of the art must claim a share in the record. If the
battle of Trafalgar had been fought only some ten short years after the
first adventurer trusted himself to the sea on a crazy raft, the ships,
rather than the men, would be the heroes of that battle, and Nelson
himself would be overshadowed by the _Victory_. The men who fought the
war in the air have overcome more than their enemies; they, and those
who worked for them on the ground, have successfully grappled with
problem after problem in the perfecting of the art of flight. A whole
world of scientific devices, from the Pitot tube, which indicates the
speed of the machine through the air, to the Dreyer automatic oxygen
apparatus, which enables the pilot to breathe in the rarefied upper
reaches of the atmosphere and to travel far above the summit of high
mountain ranges, has become a part of daily usage. A machine is the
embodiment of human thought, and if it sometimes seems to be almost
alive, that is because it springs of live parents. The men of science,
who worked for humanity, must have an honour only less than the honour
paid to the men of action, who died for their country. These last, the
pilots and observers who are dead and gone, would not ask to be exalted
above other branches of the fighting services. Their pride was to serve
the army on the land and the navy on the sea. The men who march often
admire and extol the courage of the men who fly, and they are right; but
the men who fly, unless they are very thoughtless, know that the
heaviest burden of war, its squalor and its tediousness, is borne on the
devoted shoulders of the infantryman. All other arms, even ships of war
themselves, in many of their uses, are subservient to the infantry. Man
must live, and walk, and sleep on the surface of the earth, and there,
in the few feet of soil that have been fertilized by contact with the
air, he must grow his food. These are the permanent conditions, and they
give the infantry its supremacy in war. A country that is conquered must
be controlled and administered; a city that surrenders must be occupied.
Battles can be won in the air or on the sea, and the mark of victory is
this, that the patient infantry, military and civil, can then advance,
to organize peace. An immense sympathy for the sufferings of the
infantry, an immense admiration for their dogged perseverance in their
never-ending task, is felt by all those whose business it is to assist
them from the air. It would be an ill service to the men of the air
force, and a foolish ambition, to try to raise them in consideration
above the heads of the men whose servants and helpers they are.
There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon. The air
service has its own advantages, its own trials, and its own marks of
distinction. Life in the service was lived at high pressure, and was
commonly short. Throughout the war our machines were continually at work
over enemy territory, but the pilots of the beginning of the war were
not crossing the lines at its close. A few were acting in administrative
posts; some had returned, disabled, to civil life; the rest have
passed, and their work has been carried on by generation after
generation of their successors. The air service still flourishes; its
health depends on a secret elixir of immortality, which enables a body
to repair its severest losses. The name of this elixir is tradition, and
the greatest of all the achievements of the air service is that in a
very few years, under the hammer of war, it has fashioned and welded its
tradition, and has made it sure. Critics who speak of what they have not
felt and do not know have sometimes blamed the air service because,
being young, it has not the decorum of age. The Latin poet said that it
is decorous to die for one's country; in that decorum the service is
perfectly instructed. But those who meet the members of a squadron in
their hours of ease, among gramophones and pictorial works of art
suggestive of luxury, forget that an actor in a tragedy, though he play
his part nobly on the stage, is not commonly tragic in the green-room.
If they desire intensity and gravity, let them follow the pilot out on
to the aerodrome, and watch his face in its hood, when the chocks are
pulled away, and he opens the throttle of the engine. No Greek sculpture
is finer in its rendering of life and purpose. To see him at his best
they would have to accompany him, through the storm of the anti-aircraft
guns, into those fields of air where every moment brings some new trial
of the quickness of his brain and the steadiness of his nerve. He is now
in the workshop where tradition is made, to be handed down as an
heirloom to the coming generations. It will not fail to reach them. The
Royal Air Force is strong in the kind of virtue that propagates itself
and attains to a life beyond a life. The tradition is safe.
CHAPTER I
THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR
We know next to nothing of man's greatest achievements. His written
history is the history of yesterday, and leaves him very much the same
being as it finds him, with the same habits, the same prejudices, and
only slightly enhanced powers. The greatest and most significant
advances were prehistoric. What invention, of which any record remains,
can compare in importance with the invention of speech; and what day in
the world's history is more worthy of celebration than that day, the
birthday of thought and truth, when a sound, uttered by the breath, from
being the expression of a feeling became the mark of a thing? The man
who first embarked on the sea has been praised for the triple armour of
his courage; but he must be content with praise; his biography will
never be written. The North American Indians are reckoned a primitive
people, but when first they come under the notice of history they bring
with them one of the most perfect of human inventions--the birch-bark
canoe. What centuries of dreams and struggles and rash adventures went
to the inventing and perfecting of that frail boat? What forgotten names
deserve honour for the invention of the paddle and the sail? The whole
story is beyond recovery in the rapidly closing backward perspective of
time. Man's eyes are set in his head so that he may go forward, and
while he is healthy and alert he does not trouble to look behind him. If
the beginnings of European civilization are rightly traced to certain
tribes of amphibious dwellers on the coast of the Mediterranean, who
reared the piles of their houses in the water, and so escaped the
greater perils of the land, then some sort of rudimentary navigation was
the first condition of human progress, and sea-power, which defies the
devastators of continents, had earlier prophets than Admiral Mahan. But
the memory of these thousands of years has passed like a watch in the
night.
The conquest of the sea can never be recorded in history; even the
conquest of the air, which was achieved within the lifetime of all but
the very youngest of those who are now alive, admits of no sure or
perfect record. The men who bore a part in it, and still survive, are
preoccupied with the future, and are most of them impatient of their own
past. Where knowledge begins, there begin also conflicting testimonies
and competing claims. It is no part of the business of this history of
the war in the air to compare these testimonies or to resolve these
claims. To narrate how man learned to fly would demand a whole treatise,
and the part of the history which ends in December 1903 is the most
difficult and uncertain part of all. Yet the broad outlines of the
process can be sketched and determined. It is a long story of legends
and dreams, theories and fancies, all suddenly transformed into facts; a
tale of the hopes of madmen suddenly recognized as reasonable ambitions.
When in the light of the present we look back on the past our eyes are
opened, and we see many things that were invisible to contemporaries. We
are able, for the first time, to pay homage to the pioneers, who saw the
promised kingdom, but did not enter it. No place has hitherto been found
for their names in serious history. _The Dictionary of National
Biography_, with its supplement, includes the lives of all the famous
men of this nation who died before King George the Fifth was king. Yet
it contains no mention of Sir George Cayley, the Father of British
Aeronautics; nor of John Stringfellow, who, in 1848, constructed the
first engine-driven aeroplane that ever flew through the air; nor of
Francis Herbert Wenham, whose classic treatise on Aerial Locomotion,
read at the first meeting of the Aeronautical Society, in 1866, expounds
almost every principle on which modern aviation is founded; nor of James
Glaisher, who, in 1862; made the highest recorded balloon ascent; nor of
Percy Sinclair Pilcher, who lost his life in experimenting with one of
his own gliders in 1899. These men attracted little enough notice in
their own day, and were regarded as amiable eccentrics; but they all
thought long and hard on aerial navigation, and step by step, at their
own costs, they brought it nearer to accomplishment.
Now that the thing has been done, it seems strange that it was not done
earlier. At no time was it possible for man to forget his disabilities;
the birds were always above him, in easy possession. If he attributed
their special powers wholly to the lightness of their structure and the
strength of their muscles, the variety of flying creatures might have
taught him better. The fact is that there is no unique design for
flight; given the power and its right use, almost anything can fly. If
the sea-gull can fly, so can the duck, with a much heavier body and a
much less proportion of wing. The moth can fly; but so can the beetle.
The flying-fish can fly, or rather, can leap into the air and glide for
a distance of many yards. With the requisite engine-power a portmanteau
or a tea-tray could support itself in the air. The muscular power of
man, it is now generally accepted, is not sufficient to support his
weight in level flight on still air, but if the principles of flight had
been understood, there was no need to wait for the invention of the
powerful internal-combustion engine; a steam-engine in a well-designed
aeroplane might have performed very useful flights. It was knowledge
that lingered. Newton, when he saw an apple fall in his garden at
Woolsthorpe, 'began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the
moon'. If he had been in the habit of skimming flat stones on calm
water, he might have bent his mind to the problem of flight, and might
even have anticipated some of the discoveries in aerodynamics which were
reserved for the last century--in particular, the relations of speed and
angle of incidence to the reactions of air resistance on a moving plane.
The fact which is the basis of all aeroplane flight is that a perfectly
horizontal plane, free to fall through the air, has its time of falling
much retarded if it is in rapid horizontal motion. This is what makes
gliding possible. Now let the plane which is being propelled in a
horizontal direction be slightly tilted up, so that its front, or
leading edge, is higher than its back, or trailing edge. The reaction of
the air can then be resolved into two components, technically called
'lift' and 'drag'; lift, which tends to raise the plane, and drag, which
retards it in its forward motion. When the angle of incidence of the
plane is small, that is, when it is only slightly tilted from its
direction of motion, the greater part of the air reaction is converted
into lift. This is what makes flying possible. A moderate speed through
the air will enable the plane to lift much more than its own weight.
This is not a technical treatise, but some further facts of signal
importance in the theory and practice of flight are better explained at
once, in so far as the beautiful exactitude of mathematical
demonstration can be expressed in the crudities of popular speech. The
lift produced by the reaction of the air acts on the whole plane, but
not equally on all parts of it. At a flying angle, that is, when the
angle of incidence of the plane is small, the upward force is greatest
on those parts of the plane which are immediately behind the leading
edge. The wings of any soaring bird are long and narrow, and thus are
perfectly designed for their work. A square-winged bird would be a poor
soarer; a bird the breadth of whose wings should be greater than their
length could hardly fly at all. The wings of a flying machine are called
planes, or aerofoils; the length of the wing is called the span of the
plane; the breadth of the wing is called the chord of the plane. The
proportion of the span to the chord, that is, the proportion of the
length of the wing to its breadth, is called the 'aspect ratio' of the
plane; and a plane, or wing, that is long and narrow is said to have a
high aspect ratio. A higher aspect ratio than is found in any bird or
any flying machine would theoretically improve its powers of flight, but
the practicable span of the plane, or length of the wing, is limited by
the need for rigidity and strength. The albatross, nevertheless, the
king of soaring birds, has enormously long and narrow wings; and the
planes of some flying machines have an aspect ratio almost as high as
the slats of a Venetian blind.
