49] 
FLIGHT AND FLYING MACHINES. 
ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS LANTERN SLIDES 
INCLUDING MANY LENT BY HIRAM S. 
MAXIM, ESQR. 
BY 
ID ee, lel 18s, VE UNIT NOIR BIS) 5 
(A Lecture delivered at the Royal Artillery Institution, Woolwich, Thursday, 27th Feb., 1896). 
Masor-Generat F, J. Maurice, C.B., 1n tHE Cnatr. 
Tae Caoairman—We are anxious, ladies and gentlemen, to begin as 
soon as possible and, therefore, I will at once introduce you to Dr. 
Bryan, who will give us his lecture on Flight and Flying Machines. 
Dr. Bryan—General Maurice, ladics and gentlemen, with all the 
resources of modern science there is one element which has hitherto 
baffled man in his endeavours to master it, namely, the atmosphere. 
He traverses the land and sea with speed and comfort which leave 
nothing further to be attained except greater speed and greater com- 
fort, and yet birds flying in the air, as they have done for thousands of 
years, are able to keep pace with his swiftest express trains. 
I propose this evening to treat the subject of flight more or less 
according to the historical order of its development. We will first 
examine how birds and animals learnt to fly, in the first instance, i.e., 
how they were able to acquire the power of flight gradually in the 
course of evolution before they were provided with fully developed 
wings. Next, I hope to briefly deal with the question how birds do fly 
at the present time. After that, I propose to touch on the attempts at 
artificial flight made during the last and beginning of the present 
centuries when ingenious inventors designed and sometimes even went 
so far as to construct most fantastic and grotesque flying machines, 
with which they proposed to support themselves in the air by their own 
muscular exertions. ‘Then I hope to prove to you that those early 
attempts were bound to fail, but that modern discoveries have, so far, 
modified the problem of flight as to give us hopes of soon being able 
to learn to fly. It will be seen that the early experimenters began by 
10, Vou, XXIII. 
