ARTIFICIAL FLIGHT. 547 



positions the ships would become top heavy and overturn 

 sideways. It remained for Pilcher to prove that a similar 

 condition is equally essential in the case of aerial machines. 



Pilcher's first machine had the wings very much upturned, 

 and was provided with only a vertical rudder, not a horizon- 

 tal one. But it was found that the machine pitched too 

 much, so that it became rather dangerous to experiment 

 on, and Pilcher then added a horizontal rudder which 

 made the balance much better. He found, however, that 

 although the V shape of the wings made the machine 

 very steady when sailing against a head wind, a side 

 wind was apt to tip it over, so he had another machine 

 made with the tips of the wings flat instead of being 

 curved up, but the wings were now placed at nearly the 

 height of his head. Here again it was very difficult to 

 balance with the weight so far below the wing surface, 

 accordingly Pilcher took his first machine and bent the 

 wings quite flat at the tips. He now found that by 

 havingr the wino-s so much lower down he could balance 

 much more easily ; of course, if the weight were ^00 . high 

 up, the equilibrium would be unstable ; but Pilcher's experi- 

 ments show that for safety the statical measure of stability 

 must be small. On the modified machine form, Pilcher 

 could sustain himself in the air for several seconds, and he 

 was sometimes picked up by the wind and lifted as much 

 as twenty feet above the ground ; sometimes, also, he got 

 some one to pull him along by means of a string, like a 

 kite, or to hold him against the wind, and quite a moderate 

 force was sufficient to hold the machine in mid-air. One 

 of his achievements last Easter was to descend eighty yards 

 in a calm, and noticing a large bush in the way he actually 

 made the machine rise up in the air so as just to clear the 

 obstacle. And on 19th June, he glided for over 250 yards 

 in the presence of a number of spectators, an experiment 

 which will be described in Nature, probably before the 

 present article is in print. 



Pilcher is hoping to get a small petroleum motor attached 

 in order to make the n^iachine self-propelling and thus con- 

 vert a mere glider into a true flying machine. For an 



