FLYING MACHINE 



2237 



FLYING MACHINE 



and a machine traveling twenty-five miles an 

 hour has only one-fourth the lifting power 

 of one moving fifty miles an hour. In order 

 to propel their machines at high speed early 

 inventors had to use heavy steam engines and 

 carry heavy loads of fuel and water. If they 

 doubled the size of their wings to double their 

 lifting power, they had to increase the strength, 

 and hence the weight, of their engines. As a 

 result few of their machines ever left the 

 ground. 



But even had the pioneer students of flying 

 possessed the light gasoline engines of to-day 

 they could not have succeeded without working 

 out the problems of how to leave the ground 

 and how to preserve the balance of the machine 

 while in flight. 



forty per cent in its weight the aerodrome 

 made a number of successful flights. See 

 LANGLEY, SAMUEL PIERPONT; CURTISS, GLENN 

 HAMMOND. 



Langley never knew that he had solved the 

 problem of equilibrium during flight, but he 

 was the only man who did solve it before the 

 Wrights. A Frenchman, Clement Ader, flew 

 a hundred fifty feet in 1890 and three hundred 

 feet in 1897, but t as he traversed this distance 

 in less than five seconds, his performance ought 

 to be called a leap rather than a flight. Two 

 men who at that time saw that balance was 

 the vital thing to be learned were Lilienthal, 

 a German, and Chanute, an American. Lilien- 

 thal began in 1891 to experiment with gliders, 

 aeroplanes without engines, and by leaping 



Supporting 

 Plane 



fuselage 

 Landing Skid 



DIAGRAM OP A BIPLANE 



To one who sees how easily an aeroplane 

 of the present day mounts into the air after a 

 few seconds run on its rubber tired wheels it 

 seems strange that elaborate starting devices 

 were at first deemed necessary. In 1903, shortly 

 before the Wright brothers' first secret flight, 

 Professor Samuel P. Langley of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution completed his "aerodrome," 

 a machine shaped like a dragon fly, for the 

 construction of which the United States govern- 

 ment had appropriated $50,000. To launch it 

 he built an inclined track above the Potomac 

 River, and in the two trials of the machine 

 the complicated starting apparatus wrecked it 

 before it could free itself. Glenn Curtiss took 

 the same aerodrome out of .the Smithsonian 

 Institution in 1914, placed it on floats so that 

 it could start from the water, added a few 

 braces and gave the engine a new carburetor 

 and radiator, and in spite of an increase of 



from the top of a hill in the face of the wind 

 he made 'more than 2,000 flights, one of 1,200 

 feet. Lilienthal balanced his machine by his 

 own acrobatic movements, but Chanute, the 

 longest of whose thousand flights was one of 

 360 feet, believed in adjustable planes. 



Man Triumphs. It was in 1900 that Wilbur 

 and Orville Wright began their experiments. 

 So quietly did they work, down among the 

 North Carolina sands, or near their home in 

 Ohio, that four years after their first successful 

 flight a year-book stated that "the mere fact 

 and but little description has ever been re- 

 corded." In France, Santos-Dumont in 1906 

 flew 655 feet and Farman in 1907 covered 2,530 

 feet, yet the Wrights, who had stopped experi- 

 ments in 1905 to give attention to their pat- 

 ents, were content with modestly announcing 

 that in that year they had flown twenty-four 

 miles! In their first secret flight, in 1903, they 