The wings of a flying machine, it has been said, are called planes, but
they are not true planes. Like the wings of a bird, they are 'cambered',
that is to say, they curve upward from the leading edge and downward
again to the trailing edge. Some of the most valuable work contributed
by the laboratory to the science of flight has had for its object the
determination of the best form of camber, or curve of the plane. In the
result, that form of camber has been found to be best which attains its
maximum depth a little way only behind the leading edge, and gradually
becomes shallower towards the trailing edge. Such a form of curve
produces a comparatively smooth and untroubled partial vacuum above the
plane, just behind its leading edge, and this vacuum is the factor of
chief importance in the lift of the plane.
The above is a brief and rough statement of some principles of aviation
which have been ascertained by long experiment and the labour of many
minds. It is by experiment that flight has been achieved. The Newton
who shall reduce all the observed phenomena to a few broad and simple
laws is yet to come. A bird is simpler than an aeroplane in that its
wings both support it and drive it forward, whereas all aerial machines,
both those that are heavier than air and those that are lighter than
air, are at present driven forward by the thrust of an airscrew,
revolving at the rate of some twenty to thirty times a second.
There are only two kinds of flying machine, the lighter than air and the
heavier than air, of which two kinds the simplest types are the
soap-bubble and the arrow. These two kinds have often been in
competition with each other; and their rivalry, which has sometimes
delayed progress, still continues. The chief practical objection to
machines lighter than air is that they are buoyed up by vulnerable
receptacles containing hydrogen or some other highly inflammable gas. As
soon as helium, which is a light non-inflammable gas, shall be produced
in quantity at a reasonable expense, this objection will be lessened.
The advantage of the lighter-than-air, or floating, machine over the
heavier-than-air, or soaring, machine is that it can remain stationary
in the air without loss of height, and that its great size and lifting
power enable it to supply comfortable quarters for its staff, who not
only travel in it, but, if need be, can inhabit it for days. The airship
has a promising future, but it can never wholly supersede the soaring
machine, which is heavier than air, and flies as birds fly.
A fascinating story, part legend, part fiction, might be told of the
earliest reputed inventors. The fable of Daedalus perhaps grew up round
the memory of a man of mechanical genius, for Daedalus was the author of
many inventions before he flew from Crete to Italy. Aulus Gellius, in
his entertaining book of anecdotes called the _Attic Nights_, tells how
the philosopher Archytas of Tarentum invented a mechanical pigeon,
which was filled with some kind of light air, and flew. The two schools
of aeronautics were here reconciled. Other mechanists were Roger Bacon,
who is reported to have designed a flying chariot; and Regiomontanus,
astronomer and mathematician, who made a mechanical eagle which flew to
meet the Emperor Charles the Fifth, on his solemn entry into the city of
Nuremberg. It is not necessary to inquire whether these stories are true
or false; what is certain is that the inventors did not leave their
inventions as a legacy to their fellows. For a like reason Leonardo da
Vinci, who busied himself with a mechanism which should enable man to
operate wings with his legs, and who left a short treatise on the art of
flight, has no place in the history. His mechanism is merely a drawing;
his treatise remained in manuscript. The adventurers who risked their
lives on wings of their own making are truer ancestors of the flying
man. In 1507 John Damian, who was held in esteem as an alchemist and
physician at the court of King James IV of Scotland, 'took in hand to
fly with wings, and to that effect he caused make a pair of wings of
feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of
Stirling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brake his
thigh-bone'.[1] The poet Dunbar attacked him in a satirical poem, and
the reputation of a charlatan has stuck to him, but he deserves credit
for his courageous attempt. So does the Marquis de Bacqueville, who, in
1742, attached to his arms and legs planes of his own design, and
launched himself from an upper story of his house in Paris, in the
attempt to fly across the river Seine to the Tuileries, about two
hundred yards away. He glided some distance, and then fell on a
washerwoman's barge in the stream, breaking his leg in the fall. These
and other disastrous attempts might be defended in the words of Wilbur
Wright, written in 1901, while he was experimenting with his own
gliders. 'There are two ways', he says, 'of learning how to ride a
fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how
each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence
and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house and at leisure
figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter
system is the safest; but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger
proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride
a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety you will do well
to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn
you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual
trial.'[2] This pronouncement, by the highest authority, may serve as an
apology for some of those whose attempts were reckoned madness or
quackery, and whose misfortunes, during many long centuries, are the
only material available for the history of human flight.
[Footnote 1: From the _History of Scotland_, by John Lesley, Bishop
of Ross, written about 1570.]
[Footnote 2: _Journal of the Western Society of Engineers_, vol. vi,
No. 6, December 1901.]
Two periods of modern European history are notable for a quickening of
human interest in the problem of aerial navigation. They are the age of
Louis XIV of France, and the age of the French Revolution. Both were
times of great progress in science, and of illimitable hopes; but the
earlier period, which in England witnessed the foundation of the Royal
Society, was notable chiefly for advance in the physical and
mathematical sciences; while the later period was more addicted to
chemistry, and was the age of Lavoisier, Priestley, Cavendish, and
Black. The former age, though it attained to nothing practical, made
some progress in the theory of flight; the latter age invented the
balloon.
The Royal Society took its origin in the meetings in London, during the
troublous times of the Civil War, of 'divers worthy persons inquisitive
into natural philosophy'. One of these worthy persons was John Wilkins,
mathematician, philosopher, and divine, who, being parliamentarian in
his sympathies, was, on the expulsion of the Royalists from Oxford, made
Warden of Wadham College in that University. At Wadham, in the Warden's
lodgings, the 'Experimental philosophical Club', as Aubrey calls it,
renewed its meetings. Sprat, the early historian of the Royal Society,
explains that religion and politics were forbidden topics. 'To have been
always tossing about some theological question would have been to make
that their private diversion of which they had had more than enough in
public; to have been musing on the Civil Wars would have made them
melancholy; therefore Nature alone could entertain them.' After the
Restoration a meeting was held at Gresham College in London, and a
committee was appointed, with Wilkins as chairman, to draw up a scheme
for the Royal Society. The King approved of the scheme submitted to him,
and the society received its charter in 1662.
Wilkins was a famous man in his day; he married a sister of Oliver
Cromwell, and in his later years was Bishop of Chester. But his great
work was the founding of the Royal Society; and his philosophical (or,
as they would now be called, scientific) writings, which belong to his
earlier years in London, show very clearly with what high expectations
the society started on its labours. The first of these writings,
published in 1638, is a discourse to prove that there may be another
habitable World in the Moon. The second considers the possibility of a
passage thither. The third maintains that it is probable that our Earth
is one of the planets. The fourth, which is entitled _Mercury; or, the
Secret Messenger_, discusses how thoughts may be communicated from a
distance. The fifth and last, published in 1648, is called _Mathematical
Magic_, and is divided into two books, under the titles _Archimedes; or,
Mechanical Powers_, and _Daedalus; or, Mechanical Motions_. In this
latter book Wilkins treats of mills, clocks, and the contrivance of
motion by rarefied air; of the construction of an ark for submarine
navigation, and of its uses in war; of a sailing chariot, to be driven
on the land as ships are on the sea; of the possibility of perpetual
motion; and, in chapters vii and viii, of the art of flying. There are
four ways, according to Wilkins, whereby flying in the air may be
attempted. The first is by spirits or angels; but this branch of the
subject does not belong to natural philosophy. The next is by the help
of fowls, which the learned Francis Bacon thought deserving of further
experiment. Two ways remain of flying by our own strength; we may use
wings fastened immediately to the body, or we may devise a flying
chariot. If we are to use wings, he says, we must be brought up in the
constant practice of them from youth, first 'running on the ground, as
an ostrich or tame goose will do ... and so by degrees learn to rise
higher.... I have heard it from credible testimony, that one of our own
nation hath proceeded so far in this experiment, that he was able by the
help of wings, in such a running pace, to step constantly ten yards at a
time.' The arms of a man extended are weak, and easily wearied, so he
thinks it would be worth the inquiry whether the wings might not be
worked by the legs being thrust out and drawn in again one after the
other, so as each leg should move both wings. But the best way of flying
would be by a flying chariot, big enough to carry several persons, who
might take turns to work it. Wilkins is quite honest in recognizing the
difficulties of this scheme. He deals fully with the chief of
them--whether so large and heavy a machine can be supported by so thin
and light a body as the air; and whether the strength of the persons in
it can be sufficient for the motion of it. In his attempt to show that
these objections are not insuperable, he makes some true remarks. He had
watched soaring birds, and had seen how they could swim up and down in
the air without any sensible motion of the wings. When the right
proportions of the machine are found out, and men by long practice have
attained to skill and experience, we may perhaps, he thinks, be able to
imitate the birds. If, after all, it be found that some greater motive
power is required, we must not despair of the invention of such a power.
The main difficulty will be not so much in maintaining the machine in
flight as in raising it from the ground. 'When once it is aloft in the
air, the motion of it will be easy, as it is in the flight of all kind
of birds, which being at any great distance from the earth, are able to
continue their motion for a long time and way, with little labour and
weariness.' The right proportion of the wings, both for length and
breadth; the special contrivances necessary for ascent, descent, or a
turning motion--these and many more such questions can only be resolved,
he maintains, by particular experiments. The sails of ships have been
perfected by degrees, and the attempt to fly must meet with many
difficulties and inconveniences for which only long experience and
frequent trial can suggest a remedy.
