Viewing page 9 of 37

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

words, this proposal to utilize the progress of the arts and sciences in doing useful work was subject to the same misunderstanding and injustice that ignorance always slings at pioneer endeavorers, a noteworthy and humiliating example of which was found in the brutality which a considerable part of the American press inflicted upon that noble friend of research and progress, the late Samuel Pierpont Langley.

During the past year the spectacular success of the airship of Count Zeppelin in Germany, and less sensational successes by other motor-balloons in various countries, accompanied by the triumphs of the Brothers Wright and others, both in America and Europe, with mechanical flight machines, have roused the whole world to an intense interest in everything connected with navigation of the air. Men who a year or two ago sneered at the plan to reach the North Pole by airship as the dream of a madman, now look upon that project as wholly within the bounds of practicability. If any vindication of the rationality of the central idea of our enterprise were needed, it has been found in the long voyages made by Count Zeppelin and in the demonstration that extensive journeys in the air have now become practicable. No such vindication was needed in the eyes of men who really understood all the factors involved in the problem; for they have known all along, for several years, that the construction of a motor-balloon able to make a voyage of 1,500 or 2,000 miles is simply a matter of adaptation of means to the end in view, and of the seizure of occasions not too unfavorable for the actual achievement.

As is so often the case, the general public, its imagination stimulated by the daily press, has rushed from one extreme to the other. From decrying all aerial navigation as crazy experiments it has rushed to the conclusion that within a year or two we shall have regular aerial express ships carrying passengers and mails across the continent at high speed and with such safety and certainty as to assure the commercial success

4