FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



essary with such a group of men. I remember that once a mem- 

 ber of the Naval Board of Strategy told us the real diplomatic 

 reason why President Roosevelt had just sent the Pacific fleet 

 to Oriental and Australian waters. But the professional diploma- 

 tists who were occasionally present said little or nothing, as a rule. 

 Once or twice Dr. Bell suggested that Mr. Robert Lansing 

 should "tell us something interesting." But every time he smiled 

 (I thought rather embarrassedly), and told us nothing. 



I remember one night in the nineties when there was a rather 

 small attendance and no one present seemed at all anxious to 

 open up. Dr. Bell turned to Professor S. P. Langley and asked 

 him to tell us of the progress he was making with his flying 

 work. At that time I do not believe that any of us, except perhaps 

 Dr. Bell himself, thought that Langley would succeed. In fact, 

 we felt sorry that so eminent a man should waste his time on the 

 visionary project of flight with a heavier-than-air machine. I 

 recollect, however, how interested we all were in Langley's mod- 

 est statement of his progress, and I noticed that Dr. Bell was 

 very keen on the subject. 



Later Dr. Bell wrote an enthusiastic account of the first flight 

 of the unmanned model over the Potomac at Marshall Hall. 



Dr. Bell's deep scientific and personal interest in aviation will 

 naturally be fully displayed in his biography. I am here only 

 mentioning it in an anecdotal way in connection with the 

 Wednesday evenings and closely related occasions. At later meet- 

 ings the subject recurred many times. McCurdy and other men 

 of that type, in whose ideas Dr. Bell had become interested, were 

 there and talked. And one night he had erected in the front 

 parlor one of the great new tetrahedral kites. Using this as a 

 model, he explained with great enthusiasm the advantages of 

 the multiplicity of the tetrahedral cells. 



Long after Langley's death, when the Wrights came to Wash- 



[286] 