So far Wilkins went; and he went no farther. His speculations, however,
made a deep impression on his own age, gave a bias to the researches of
his fellows, and, incidentally, aroused a storm of ridicule. When Joseph
Glanvill, in his vigorous little treatise called _Scepsis Scientifica_
(1665), wrote a forecast of the possible achievements of the Royal
Society, he borrowed his hopes from Wilkins. 'Should these heroes go
on', he says, 'as they have happily begun, they will fill the world
with wonders, and posterity will find many things that are now but
rumours, verified into practical realities. It may be, some ages hence,
a voyage to the southern unknown tracts, yea, possibly the Moon, will
not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us it
may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions,
as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance
of the Indies, by sympathetic conveyances, may be as usual to future
times, as to us in a literary correspondence. The restoration of grey
hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be
effected without a miracle; and the turning the now comparative desert
world into a paradise, may not improbably be expected from late
agriculture.' Again, when Sir William Temple, some thirty years later,
cast contempt upon the Moderns in his _Essay of Ancient and Modern
Learning_, it was the speculations of Wilkins that provoked his keenest
satire. 'I have indeed heard of wondrous Pretensions and Visions of Men,
possess'd with Notions of the strange Advancement of Learning and
Sciences, on foot in this Age, and the Progress they are like to make in
the next; as, the Universal Medicine, which will certainly cure all that
have it; the Philosopher's Stone, which will be found out by Men that
care not for Riches: the transfusion of young Blood into old Men's
Veins, which will make them as gamesome as the Lambs, from which 'tis to
be derived; an Universal Language, which may serve all Men's Turn, when
they have forgot their own: the Knowledge of one another's Thoughts,
without the grievous Trouble of Speaking: the Art of Flying, till a Man
happens to fall down and break his Neck: Double-bottom'd Ships, whereof
none can ever be cast away, besides the first that was made: the
admirable Virtues of that noble and necessary Juice called Spittle,
which will come to be sold, and very cheap, in the Apothecaries' Shops:
Discoveries of new Worlds in the Planets, and Voyages between this and
that in the Moon, to be made as frequently as between York and London:
which such poor Mortals as I am think as wild as those of Ariosto, but
without half so much Wit, or so much Instruction; for there, these
modern Sages may know where they may hope in Time to find their lost
Senses, preserved in Vials, with those of Orlando.'
Both Sir William Temple and Joseph Glanvill were men of acute
intelligence and complete sanity; the one an aged statesman deeply
versed in the deceits and follies of men; the other a young cleric,
educated in the Oxford of the Commonwealth, and stirred to enthusiasm by
what he had there heard of the progress of natural philosophy. In this
perennial debate the man of the world commonly triumphs; he plays for
the stakes that are on the table, and does not put faith in deferred
gains. For something like two hundred years Sir William Temple's triumph
was almost complete. Now things have changed, and Glanvill's rhapsody
comes nearer to the truth. Wireless telegraphy, radium, the discoveries
of bacteriology, and not least the conquest of the air, have taken the
edge off the sallies of the wit, and have verified the dreams of the
prophet.
What most delayed the science and art of flight, which made no progress
during the whole of the eighteenth century, was an imperfect
understanding of the flight of birds. The right way to achieve flight,
as events were to prove, was by the study and practice of gliding. But
birds were believed to support, as well as to raise, themselves in the
air chiefly by what in the jargon of science is called orthogonal
flight, that is, by direct downward flapping of the wings. This view
received authoritative support from a famous treatise written in the
seventeenth century by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, an Italian professor of
mathematical and natural philosophy. Borelli, who held professorships at
the Universities of Florence and Pisa, and corresponded with many
members of the Royal Society, was an older man than Wilkins, but his
book on the movements of animals (_De Motu Animalium_), which included a
section on the flight of birds (_De Volatu_), was not published till
1680, when both he and Wilkins were dead. It was long held in high
esteem for its anatomical exposition of the action of flying, and some
of its main contentions cast a damp upon the hopes of man. The bones of
a bird, says Borelli, are thin tubes of exceeding hardness, much
lighter, and at the same time stronger, than the bones of a man. The
pectoral muscles, which move the wings, are massive and strong--more
than four times stronger, in proportion to the weight they have to move,
than the legs of a man. And he states his conclusion roundly--it is
impossible that man should ever achieve artificial flight by his own
strength. This view, dogmatically stated by one who was a good
mathematician and a good anatomist, became the orthodox view, and had an
enduring influence. All imitation of the birds by man, and further, all
schemes of navigating the air in a machine dynamically supported,
seemed, by Borelli's argument, to have been thrust back into the limbo
of vanities.
There remained only the hope that some means might be found of buoying
man up in the air, thereby leaving him free to apply his muscular and
mechanical powers to the business of driving himself forward. Another
celebrated treatise of the seventeenth century pointed the way to such a
means. Francesco Lana, a member of the Society of Jesus in Rome, spent
the greater part of his life in scientific research. He planned a large
encyclopaedia, embodying all existing science, in so far as it was based
on experiment and proof. Of this work only two volumes appeared during
his lifetime; he died at Brescia in the year 1687. But long before he
died, he had produced, in 1670, a preliminary sketch of his great work;
and it is this earlier and shorter treatise which contains the two
famous chapters on the Aerial Ship. The aerial ship is to be buoyed up
in the air by being suspended from four globes, made of thin copper
sheeting, each of them about twenty-five feet in diameter. From these
globes the air is to be exhausted, so that each of them, being lighter
than air, will support the weight of two or three men. The ship being
thus floated can be propelled by oars and sails.
Any modern reader, without asking for further specifications, can
pronounce this design absurd. Lana was prevented by his vow of poverty
from spending any money on experiment, so that he had to meet only
argumentative objections, not those much more formidable obstacles, the
ordeal of the inventor, which present themselves when a machine is
theoretically perfect and will not work. The difficulties which he
foresaw are real enough. The process of exhausting the air from the
globes might, he thought, prove troublesome. The pressure of the
atmosphere on the outer surface, it might be held, would crush or break
the globes, to which he replied that that pressure would be equal on all
sides, and would therefore rather strengthen the globes than break them.
The ship, some might object, could not be propelled by oars; Lana thinks
it could, but suggests, to comfort the objectors, that oars will rarely
be necessary, for there will always be a wind. The weight of the machine
and of the persons in it will fortunately prevent it from rising to
heights where breathing becomes impossible. 'I do not foresee', says
Lana, 'any other difficulties that could prevail against this invention,
save one only, which to me seems the greatest of them all, and that is
that God would never surely allow such a machine to be successful,
since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political
governments of mankind. Where is the man who can fail to see that no
city would be proof against surprise, when the ship could at any time be
steered over its squares, or even over the courtyards of
dwelling-houses, and brought to earth for the landing of its crew?...
Iron weights could be hurled to wreck ships at sea, or they could be set
on fire by fireballs and bombs; nor ships alone, but houses, fortresses,
and cities could be thus destroyed, with the certainty that the airship
could come to no harm as the missiles could be hurled from a vast
height.'
The extravagance of Lana's design must not be allowed to rob him of the
credit of being, in some sense, the inventor of the balloon. A balloon
filled with gas, and lighter than air, was in his day inconceivable; the
composition of the atmosphere was unknown, and the chemistry of gases
was not understood. But he had followed the physical investigations of
the seventeenth century, and was well acquainted with Torricelli's
demonstration of the weight of the atmosphere. The only practical way
for him to make a vessel lighter than air was to empty it of the air
within it, and Torricelli's invention of the barometer seemed to bring
such a device within reach. The common pump begat the barometer; the
barometer begat the balloon. But the enormous pressure of the atmosphere
on a vessel encasing a vacuum, though Lana had triumphed over it in
argument, could not be so easily dealt with in practice. The success of
the balloon was delayed until, by the discovery and production of a gas
lighter than air, a frail and thin envelope could be supported against
the pressure from without by an equal pressure from within.
For ballooning what was chiefly necessary was a thorough knowledge of
gases and of the means of producing them. The older chemistry, or
alchemy, devoted all its attention, for centuries, to the precious
metals, and knew nothing of gas. Medical chemistry, which succeeded it,
was concerned chiefly with the curative properties of various chemical
preparations. When Robert Boyle, and the investigators who came after
him, put aside this age-long preoccupation with wealth and healing, and
set themselves to determine, by observation and experiment, the nature
of common substances, and the possibility of resolving them into simpler
elements, modern chemistry began. Four states of matter, namely, earth,
air, fire, and water, were recognized by the older chemists, and were by
them called elements; it was the work of the eighteenth century to
investigate these, and especially to separate the constituents of air
and of water. In 1774 Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen. In 1782 Henry
Cavendish showed that hydrogen, when burnt, produces water. At a much
earlier date hydrogen had been produced by the action of acid on metals,
and had been found to be many times lighter than air. Dr. Joseph Black,
professor of chemistry in the University of Edinburgh, was the first to
suggest, in 1767, that a balloon inflated with hydrogen would rise in
the air; and the experiment was successfully tried with soap-bubbles by
Tiberius Cavallo, in the year 1782.
Nevertheless, the famous first balloon, which ascended in 1783, was not
filled with hydrogen, and was invented by what may be called a happy
accident. The brothers Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier were the sons of a
wealthy paper-maker at Annonay, not very far from Lyons. The suggestion
of their balloon came to them from observing that thick opaque clouds
float high in the air. Linen material was readily accessible to them at
the factory, and they resolved to try whether a large balloon, some
thirty-three feet in diameter, filled with smoke vapours, would rise in
the air. Their experiment was successful. On the 5th of June 1783 they
filled their balloon with smoke (and therefore with hot air) over a fire
of chips and shavings; it rose easily, and travelled to a distance of
about a mile and a half before it cooled and sank. The fame of this
experiment quickly reached Paris, the centre of science and fashion, and
awakened rivalry. Under the direction of Professor Charles, a well-known
physicist, two brothers whose surname was Robert made from varnished
silk a balloon of about thirteen feet in diameter; it was filled with
hydrogen, and on the 27th of August 1783, in the presence of a large and
excited assembly, it rose from the Champ de Mars and travelled some
fifteen miles into the country, where it fell, and produced a panic
among the peasantry. On the 19th of September Joseph Montgolfier was
brought to Versailles to give a demonstration of his new invention in
the presence of the King and Queen. On this occasion his balloon rose
1,500 feet into the air, carrying with it a sheep, a cock, and a duck,
the first living passengers, whom it deposited unhurt when it came to
ground again after a short flight. Thereafter society went balloon-mad.
