
WRIGHT BROTHERS’ AEROPLANE 
This is simply a soaring machine, but it has won much praise from persons high in aeronautics. The inventors, 
since Prof. Langley’s death, take precedence in this country as having achieved success with the aeroplane. 
subsequently a number of successful models 
were made and tried by various inventors, 
no full-sized apparatus was attempted until 
Maxim commenced his great machine in 
1890. It has been pretty convincingly 
demonstrated that it is possible to perfect 
the airship and put it to use. Flying 
machines like Maxim’s and Langley’s have 
many important uses, and are the only 
aerial devices with which anything like 
high speed has as yet been secured. Ma- 
chines for gliding flight like Lilienthal’s, 
Pilcher’s and Chanute’s serve merely for 
sport. 
The late Prof. Langley was the greatest 
exponent of the aeroplane, or the theory 
of aviation; Santos-Dumont the most suc- 
cessful experimenter with the’ dirigible 
balloon. Both men have produced ma- 
chines which have actually flown and which 
could be directed while in flight. Santos- 
Dumont has had an advantage in that he 
has been able to fly with his machine, but 
he admits that aerostation is, after all, a 
means toward aviation, which is an end. 
“In other words,” says an expert, “‘a 
balloon is just now necessary because of 
its capacity for sustaining human beings 
in air, but during a forthcoming period of 
evolution the area of the balloon will be 
further and further reduced until finally 
little will be left but a self-sustaining aero- 
plane such as Prof. Langley strove to 
evolve.” 
Prof. Langley discovered that a plate 
weighing 200 pounds could be moved 
through the air as fast as an express train 
with an expenditure of less than one horse- 
power of energy. It became known as 
Langley’s law that the faster an aeroplane 
travels through the air, the less is the 
energy required to drive it. Though Prof. 
Langley’s model aeroplane proved a fine 
success, he found, when he came to con- 
struct one sufficiently strong to carry a 
man, that he was confronted with an ap- 
parently insurmountable law of mathe- 
matics, namely, that the weight of such a 
machine increases as the cube of its di- 
mensions, whereas the wing surface in- 
creases as the square, and, as Prof. Simon 
Newcomb points out, it would seem that a 
flying machine made by a jeweler would 
be more efficient than one made by a 
blacksmith. 
As it appears, Langley’s investigation 
in this field was just the opposite of what 
almost every other exnverimenter in this 
field had tried to do. It was apparent to 
him at once that a flying machine, to be of 
any practical value whatever, would have 
to be powerful enough and heavy enough 
to drive straight against or across and in 
and out of the strongest winds. And it is 
