Engineers have, until recent years, fought shy of anything relating to aerial navigation. Those who ventured, in spite of the odium attached to that study, to look into it at all, became very soon satisfied that the great obstacle in the way was the lack of a motor sufficiently light to sustain its weight and that of an aeroplane, upon the air. Fifteen years ago the lightest steam motor was the marine engine weighing 60 pounds to the H.P., while the gas engine weighed very much more; the locomotive weighed 200 pounds per H.P. During the past fifteen years a great change has taken place. Steam motors have been produced weighing only 10 pounds per horse–power, and gas engines have been lightened down to 12½ to 15 pounds per horse–power, so that the status, so far as engineers are concerned, is very greatly changed, and there is some hope that, for some limited purposes at least, man will eventually be able to fly through the air.

Though the subject of aerial navigation is generally considered new, it has occupied the minds of men more or less from the earliest ages. Our personal interest in it dates from our childhood days. Late in the autumn of 1878 our father came into the house one evening with some object partly concealed in his hands, and before we could see what it was, he tossed it into the air. Instead of falling to the floor, as we expected, it flew across the room till it struck the ceiling, where it fluttered awhile, and finally sank to the floor. It was a little toy, known to scientists as a “hélicoptère,” but which we, with sublime disregard for science, at once dubbed a “bat.” It was a light frame of cork and bamboo, covered with paper, which formed two screws, driven in opposite directions by Tubber bands under torsion. A toy so delicate lasted only a short time in the Tiands of small boys, but its memory was abiding.

The erection at Cairo, Egypt, of a monument to L. P. Mouillard, recalls attention to one of the greatest missionaries of the flying cause which the nineteenth century produced. Mouillard was a Frenchman who passed a large part of his life in Algeria and Egypt, where his attention was attracted, by the wonderful soaring of vultures on fixed wings. His imagination was greatly excited by what he saw, and during the remainder of his life he was like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight.In 1881 he published a book called “The Empire of the Air,” which is one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature that has ever been published.

Clement Ader was a French electrical engineer, who during the last quarter of the nineteenth century devoted a great deal of study and money to the problem of human flight. In his youth he had become interested in the flight of birds, and at a later period had made a study of bats, with a view to imitating their structure in a flying machine. Between the years 1882 and 1890 he built a number of pieces of apparatus, of which the last, finished in 1890, was fitted with a steam engine.

Having exhausted his own resources, he succeeded in enlisting the aid of the French Government, and proceeded to the construction of a large machine, having a steam motor of 40 horse-power. This apparatus was tried under conditions of great secrecy in October, 1897, at the military field at Satory, near Paris, in the presence of a Commission representing the French Government, but the results were so unsatisfactory that the French Government, which had spent more than $100,000 on the project, refused to advance further funds, and Ader abandoned the attempt to solve the problem.

My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of flight in 1899, a little more than 12 years ago. Some three years before this the death of Lilienthal, which was mentioned in the newspapers of that day, had brought the subject to our attention and led us to make some inquiry for books relating to flight. But the only serious books we found were by Professor Marey, and these related to the mechanism of bird flight rather than human flight. As our interest at that time was mere curiosity as to what had been done, we did not pursue the subject further when we failed to find books relating to human flight.

Several years later, while reading a book on ornithology, we became interested in studying the appearance and habits of birds, but it soon occurred to us that the really interesting thing about birds was their power of flight. This was a power which seemed to us almost in contradiction of the laws of nature.

The present generation will never completely realise the magnitude of the loss to Aviation caused by the death of Wilbur Wright, and yet it requires but a moment's thought to recognise that his name will live until all histories are obliterated, for with his brother Orville, he accomplished the dream of ages, which men of acknowledged science had become in the habit of first attempting to accomplish, and then alleging the feat to be amongst the unattainable.

There are only three ways of getting from one place to another on this earth; one is on land, the next is on water, and the third is now through the air. Certainly it was possible to travel in the air to destinations settled by the caprice of the wind, but to do the same as the birds, and travel from one place to another, had never been possible until Wilbur and Orville Wright accomplished mechanical flight in 1903.