Pilatre de Rozier, a young native of Metz, determined to attempt an
aerial voyage. During the month of October he experimented with a
captive balloon of the Montgolfier type, from which he suspended a
brazier, so that by a continued supply of heated air the balloon should
maintain its buoyancy. On the 21st of November 1783, accompanied by the
Marquis d'Arlandes, he rose in a free balloon from the Bois de Boulogne,
and made a successful voyage of twenty minutes, during which time he
travelled over Paris for a distance of about five miles. Ten days later,
on behalf of the savants, M. Charles retorted with a voyage of
twenty-seven miles, in a hydrogen balloon, from Paris to Nesle; he was
accompanied by one of the brothers Robert, and when Robert left the car
at Nesle the balloon, lightened of a part of its burden, rose rapidly
with M. Charles to a height of two miles in the air. Most of the
fittings of the modern hydrogen balloon, the hoop and netting, for
instance, from which the car is suspended, and the valve at the top of
the balloon for the release of the gas, were devised by Charles. The
unfortunate Pilatre de Rozier met his death on the 15th of June 1785, in
an attempt to cross from Boulogne to England. In order to avoid a
constant wastage of hydrogen in controlling the height of the balloon,
he devised a double balloon; the larger one, above, was filled with
hydrogen, the smaller one, below, was worked with hot air from a
brazier, on the Montgolfier principle. At a height of some three
thousand feet, while it was still over French territory, the double
balloon caught fire and fell flaming to the earth.
The earliest balloon ascents in England followed close upon the French
experiments. On the 25th of November 1783 Count Francesco Zambeccari
sent up an oil-silk hydrogen balloon, ten feet in diameter, from the
Artillery Ground in Moorfields; it travelled forty-eight miles, and fell
at Petworth in Sussex. On the 22nd of February 1784 a balloon of five
feet in diameter, liberated at Sandwich in Kent, travelled seventy-five
miles, and after crossing the Channel, fell at Warneton in Flanders. To
inflate a bag with gas and let it take its chance in the air is no great
achievement, but these were flights of good promise. The first person in
Great Britain to navigate the air was James Tytler, a Scot, who on the
27th of August 1784 ascended in a fire-balloon, that is, a balloon
filled with hot air, from Comely Gardens, Edinburgh, and travelled about
half a mile. Tytler had been employed by the booksellers to edit the
second edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, of which he wrote the
greater part, at a salary of seventeen shillings a week; he passed his
life in poverty, and his balloon adventure attracted little attention.
The public mania for ballooning as a spectacle began with the ascents of
Vincenzo Lunardi, secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador in England.
Lunardi's first ascent, which was well advertised, was made from the
Artillery Ground in Moorfields on the 15th of September 1784, in the
presence of nearly two hundred thousand spectators. His hydrogen
balloon, of about thirty-two feet in diameter, sailed high over London,
and descended near Ware in Hertfordshire. His record of his sensations,
written in imperfect English, and published in 1784 under the title of
_An Account of the First Aerial Voyage in England_, deserves quotation:
'At five minutes after two, the last gun was fired, the cords divided,
and the Balloon rose, the company returning my signals of adieu with the
most unfeigned acclamations and applauses. The effect was that of a
miracle on the multitudes which surrounded the place; and they passed
from incredulity and menace into the most extravagant expressions of
approbation and joy.
'At the height of twenty yards, the Balloon was a little depressed by
the wind, which had a fine effect; it held me over the ground for a few
seconds, and seemed to pause majestically before its departure.
'On discharging a part of the ballast, it ascended to the height of two
hundred yards. As a multitude lay before me of a hundred and fifty
thousand people, who had not seen my ascent from the ground, I had
recourse to every stratagem to let them know I was in the gallery, and
they literally rent the air with their acclamations and applause. In
these stratagems I devoted my flag, and worked with my oars, one of
which was immediately broken and fell from me. A pigeon too escaped,
which, with a dog, and cat, were the only companions of my excursion.
'When the thermometer had fallen from 68 deg. to 61 deg. I perceived a great
difference in the temperature of the air. I became very cold, and found
it necessary to take a few glasses of wine. I likewise eat the leg of a
chicken, but my bread and other provisions had been rendered useless by
being mixed with the sand which I carried as ballast.
'When the thermometer was at fifty, the effect of the atmosphere, and
the combination of circumstances around, produced a calm delight, which
is inexpressible, and which no situation on earth could give. The
stillness, extent, and magnificence of the scene rendered it highly
awful. My horizon seemed a perfect circle; the terminating line several
hundred miles in circumference. This I conjectured from the view of
London; the extreme points of which, formed an angle of only a few
degrees. It was so reduced on the great scale before me, that I can find
no simile to convey an idea of it. I could distinguish Saint Paul's and
other churches, from the houses. I saw the streets as lines, all
animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I
should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. It was an enormous
beehive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass
seemed to have no object but myself, and the transition from the
suspicion, and perhaps contempt, of the preceding hour, to the
affectionate transport, admiration and glory of the present moment, was
not without its effect on my mind. I recollected the puns[3] on my name,
and was glad to find myself calm. I had soared from the apprehensions
and anxieties of the Artillery Ground, and felt as if I had left behind
me all the cares and passions that molest mankind.
[Footnote 3: In some of the papers, witticisms appeared on the
affinity of Lunatic and Lunardi.]
'Indeed, the whole scene before me filled the mind with a sublime
pleasure, of which I never had a conception. The critics imagine, for
they seldom speak from experience, that terror is an ingredient in every
sublime sensation. It was not possible for me to be on earth in a
situation so free from apprehension. I had not the slightest sense of
motion from the Machine, I knew not whether it went swiftly or slowly,
whether it ascended or descended, whether it was agitated or tranquil,
but by the appearance or disappearance of objects on the earth. I moved
to different parts of the gallery, I adjusted the furniture, and
apparatus, I uncorked my bottle, eat, drank, and wrote, just as in my
study. The height had not the effect, which a much lesser degree of it
has near the earth, that of producing giddiness. The broomsticks of the
witches, Ariosto's flying-horse, and even Milton's sunbeam, conveying
the angel to the earth, have all an idea of effort, difficulty, and
restraint, which do not affect a voyage in the Balloon.
'Thus tranquil, and thus situated, how shall I describe to you a view,
such as the ancients supposed Jupiter to have of the earth, and to copy
which there are no terms in any language. The gradual diminution of
objects, and the masses of light and shade are intelligible in oblique
and common prospects. But here every thing wore a new appearance, and
had a new effect. The face of the country had a mild and permanent
verdure, to which Italy is a stranger. The variety of cultivation, and
the accuracy with which property is divided, give the idea ever present
to a stranger in England, of good civil laws and an equitable
administration; the rivers meandering; the sea glist'ning with the rays
of the sun; the immense district beneath me spotted with cities, towns,
villages, houses, pouring out their inhabitants to hail my appearance:
you will allow me some merit at not having been exceedingly intoxicated
with my situation.
'The interest which the spectators took in my voyage was so great, that
the things I threw down were divided and preserved as our people would
relicks of the most celebrated saints. And a gentlewoman, mistaking the
oar for my person, was so affected with my supposed destruction, that
she died in a few days.'
* * * * *
For many months after this the Flying Man was the chief topic of
conversation in the town. Even in the previous year reports of the
French ascents had produced a fever of excitement in London. 'Balloons',
said Horace Walpole, writing in December 1783, 'occupy senators,
philosophers, ladies, everybody.' All other interests yielded
precedence. Miss Burney's _Cecilia_ was the novel of the season, but it
had to give way. 'Next to the balloon,' said Mrs. Barbauld, in a letter
written in January 1784, 'Miss Burney is the object of public
curiosity.' A few weeks earlier, Dr. Johnson passed the day with three
friends, and boasted to Mrs. Thrale that no mention had been made by any
of them of the air balloon, 'which has taken full possession, with a
very good claim, of every philosophical mind and mouth'. Some days after
Lunardi's first ascent Johnson wrote to a friend, 'I had this day in
three letters three histories of the flying man in the great Ballon. I
am glad that we do as well as our neighbours.' Three letters were
enough, and on the same day Johnson wrote to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Do
not write about the balloon, whatever else you may think proper to say'.
On the 29th of September 1784 Lunardi's balloon caught fire by accident,
and was burnt on the ground. Johnson's quiet and sensible comment is
conveyed in a letter to his friend Dr. Brocklesby, on the 6th of
October: 'The fate of the balloon I do not much lament: to make new
balloons is to repeat the jest again. We now know a method of mounting
into the air, and, I think, are not likely to know more. The vehicles
can serve no use till we can guide them; and they can gratify no
curiosity till we mount with them to greater heights than we can reach
without; till we rise above the tops of the highest mountains, which we
have yet not done. We know the state of the air in all its regions, to
the top of Teneriffe, and therefore, learn nothing from those who
navigate a balloon below the clouds. The first experiment, however, was
bold, and deserved applause and reward.'
Johnson died in December of that same year; the balloon had made its
appearance just in time for his comments. Another critic, Horace
Walpole, was in two minds about balloons. Sometimes they seemed to him
'philosophic playthings'. He was growing old, and did not care to spend
his time in 'divining with what airy vehicles the atmosphere will be
peopled hereafter, or how much more expeditiously the east, west, or
south will be ravaged and butchered, than they have been by the old
clumsy method of navigation'. Yet in spite of his elegant indifference,
he could not help being interested; and some of his divinations come
very near to the truth. He pictures Salisbury Plain, Newmarket Heath,
and all downs, arising into dockyards for aerial vessels; and he
professes himself willing to go to Paris by air, 'if there is no air
sickness'. The best defence of the new invention was spoken by Benjamin
Franklin, who when he was asked in Paris, 'What is the use of balloons?'
replied by another question--'What is the use of a newborn infant?'
The infancy of the balloon lasted long; indeed, if lack of self-control
be the mark of infancy, the balloon was an infant during the whole of
the nineteenth century. In the early days, new achievements, in distance
or height, kept public expectation alive. Jean Pierre Blanchard, a
French aeronaut, and rival of Lunardi, succeeded, on the 7th of January
1785, in crossing the English Channel from Dover. Thereafter ascents
became so numerous that it is impossible to keep count of them.
Glaisher, writing about 1870, says that the most remarkable ascent of
the century was that fitted out by Robert Hollond, Esq., M.P. The
balloonist was Charles Green, and they were accompanied by Mr. Monck
Mason, who published an account of the voyage. In Mr. Green's balloon,
afterwards called the _Great Nassau_, they left Vauxhall Gardens on the
afternoon of Monday, the 7th of November 1836, with provisions to last a
fortnight. They were soon lost in the clouds, and after crossing the
sea, had no very clear idea of what country they were over. After
eighteen hours' journey, fearing that they had reached Poland or Russia,
they came to earth, and found that they had travelled five hundred
miles, to the neighbourhood of the town of Weilburg, in the duchy of
Nassau. Charles Green was the most experienced aeronaut of his time; he
was the first to use coal-gas in place of hydrogen, and he was the
inventor of the guide-rope, which is dropped from a balloon to allow her
to be secured by a landing party, or is trailed on the ground to reduce
her speed and to assist in maintaining a steady height.
