THE TRIUMPH OF THE AEROPLANE 



which I judged to be between eighty and one hundred 

 feet in the air, the wheek ceased turning, and the 

 machine, deprived of the aid of propellers, to my sur- 

 prise did not fall, but settled down so softly and gently 

 that it touched the water without the least shock, and 

 was in fact immediately ready for another trial." 



To most persons, even to the cautious and scientific 

 inventor himself, the performance of this, and a second 

 aerodrome which flew about three-quarters of a mile, 

 seemed to show that the secret of aerial navigation was 

 all but fathomed. "The world, indeed, will be supine," 

 Langley wrote a short time after the success of his 

 flying-machine, *4f it does not realize that a new pos- 

 sibility has come to it, and that the great universal 

 highway overhead is soon to be opened." What could 

 be plainer? A machine of a certain construction, 

 weighing some thirty pounds, and carrying at that some 

 excess of weight, had been able to fly a relatively long 

 distance. What easier than to construct a machine 

 on precisely similar lines only ten, a hundred, a thou- 

 sand times larger, until it would carry persons and cargo, 

 and fly across an ocean or a continent ? 



Professor Langley himself, as was most fitting, 

 imdertook the construction of such a man-carrying 

 air-ship. And it was during this undertaking that he 

 made the momentous discovery that seemed to oppose 

 a question mark to the possibility of flight by the 

 aeroplane principle. This discovery was an "unyield- 

 ing mathematical law that the weight of such a machine 

 increases as the cube of its dimensions, whereas the 

 wing surface increases as the square." In other words, 



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