412 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Flight of large Aerodrome, October 7, 1903. 



Congress the army board was unwilling 

 to continue the work. In the mean- 

 while the Wright brothers had begun 

 their experiments with flying machines 

 and in the year of the trial of the 

 Langley aerodrome accomplished their 

 first flight with a motor. In 1905 they 

 remained in the air for half an hour, 

 but it was not until 1908 that they 

 fully demonstrated the practicability 

 of sustained flight. Langley died on 

 February 27, 1906, at the beginning 

 of the era of mechanical flight to 

 which his researches had so largely 

 contributed. 



THE ADDBESS OF THE PRESI- 

 DENT OF THE BRITISH 

 ASSOCIATION 

 Sir William Eamsay presided over 

 the recent meeting of the British Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science 

 at Portsmouth, and, like many of his 

 predecessors in the chair, made an ad- 

 dress that is of very general interest. 

 He gave a clear account of ancient and 

 modern views regarding the chemical 

 elements, laying, as is natural, much 

 stress on the new discoveries in which 

 he himself has taken such a leading 

 part. It is not possible to review the 



marvelous story of the recent develop- 

 ments of chemistry more concisely than 

 is done in the addr ss. It is of interest 

 to note that fair William Eamsay main- 

 tains, though rather incidentally, the 

 validity of his experiments from which 

 he concluded that the metal copper is 

 converted partially into lithium by the 

 energy radiated from radium, and that 

 thorium, zirconium, titanium and sili- 

 con are degraded into carbon. It will 

 be remembered that Madame Curie was 

 unable to confirm these results. 



Sir William Eamsay passes from the 

 disintegration of the atom to the ques- 

 tion of the available supply of energy, 

 especially for Great Britain. He tells 

 us that each Greek freeman had five 

 helots who did his bidding, saving him 

 from manual labor and giving. Athens 

 its preeminence in literature and 

 thought, but that people in Great 

 Britain are still better off, each family 

 having twenty helots represented by 

 the consumption of fifty million tons 

 of coal annually. It is this coal which 

 has given England its great wealth and 

 commercial supremacy. At the present 

 rate of increase of consumption the 

 supply will be exhausted within 175 

 years, and there appears to be nothing 