The dangers of the balloon were diminished by the labours of scientific
men, but its disabilities remained. No one who travelled in a balloon
could choose his destination. The view of the earth, and of the clouds,
obtainable from a height, was beautiful and unfamiliar, but in the
absence of any specific utility the thing became a popular toy. In
public gardens a balloon could be counted on to attract a crowd, and the
showman soon gave it its place, as a miracle of nature, by the side of
the giant and the dwarf, the living skeleton, and the fat woman. A horse
is not seen to advantage in the car of a balloon, but it is a marvel
that a horse should be seen there at all, and equestrian ascents became
one of the attractions of the Cremorne Gardens in 1821.
It was not until 1859 that an organized attempt was made to reclaim the
balloon for the purposes of science. In that year a committee, appointed
by the British Association to make observations on the higher strata of
the atmosphere, met at Wolverhampton. Volunteers were lacking until, in
1862, James Glaisher, one of the members of the committee, declared his
willingness to prepare the apparatus and to make the observations from a
balloon. Glaisher had spent many years on meteorological observation, in
Ireland, at Cambridge University, and at the Royal Observatory,
Greenwich. He proposed to investigate the effect of different elevations
on the temperature of the dew-point; on the composition and electrical
condition of the atmosphere, and on the rate and direction of the wind
currents in it; on the earth's magnetism, and the solar spectrum; on
sound, and on solar radiation. From 1862 to 1866 he made twenty-eight
ascents, with Henry Coxwell as his balloonist. The most famous of these
was from Wolverhampton on the 5th of September 1862, when Glaisher
claimed to have reached a height of fully seven miles. After recording a
height of 29,000 feet Glaisher swooned; Coxwell lost the use of his
limbs, but succeeded in pulling the cord of the valve with his teeth.
When Glaisher swooned the balloon was ascending rapidly; when he came
to, thirteen minutes later, it was descending rapidly, and the height
that he claimed was an inference, supported by the reading of a minimum
thermometer. Critics have pointed out that his calculations made no
allowance for the slackening of the upward pace of the balloon as it
neared its limit, nor for the time it would take, with the valve feebly
pulled, to change its direction and acquire speed in its descent. They
are inclined to allow him a height of about six miles, which is a
sufficiently remarkable achievement.
All these ascents, though they proved that the balloon had a certain
utility for the exploration of the upper reaches of the atmosphere, did
little or nothing for aerial navigation. The great vogue of the balloon
distracted attention from the real problem of flight. That problem was
not abandoned; a number of men, working independently, without any sort
of public recognition, made steady advance during the whole course of
the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, three years before
flight was achieved, those who were most deeply concerned in the attempt
knew that success was near. The great difficulty of scientific research
lies in choosing the right questions to ask of nature. Every lawyer
knows that it is easy to put a question so full of false assumptions
that no true answer to it is possible; and many a laborious man of
science has spent his life in framing such questions, and in looking for
an answer to them. The contribution of the nineteenth century to the
science of flight was that it got hold of the right questions, and
formulated them more or less exactly, so that the answers, when once
they were supplied by continued observation and experiment, were things
of value.
The earliest of these pioneers was Sir George Cayley, a country
gentleman with estates in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, who devoted his
life to scientific pursuits. He was born in 1773, and the balloons which
excited the world during his boyhood directed his mind to the subject of
aerial navigation. He invented many mechanical contrivances, and he laid
great and just stress on the importance of motive power for successful
flight. In 1809 he published, in _Nicholson's Journal_, a paper on
Aerial Navigation, which has since become a classic, for although it
stops short of a complete exposition, it is true so far as it goes, and
contains no nonsense and no fantasy. He endeavoured, in the first year
of Queen Victoria's reign, to establish an aeronautical society, but the
ill repute of the balloon and the bad company it kept deprived him of
influential support. He did his duty by his county, as a Whig magnate,
and amused his leisure with science, till his death in 1857.
Cayley's work is difficult to assess. He had all the right ideas, though
the means of putting them into practice did not lie ready to his hand.
If he had been a poor man, he might have gone farther. He designed, so
to say, both an airship and an aeroplane; there was no one to execute
his designs, and the scheme fell through. He more than once anticipated
later inventions, but he put nothing on the market. His mind was fertile
in mechanical devices, so that if one proved troublesome, he could
always turn his attention to another. He is content to enunciate a
truth, and to call it probable. 'Probably', he says, in discussing
engines of small weight and high power, 'a much cheaper engine of this
sort might be produced by a gas-light apparatus and by firing the
inflammable air generated with a due portion of common air under a
piston.' This is an exact forecast of the engine used to-day in all
flying machines. He has some good remarks on the shape that offers least
resistance to the air in passing through it, that is, on the doctrine of
the streamline. He knew that the shape of the hinder part of a solid
body which travels through the air is of as much importance as the shape
of the fore-part in diminishing resistance. He does not seem to have
known that it is of more importance. He knew that the resistance of the
air acting on concave wings, or planes, at a small angle of incidence
was resolved chiefly into lift, and he suspected that the amount of the
lift was greater than the mathematical theory of his day allowed. Above
all, his treatise is stimulating, and suggests further inquiry and
experiment along lines which have since proved to be the right lines.
Cayley's ideas were developed in practice by John Stringfellow, a
manufacturer of lace machinery at Chard, in Somersetshire, and by his
friend W. S. Henson, a young engineer. They constructed a light
steam-engine, and designed an aeroplane, of which they entertained such
high hopes that they took out a patent, and applied to Parliament for an
Act to incorporate an Aerial Steam Transit Company. The reaction of
public opinion on their proposals took the form of drag rather than
lift, and they were thrown back on their own resources. In 1847 they
made a model aeroplane, twenty feet in span, driven by two four-bladed
airscrews, three feet in diameter, and they experimented with it on Bala
Down, near Chard. It did not fly. Henson, completely discouraged,
married and went to America; Stringfellow persisted, and in 1848 made a
smaller model, ten feet in span, with airscrews sixteen inches in
diameter. This machine, which had wings slightly cambered, with a rigid
leading edge and a flexible trailing edge, made several successful
flights, first in a long covered room at Chard, and later, before a
number of witnesses, at Cremorne Gardens. After this success
Stringfellow did no more for many years, until the foundation of the
Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1866 roused him again to
activity. At the society's exhibition of 1868, held in the Crystal
Palace, he produced a model triplane, which ran along suspended from a
wire, and, when its engine was in action, lifted itself as it ran.
The foundation of the Aeronautical Society, with the Duke of Argyll as
president and with a council of men of science, attracted fresh minds to
the study of flight, and gave the subject a respectable standing. Mr.
Wenham's paper, read to the society on the 27th of June 1866, proved
that the effective sustaining area of a wing is limited to a narrow
portion behind the leading edge; that, in order to increase this area,
the planes of a flying machine might advantageously be placed one above
another--an idea which was borrowed and put into practice by Mr.
Stringfellow in his triplane--and that a heavy body, supported on
planes, requires less power to drive it through the air at a high speed
than to maintain it in flight at a low speed. For some years the society
flourished; then its energies declined, and it fell into a state of
suspended animation. At its second exhibition, in 1885, there were only
sixteen exhibits as against seventy-eight at the exhibition of 1868. The
prospects of practical success seemed remoter than ever. At last, thirty
years after its foundation, it sprang into renewed activity, and, with
Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell as secretary, did an immense work, from 1897
onwards, in directing and furthering the study of aviation. The
_Aeronautical Journal_, which was published quarterly by the revived
society, is a record of the years of progress and triumph.
The cause of this sudden revival is to be sought in the extraordinary
fermentation which had been going on under the surface, both in Europe
and America. The public was careless and sceptical; inventors who were
seeking practical success were shy of premature publicity; papers read
to learned societies were more concerned with theory than with practice;
but there was hope in the air, and hundreds of minds were independently
at work on the problem of flight. Some idea of the variety of
suggestions and devices may be gathered from Mr. Octave Chanute's
_Progress in Flying Machines_, a reprint of a series of articles by him,
which appeared, from 1891 onwards, in _The Railroad and Engineering
Journal_ of New York City. It was said in the ancient world that there
is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has believed it; there is no
imaginable way of flight that has not engaged the time and effort of
some inventor. Yet among the multitude of attempts it is not difficult
to trace the ancestry of the modern flying machine. Wing-flapping
machines left no issue. Machines supported in the air by helicopters,
that is, by horizontal revolving blades, can be made to rise from the
ground, but cannot easily be made to travel. The way to success was by
imitation of soaring birds; and it is worthy of note that some of the
best minds were, from the first, fascinated by this method of flight,
and were never tired of observing it. Cayley remarks that the swift,
though it is a powerful flyer, is not able to elevate itself from level
ground. Wenham records how an eagle, sitting in solitary state in the
midst of the Egyptian plain, was fired at with a shotgun, and had to run
full twenty yards, digging its talons into the soil, before it could
raise itself into the air. M. Mouillard, of Cairo, spent more than
thirty years in watching the flight of soaring birds, and devoted the
whole of his book, _L'Empire de l'Air_ (1881), to the investigation of
soaring flight. The pelican, the turkey-buzzard, the vulture, the
condor, have all had their students and disciples. M. Mouillard, indeed,
maintains that if there be a moderate wind, a bird can remain a whole
day soaring in the air, with no expenditure of power whatever. To those
who have watched seagulls this may perhaps seem credible; but air is
invisible, and soaring birds are skilful to choose a place, in the wake
of a ship or in the neighbourhood of a cliff, where there is an
up-current of air, so that when they glide by their own weight, though
they are losing height in relation to the air, they are losing none in
relation to the surface of the earth.
