THE TRIUMPH OF THE AEROPLANE 



conspicuous success was Mr. Henry Farman, an English- 

 man residing in Paris, who on the 13th of January, 1908, 

 aroused the enthusiasm of the entire world, and won 

 a £2000 prize, by flying in a heavier-than-air ma- 

 chine in a prescribed circle, covering about sixteen 

 hundred yards, and alighting at the starting-point. 



This was more than four years after the Wright 

 brothers had made far more remarkable flights, to which 

 few persons had paid any attention, and of which 

 most people had never heard. But in the autumn of 

 the same year Orville Wright in America, and Wilbur 

 Wright in France began a series of public flights which 

 demonstrated for all time that the air at last had 

 been conquered, and that they were the unquestionable 

 conquerors. Orville, at Fort Myer, near Washington, 

 on September 12th, electrified the world by flying 

 continuously around a circular course for an hour and 

 fifteen minutes. This was the most conclusive per- 

 formance yet accomplished and set at rest all doubts 

 as to the possibility of mechanical flight. For no one 

 could doubt that a machine which could maintain itself 

 in the air by its own power for more than an hour was 

 truly a flying-machine in the most exacting sense of the 

 term. 



A few days after this performance an accident to 

 the propeller of this machine wTecked it, the resulting 

 fall breaking the leg of the inventor, and killing his 

 companion, Lieutenant Selfridge of the United States 

 Army. 



Almost simultaneously Wilbur Wright began a 

 series of flights at Le Mans, France, which demon- 



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