The parents of the modern flying machine were the gliders, that is, the
men who launched themselves into the air on wings or planes of their own
devising. The scientific investigators, who experimented with machines
embodying the same principle, did much to assist the gliders, but in
justice they must take a second place. The men who staked their lives
were the men who, after many losses, were rewarded with the conquest of
the air. There are stories of a certain Captain Lebris, how in 1854,
near Douarnenez in Brittany, he constructed an artificial albatross, and
tying it by a slip rope to a cart which was driven against the wind,
mounted in it to a height of three hundred feet. But the first glider of
whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted
his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people
looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal
professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that
Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no
money on such things--a piece of advice which, Lilienthal remarks, was
unhappily quite superfluous. In 1889 he completed, with the help of his
brother, a series of experiments on the carrying capacity of arched, or
cambered, wings, and published the results in a book entitled _Bird
Flight as the Basis of Aviation_. In his youth every crow that flew by
presented him with a problem to solve in its slowly moving wings.
Prolonged study led him to the conclusion that the slight fore-and-aft
curvature of the wing was the secret of flying. But he knew too much to
suppose that this conclusion solved the problem. A dozen other
difficulties, including the difficulty of balance, remained to be
mastered. When German societies for the advancement of aerial navigation
began to be formed, he at first held aloof from them, for the balloon,
which he regarded as the chief obstacle to the development of flight,
monopolized their entire attention. His insistence on the cambered wing
did not convince others, who went on experimenting with flat planes.
German and Austrian aviators, it is true, were induced by his book to
put aside flat surfaces and introduce arched wings. 'However,' he
remarks, 'as this was done mainly on paper, in projects, and in
aeronautical papers and discussions, I felt impelled myself to carry out
my theory in practice.' So, in the summer of 1891, on a pair of
bird-like wings, with eighty-six square feet of supporting surface,
stabilized by a horizontal tail and a vertical fin aft, he began his
gliding experiments. His whole apparatus, made of peeled willow sticks,
covered with cotton shirting, weighed less than forty pounds. He was
supported in it wholly on his forearms, which passed through padded
tubes, while his hands grasped a cross-bar. He guided the machine and
preserved its balance by shifting his weight, backwards or forwards or
sideways. In this apparatus, altered and improved from time to time,
Lilienthal, during the next five years, made more than two thousand
successful glides. At first he used to jump off a spring-board; then he
practised on some hills in the suburbs of Berlin; then, in the spring of
1894, he built a conical hill at Gross-Lichterfelde to serve him as a
starting-ground. Later on, he moved to the Rhinow hills. His best glides
were made against a light breeze at a gradient of about 1 in 10; and he
could easily travel a hundred yards through the air. 'Regulating the
centre of gravity', he says, 'becomes a second nature, like balancing on
a bicycle; it is entirely a matter of practice and experience.' His most
alarming experiences were from gusts of wind which would suddenly raise
him many metres in the air and suspend him in a stationary position. But
his skill was so great that he always succeeded in resuming his flight
and alighting safely. He continued to improve and develop his machine.
He made a double-surface glider, on the biplane principle, and flew on
it. He experimented with engines, intended to flap the extremities of
the wings--first a steam-engine of two horse-power, weighing forty-four
pounds, then a simpler and lighter type, worked by compressed carbonic
acid gas. But he explains that these can be safely introduced only if
they do not impair the gliding efficiency of the machine, and he does
not seem to have made much progress with them. His last improvement was
a movable horizontal tail, or elevator, worked by a line attached to his
head, to control the fore-and-aft balance of the machine. This fresh
complexity was perhaps the cause of his death. On the 9th of August 1896
he started on a long glide from a hill about a hundred feet high; a
sudden gust of wind caught him, and it is supposed that the involuntary
movements of his head in the effort to regain his balance made matters
worse; the machine plunged to the ground, and he was fatally injured.
Lilienthal was a good mathematician, a careful recorder of the results
of his experiments, and a disinterested student of nature. Complete
success was denied to him, but his work informed and stimulated others.
The Wright brothers, when they first took up the problem of flight, had
the advantage of acquaintance with Professor S. P. Langley's
aeronautical researches, but their gliding experiments were shaped and
inspired by what they had read of Lilienthal's achievements.
The other pioneer, who has earned a place beside Lilienthal, is Percy
Pilcher. In 1893, at the age of twenty-seven, he became assistant
lecturer in naval architecture and marine engineering at Glasgow
University. He devoted all his spare time to aeronautics, and in 1895
built his first glider, which he named 'The Bat'. The machine was built,
with the help of his sister, in the sitting-room of their lodging in
Kersland street, Glasgow, and was tested on the banks of the Clyde, near
Cardross. Some defects were revealed by the tests; when these were
remedied, and the glider was towed by a rope, Pilcher rose to a height
of twenty feet, and remained in the air for nearly one minute.
Thereafter he built, in rapid succession, three new gliders, all of
different design, which he called 'The Beetle', 'The Gull', and 'The
Hawk'. The professor of naval architecture at Glasgow, Sir John Biles,
says of him, 'He was one of the few men I have met who had no sense of
fear.... I was deterred from helping him as much as I ought to have done
by a fear of the risks that he ran. He at one time talked to Lord Kelvin
about helping him: Lord Kelvin spoke to me about it, and said that on no
account would he help him, nor should I, as he would certainly break his
neck. This was unfortunately too true a prophecy.' The Hawk was the best
of his gliders; at Eynsford in Kent, on the 19th of June 1897, he made a
perfectly balanced glide of 250 yards across a deep valley, towed only
by a thin fishing line, 'which one could break with one's hands'. After
this, Pilcher began to make plans for fitting an engine to his glider.
Since the first appearance of the Otto engine in 1876, and of the
Daimler engine eight years later, the oil-engine had steadily developed
in lightness and power, but no engine exactly suitable for his purpose
was on the market, so he resolved to build one. An engine of four
horse-power, weighing forty pounds, with a wooden airscrew five feet in
diameter, was, by his calculations, amply sufficient to maintain his
glider in horizontal flight. The light engine has now been so enormously
improved, that it comes near to developing one horse-power for every
pound of weight. The violent have taken the kingdom of the air by force:
in Pilcher's day the problem was more delicate. He worked at his engine
in his leisure time, and, leaving the firm of Maxim & Nordenfeldt, by
whom he had been employed from 1896 onwards, made, in 1898, his own
firm of Wilson & Pilcher. In the spring of 1899 he was much impressed
by Mr. Laurence Hargrave's soaring kites, exhibited by the inventor at a
meeting of the Aeronautical Society, and it seems that he embodied some
of Mr. Hargrave's ideas in his latest built machine, a triplane. He
intended to fly this machine at Stanford Hall, Market Harborough, where
he was staying with Lord Braye, but on the day appointed, the 30th of
September 1899, the weather proved too wet. Nevertheless Pilcher
consented to give some demonstrations on The Hawk, towed by a light
line; during the second of these, while he was soaring at a height of
thirty feet, one of the guy-wires of the tail broke, and the machine
turned over and crashed. Pilcher never recovered consciousness, and died
two days later. His name will always be remembered in the history of
flight. If he had survived his risks for a year or two more, it seems
not unlikely that he would have been the first man to navigate the air
on a power-driven machine. He left behind him his gallant example, and
some advances in design, for he improved the balance of the machine by
raising its centre of gravity, and he provided it with wheels, fitted on
shock-absorbers, for taking off and alighting.
Lilienthal and Pilcher are pre-eminent among the early gliders, for
their efforts were scientific, continuous, and progressive. But there
were others; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the
comparative value of experiments carried on, many of them in private, by
inventors of all countries. Professor J. J. Montgomery, of California,
carried out some successful glides, on machines of his own devising, as
early as 1884; and Mr. Octave Chanute, the best historian of all these
early efforts, having secured the services of Mr. A. M. Herring, a much
younger man who had already learned to use a Lilienthal machine, made a
series of experiments, with gliders of old and new types, on the shores
of Lake Michigan, during the summer of 1896. About the same time some
power-driven machines, attached to prepared tracks, were successfully
flown. In 1893 Horatio Phillips flew a model, with many planes arranged
one above another like a Venetian blind, on a circular track at Harrow;
and in the same year Sir Hiram Maxim's large machine, with four thousand
feet of supporting surface, was built at Baldwin's Park in Kent, and,
when it was tested, developed so great a lift that it broke the guide
rails placed to restrain it. Clement Ader, a French electrical engineer,
worked at the problem of flight for many years, and, having obtained the
support of the French Government, constructed a large bat-like machine,
driven by a steam-engine of forty horse-power. In 1897 this machine was
secretly tried, at the military camp of Satory, near Paris, and was
reported on by a Government commission; all that was known thereafter
was that the Government had refused to advance further funds, and that
Ader had abandoned his attempts. When the Wrights had made their
successful flights, a legend of earlier flights by Ader grew up in
France; a heated controversy ensued, and the friends of M. Santos
Dumont, who claimed that he was the first to fly over French soil, at
length induced the French Government to publish the report on the trial
of Ader's machine. The report proved that the machine had not left the
ground.
It is not in mortals to command success; but those who study the record
of the ingenious, persevering, and helpful work done for a quarter of a
century by Mr. Laurence Hargrave, of Sydney, New South Wales, will agree
with Mr. Chanute that this man deserved success. His earliest important
paper was read to the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1884. In the
course of the next ten years he made with his own hands eighteen
different flying machines, of increasing size, all of which flew. His
earlier machines were not much larger than toys, and were supplied with
power by the pull of stretched india-rubber. On this scale he was
successful with a machine driven by an airscrew and with a machine
driven by the flapping of wings. As his machines grew in size he turned
his attention to engines. He was successful with compressed air; he made
many experiments with explosion motors; and he succeeded in producing a
steam-engine which weighed seven pounds and developed almost two-thirds
of one horse-power. In 1893 he invented the box-kite, which is a true
biplane, with the vertical sides of the kite doing the work of a
stabilizing fin. This kite had a marked influence on the design of some
early flying machines. He also invented the soaring kite. His hope that
man would fly was more than hope; he refused to argue the question with
objectors, for 'I know', he said, 'that success is dead sure to come'.
Moreover he put all his researches at the disposal of others. He refused
to take out any patents. He did all he could to induce workers to follow
his example and communicate their ideas freely, so that progress might
be quickened. His own ideas, his own inventions, and his own carefully
recorded experiments were a solid step in that staircase of knowledge
from which at last man launched himself into the air, and flew.
In America the pioneer who did most to further the science of human
flight was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, of the Smithsonian
Institute, in Washington. He was well known as an astronomer before ever
he took up with aeronautics. From 1866 to 1887 he was professor of
astronomy at the Western University of Pennsylvania, at Pittsburg.
During his later years there he built a laboratory for aerial
investigations, and carried out his famous experiments. His whirling
table, with an arm about thirty feet long, which could be moved at all
speeds up to seventy miles an hour, was devised to measure the lifting
power of air resistance on brass plates suspended to the arm. In 1891 he
published his _Experiments in Aerodynamics_, which embodied the definite
mathematical results obtained by years of careful research. It would be
difficult to exaggerate the importance of this work. The law which
governs the reaction of the air on planes travelling at various speeds
and various angles of incidence had been guessed at, or seen in
glimpses, by earlier investigators; but here were ascertained numerical
values offered to students and inventors. The main result is best stated
in Professor Langley's own words: 'When the arm was put in motion I
found that the faster it went the less weight the plates registered on
the scales, until at great speed they almost floated in the air.... I
found that only one-twentieth of the force before supposed to be
required to support bodies under such conditions was needed, and what
before had seemed impossible began to look possible.... Some
mathematicians, reasoning from false data, had concluded that if it took
a certain amount of power to keep a thing from falling, it would take
much additional power to make it advance. My experiment showed just the
reverse ... that the faster the speed the less the force required to
sustain the planes, and that it would cost less to transport such planes
through the air at a high rate of speed than at a low one. I found
further that one horse-power could carry brass plates weighing two
hundred pounds at the rate of more than forty miles an hour in
horizontal flight.'
When these researches were known and understood, their effect upon the
practical handling of the problem of flight was immediate and decisive.
The aeroplane, or gliding machine, had many rivals; they were all killed
by Professor Langley's researches, which showed that the cheapest and
best way to raise a plane in the air is to drive it forward at a small
upward inclination; and that its weight can be best countered not by
applying power to raise it vertically, but by driving it fast. In the
statistical tables that he prepared he called the upward pressure of the
air _Lift_; the pressure which retards horizontal motion he called
_Drift_. The words make a happy pair, but the word _Drift_ is badly
needed to describe the leeway of an aeroplane in a cross-wind, so that
in England another pair of words, _Lift_ and _Drag_, has been
authoritatively substituted.
From this time onward Langley devoted himself to those other problems,
especially the problems of balance, of mechanical power, and of safety
in taking off and alighting, which had to be solved if he was to make a
machine that should fly. He was much influenced, he says, by a
mechanical toy, produced as early as 1871 by an ingenious Frenchman
called Penaud, and named by its inventor the 'planophore'. This toy,
which weighed only a little over half an ounce, was supported on wings,
and was driven forward by an airscrew made of two feathers. The motive
power was supplied by twisted strands of rubber which, as they
untwisted, turned the airscrew. The wings were set at a dihedral angle,
that is, they were bent upwards at the tips; and fore-and-aft stability
was secured by a smaller pair of wings just in front of the airscrew.
'Simple as this toy looked,' says Professor Langley, 'it was the father
of a future flying machine, and France ought to have the credit of it.'
His own steam-driven flying machine was produced and successfully flown
in 1896. It had two wings and a tail, with a supporting surface in all
of seventy square feet; its total weight was seventy-two pounds; the
engine, constructed by himself, weighed only seven pounds and developed
one horse-power, which served to drive two airscrews, revolving in
opposite directions. The best flight of this machine was more than
three-quarters of a mile, and was made over the Potomac river. When, on
its first flight, it had flown for a minute, 'I felt', says Professor
Langley, 'that something had been accomplished at last, for never in any
part of the world or in any period had any machine of man's construction
sustained itself in the air before for even half of this brief time'.
His flying machines were called by Langley 'aerodromes', and the word
'aeroplane' was used by him, as it is used in the _New English
Dictionary_ of 1888, only in the sense of a single plane surface used
for aerial experiments. But no usage, however authoritative, can
withstand the tide of popular fashion; the machine is now an aeroplane,
while aerodrome is the name given to the flying-ground from which it
starts.
The success of his machine became widely known, and in 1898 the War
Department of the United States, having ascertained that Langley was
willing to devote all his spare time to the work, allotted fifty
thousand dollars for the development, construction, and test of a large
'aerodrome', big enough to carry a man. The construction was long
delayed by the difficulty of finding a suitable engine. This difficulty
hampered all early attempts at flight. The internal-combustion engine
was by this time pretty well understood, and, with the will to do it,
might have been made light enough for the purpose. But it was almost an
axiom with engineering firms that a very light engine could not wear
well and was untrustworthy in other ways. One horse-power to the
hundredweight was what they regarded as the standard of solid merit.
Further, they were prejudiced against that extremely rapid movement of
the parts which is necessary if the crank-shaft is to revolve more than
a thousand times a minute. They were asked to depart from all their
cherished canons and to risk failure and break-down in order that man
should achieve what many of them regarded as an impossibility. It was
with Langley as it was with Pilcher and the Wrights; he had to make his
own engine. By 1901 he had completed with the aid of his assistants an
engine of fifty-two horse-power, weighing, with all its appurtenances,
less than five pounds to the horse-power. A year and a half more was
spent in adapting and co-ordinating the frame and appliances, and in
carrying out the shop tests. At last, on the 7th of October 1903, from a
house-boat moored in the Potomac river, about forty miles below
Washington, the first trial was made. The machine caught in the
launching mechanism, and fell into the river, where it broke. It was
repaired, and a second trial was made on the 8th of December 1903. Again
the machine failed to clear the launching car, and plunged headlong into
the river, where the frame was broken by zealous efforts to salve it in
the dark. Nine days after this final failure the Wrights made their
first successful power-driven flight, at Kitty Hawk, on the coast of
North Carolina.
Langley was almost seventy years old when his last and most ambitious
machine failed. He lived for two years more. If his contributions to the
science of flight, which are his chief title to fame, were ruled out of
the account, he would still be remembered as something more than a good
astronomer--a man of many sciences, who cared little for his own
advancement, and much for the advancement of knowledge.
From what has been said it is now possible to conceive how things stood
when the brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, first attacked the problem
of flying in the air. Men had flown, or rather had glided through the
air, without engines to support and drive them. Machines had flown,
without men to control and guide them. If the two achievements could be
combined in one, the problem was solved; but the combination, besides
bringing together both sets of difficulties and dangers, added new
dangers and difficulties, greater than either. Plainly, there were two
ways, and only two, of going about the business. Professor Langley held
that in order to learn to fly, you must have a flying machine to begin
with. Wilbur Wright, whose views on the point never varied from first to
last, held that you must have a man to begin with. The brothers were
impatient of 'the wasteful extravagance of mounting delicate and costly
machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage'. When they began
their experiments they had already reached the conclusion that the
problem of constructing wings to carry the machine, and the problem of
constructing a motor to drive it, presented no serious difficulty; but
that the problem of equilibrium had been the real stumbling-block, and
that this problem of equilibrium was the problem of flight itself. 'It
seemed to us', says Wilbur Wright, 'that the main reason why the problem
had remained so long unsolved was that no one had been able to obtain
any adequate practice. We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time
had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The
wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished
so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to
attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours'
practice, spread out in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five
years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful
in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts. We thought that if
some method could be found by which it would be possible to practise by
the hour instead of by the second there would be hope of advancing the
solution of a very difficult problem.'
When this was written, in 1901, it was a forecast; it is now the history
of a triumph. By prolonged scientific practice, undertaken with every
possible regard to safety, on soaring and gliding machines, the Wrights
became master pilots and conquerors of the air. Their success had in it
no element of luck; it was earned, as an acrobat earns his skill. So
confident did they become that to the end their machines were all
machines of an unstable equilibrium, dependent for their safety on the
skill and quickness of the pilot. Their triumph was a triumph of mind
and character. Other men had more than their advantages, and failed,
where these men succeeded. Great things have sometimes been done by a
happy chance; it was not so with the Wrights. They planned great things,
and measured themselves against them, and were equal to them.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were the sons of Milton Wright, of Dayton,
Ohio. They came of New England stock. One of their ancestors emigrated
from Essex in 1636, and settled at Springfield, Massachusetts; a later
ancestor moved west, to Dayton. Wilbur was born in 1867, and Orville in
1871. They had two elder brothers and one younger sister; but Wilbur and
Orville were so closely united in their lives and in their thoughts,
that it is not easy to speak of them apart. Mr. Griffith Brewer, who
knew them both, was often asked which of the two was the originator, and
would reply, 'I think it was mostly Wilbur'; but would add, 'The thing
could not have been done without Orville'. Wilbur, being four years the
elder, no doubt took the lead; but all their ideas and experiments were
shared, so that their very thought became a duet. Wilbur, who died in
1912, was a man of a steady mind and of a dominant character, hard-knit,
quiet, intense. He has left some writings which reflect his nature; they
have a certain grim humour, and they mean business; they push aside all
irrelevance, and go straight to the point. After adventures in printing
and journalism the two brothers set up at Dayton as cycle manufacturers.
The death of Lilienthal, reported in the newspapers in 1896, first
called their attention to flight, and they began to read all available
books on the subject. They found that an immense amount of time and
money had been spent on the problem of human flight--all to no effect.
Makers of machines had abandoned their efforts. As for gliders, after
the death of Lilienthal, Mr. Chanute had discontinued his experiments,
and, a little later, Mr. Pilcher fell and was killed. When knowledge of
these things came to the brothers, it appealed to them like a challenge.
From 1899 onwards they turned all their thoughts to the problem. They
watched the flight of birds to see if they could surprise the secret of
balance. They studied gliding machines, and resolved to construct a
machine of their own, more or less on the model of Mr. Chanute's most
successful glider, which was a biplane, or 'double-decker'. When their
machine was partly built, they wrote to the weather bureau at
Washington, and learned that the strongest and most constant winds were
to be found on the coast of North Carolina. They then wrote to the
postmaster of Kitty Hawk, who testified that the sand-hills of that
place were round and soft, well fitted for boys playing with flying
machines. They took the parts of their machine to Kitty Hawk, assembled
and completed it in a tent, and forthwith began their long years of
continuous and progressive experiment. Their chief helper was Mr.
Chanute. 'In the summer of 1901', they said, 'we became personally
acquainted with Mr. Chanute. When he learned that we were interested in
flying as a sport and not with any expectation of recovering the money
we were expending on it, he gave us much encouragement. At our
invitation he spent several weeks with us at our camp at Kill Devil
Hill, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, during our experiments of that and
the two succeeding years.'
The first two summers, 1900 and 1901, brought them some familiarity in
the handling of their first two gliders, which they navigated lying face
downward on the lower plane. In all their gliding experiments they
studied safety first. They knew that the business they had embarked on
was of necessity a long and dangerous one; that they were bound to
encounter many dangers, and that each of them had only one life. They
took no avoidable risks. Gliding seemed to them, at first, to have been
discredited by the deaths of Lilienthal and Pilcher, so they planned to
try their machine by tethering it with a rope and letting it float a few
feet from the ground, while they practised manipulation. The wind proved
to be not strong enough to sustain the weighted machine, and they were
compelled to take to gliding. All their early glides were made as near
the ground as possible. The machine had no vertical rudder, but they
fitted it, in front, with what they called a horizontal rudder, that is,
an elevator. By the use of this they could bring it to the ground at
once when the wind was tricky and their balance was threatened. The
lateral balance they attempted to control by warping the wings, but with
no satisfactory results. They made glides longer than any on record, but
while the problem of stability was still unsolved, there could be no
real progress. At the end of 1901, Wilbur Wright made the prediction
that men would some time fly, but that it would not be in their
lifetime.
They returned to Dayton, and spent the winter in experiment and
research. They had taken up aeronautics partly as a sport; they were now
drawn deeper and deeper into the scientific study of it. They made a
wind-tunnel, sixteen inches square and about six feet long, and tested
in it the lift and drag of model wings, made in various sizes and with
various aspect ratios. The tables which they compiled from these
experiments were continually used by them thereafter, and superseded
the tables of Lilienthal and Langley, which took no account of the
aspect ratio. When they returned to Kitty Hawk, in the autumn of 1902,
they took with them a greatly improved glider. The aspect ratio of the
planes was six to one, instead of about three to one, as in their second
glider. Further, while preserving the horizontal vane, or elevator, at
the front of the machine, they added a vertical vane, or rudder, at the
rear. It was their failure to control the lateral balance in the
experiments of 1901 that suggested this device to them. From the first
they had discarded the method, practised by Lilienthal and Pilcher, of
adjusting the lateral balance by shifting the weight of the operator's
body. This method seemed to them 'incapable of expansion to meet large
conditions, because the weight to be moved and the distance of possible
motion were limited, while the disturbing forces steadily increased,
both with wing area and with wing velocity'. Accordingly they invented a
method of warping the wings, to present them to the wind at different
angles on the right and left sides. Thus the force of the wind was used
to restore the balance which the wind itself had disturbed. But in their
early gliders this warping process acted in an unexpected way. The wing
which, in order to raise that side of the machine, was presented to the
wind at the greater angle of incidence often proved to be the wing which
lagged and sank. The decrease in speed, due to the extra drag, more than
counterbalanced the effect of the larger angle. When they attempted to
remedy this by introducing a fixed vertical vane in the rear, 'it
increased the trouble and made the machine 'absolutely dangerous'. Any
side-slip became irrecoverable by causing the vertical fixed vane to
strike the wind on the side toward the low wing, instead of on the side
toward the high wing, as it should have done to correct the balance.
'It was some time', the brothers remark, 'before a remedy was
discovered. This consisted of movable rudders working in conjunction
with the twisting of the wings.' So that now three different parts of
the machine had to be controlled by wires, worked swiftly and correctly
by the operator, to preserve the balance. There were the wing tips which
had to be warped. There was the horizontal vane in front which had to be
adjusted, to keep the machine in level flight or to bring it to the
ground. There was the vertical vane behind which had to be moved this
way and that to secure the desired effect from the warping of the wings.
'For the sake of simplicity,' says Wilbur Wright, 'we decided to attach
the wires controlling the vertical tail to the wires warping the wings,
so that the operator, instead of having to control three things at once,
would have to attend to only the forward horizontal rudder and the wing
warping mechanism; and only the latter would be needed for controlling
lateral balance.'
The thing was done. They had built an aeroplane that could fly; and the
later introduction of an engine was as simple a matter as the harnessing
of a horse to a carriage. 'With this apparatus', says Wilbur Wright,
speaking of the glider of 1902, 'we made nearly seven hundred glides in
the two or three weeks following. We flew it in calms and we flew it in
winds as high as thirty-five miles an hour. We steered it to right and
left, and performed all the evolutions necessary for flight. This was
the first time in the history of the world that a movable vertical tail
had been used in controlling the direction or the balance of a flying
machine. It was also the first time that a movable vertical tail had
been used, in combination with wings adjustable to different angles of
incidence, in controlling the balance and direction of an aeroplane. We
were the first to functionally employ a movable vertical tail in a
flying aeroplane. We were the first to employ wings adjustable to
respectively different angles of incidence in a flying aeroplane. We
were the first to use the two in combination in a flying aeroplane.'
It is a large claim, and every word of it is true. New inventions are
commonly the work of many minds, and it would be easy to name at least
half a dozen men to whose work the Wrights were indebted. But these were
tributaries; the main achievement belongs wholly to the Wrights. Their
quiet perseverance, through long years, in the face of every kind of
difficulty, is only a part of their distinction; the alertness and
humility of mind which refused all traffic with fixed ideas, and made
dangers and disappointments the material of education, is what stamps
them with greatness. They put themselves to school to the winds. They
knew that there is no cheap or easy way to master nature, and that only
the human spirit, at its best and highest, can win through in that long
struggle. Their patience never failed. 'Skill', says Wilbur Wright,
'comes by the constant repetition of familiar feats rather than by a few
overbold attempts at feats for which the performer is yet hardly
prepared.' Man must learn to fly as he learns to walk. 'Before trying to
rise to any dangerous height a man ought to know that in an emergency
his mind and muscles will work by instinct rather than by conscious
effort. There is no time to think.'
The machine of 1902, which might be called the victory machine, deserves
a full description. It was a double-decked machine, with two planes
fixed by struts one above the other about five feet apart. The planes
were thirty-two feet in span, and five feet in chord. The total area of
their supporting surfaces was about three hundred and five square feet.
The operator lay on his face in the middle of the lower plane. The
horizontal rudder in front had a supporting surface of fifteen square
feet. The vertical tail, as they called it, which was the true rudder,
was reduced after trial to six square feet. The machine was supported on
the ground by skids, and was very strongly built. It weighed a hundred
and sixteen and a half pounds, to which must be added about a hundred
and forty pounds for the weight of the operator. It performed about a
thousand glides, with only one injury, though it made many hard landings
at full speed on uneven ground. The longest glide was 622-1/2 feet,
traversed in twenty-six seconds. The glides were made from the Kill
Devil sand-hills, near Kitty Hawk--mounds of sand heaped up by the wind,
the biggest having a height of a hundred feet.
The time had now come to invite an engine to bear a part in the
proceedings. In the autumn of 1903 the brothers returned to Kitty Hawk
for their fourth season of experiment. They had built in the winter a
machine weighing six hundred pounds, including the operator and an eight
horse-power motor. Finding that the motor gave more power than had been
estimated, they added a hundred and fifty pounds of weight in
strengthening the wings and other parts. The airscrews, built from their
own calculations, gave in useful work two-thirds of the power expended.
Before trying this machine, however, they continued their practice with
the old glider, and made a number of flights in which they remained in
the air for over a minute, often soaring for a considerable time in one
spot, without any descent at all.
It was late in the season, the 17th of December 1903, when they first
tried the power machine. A general invitation to be present at the trial
had been given to the people living within five or six miles, but 'not
many were willing to face the rigours of a cold December wind in order
to see, as they no doubt thought, another flying machine _not_ fly'.
Five persons besides the brothers were present. Mr. Orville Wright's
narrative, written for the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, must
be given in his own words:
'On the morning of December 17th, between the hours of 10.30 o'clock and
noon, four flights were made, two by Mr. Orville Wright, and two by Mr.
Wilbur Wright. The starts were all made from a point on the levels, and
about 200 feet west of our camp, which is located about a quarter of a
mile north of the Kill Devil Sand Hill, in Dare County, North Carolina.
The wind at the time of the flights had a velocity of twenty-seven miles
an hour at 10 o'clock, and 24 miles an hour at noon, as recorded by the
anemometer at the Kitty Hawk weather bureau station. This anemometer is
30 feet from the ground. Our own measurements, made with a
hand-anemometer at a height of four feet from the ground, showed a
velocity of about 22 miles when the first flight was made, and 20-1/2
miles at the time of the last one. The flights were directly against the
wind. Each time the machine started from the level ground by its own
power alone, with no assistance from gravity or any other sources
whatever. After a run of about 40 feet along a mono-rail track, which
held the machine eight inches from the ground, it rose from the track
and, under the direction of the operator, climbed upward on an inclined
course till a height of 8 or 10 feet from the ground was reached, after
which the course was kept as near horizontal as the wind gusts and the
limited skill of the operator would permit. Into the teeth of a December
gale the Flyer made its way forward with a speed of 10 miles an hour
over the ground, and 30 to 35 miles an hour through the air. It had
previously been decided that, for reasons of personal safety, these
first trials should be made as close to the ground as possible. The
height chosen was scarcely sufficient for manoeuvring in so gusty a wind
and with no previous acquaintance with the conduct of the machine and
its controlling mechanisms. Consequently the first flight was short. The
succeeding flights rapidly increased in length and at the fourth trial a
flight of 59 seconds was made, in which time the machine flew a little
more than a half-mile through the air and a distance of 852 feet over
the ground. The landing was due to a slight error of judgement on the
part of the operator. After passing over a little hummock of sand, in
attempting to bring the machine down to the desired height the operator
turned the rudder too far, and the machine turned downward more quickly
than had been expected. The reverse movement of the rudder was a
fraction of a second too late to prevent the machine from touching the
ground and thus ending the flight. The whole occurrence occupied little,
if any, more than one second of time.
'Only those who are acquainted with practical aeronautics can appreciate
the difficulties of attempting the first trials of a flying machine in a
25-mile gale. As winter was already well set in, we should have
postponed our trials to a more favourable season, but for the fact that
we were determined, before returning home, to know whether the machine
possessed sufficient power to fly, sufficient strength to withstand the
shock of landings, and sufficient capacity of control to make flight
safe in boisterous winds, as well as in calm air. When these points had
been definitely established, we at once packed our goods and returned
home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.'