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1907. June 14.  Friday at Baddeck

Star
Newark N.J.
30 April 1907.
AERIAL NAVIGATION IS NEAR
Although all inventors are more or less dreamers, when a man of the character and achievements of Professor Alexander Graham Bell deliberately announces that he is convinced the time is near when the navies of the world will be equipped with practical aerial warships it is no time to scoff.  He is not given to uttering half-baked opinions for the sake of the sensation they may create.  The inventor and perfector of the telephone is a scientist and not a sensation-monger.  He has himself made a careful study of aeronautics and is satisfied that the most serious problem has been solved.  He is himself earnestly working out the practical details.
  Making all due allowances for the enthusiasm of the student and the practical inventor, the fact that Professor Bell is confident that before long there will be airships capable of crossing the Atlantic in about twenty hours, although such an event has long been predicted, is somewhat startling.  That it will revolutionize transportation and warfare goes without saying.  That it opens up potentialities for bringing war to that stage of the terrible as to make it, ere long, almost impossible, can easily be conceived.  The possibilities for peaceful commerce with swift airships are almost inconceivable.  And yet the evolution from the means of travel and transportation of today to what he holds out as almost attained is not more marvelous than are those present agencies compared with what the world was content with within the memory of many living men.

Herald Boston
30 Apr –1907.
Prof. Alexander Graham Bell is nothing if not enthusiastic on the subject of aerial navigation. And he is not a gentleman who is in the habit of wasting his ammunition by firing into the air.

Press Philadelphia
30 Apr 1907
Postpones Air Flight to Capital.
St. Louis, April 29.–Aeronaut James McCoy, of the Aero Club, of Omaha, who expected to start on a balloon flight to Washington, D. C. to-night, decided to postpone the start until the wind is from the west and the weather is clear.

Citizen Brooklyn
30 Apr–1907
Up to the present it was understood that Walter Wellman proposed to reach the North Pole by balloon only; but now it seems from the statement that twenty-nine Siberian dogs for sled service have been shipped to his starting point in Norway, that he proposes to outdo Peary on the ice as well as the unfortunate Andre in the air. If words are to be translated into deeds, Peary might as well abandon his next year's project now.

Gazette Montreal Can.
30 April 1907

AERIAL NAVIGATION.
Dr. Bell Sees Great Things in the
Near Future.

   New York, April 29.–A London despatch to The Times quotes Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, as saying last night that it is only a question of a brief period when the progress of aerial navigation will make it possible to have dinner in America and breakfast the next morning in Europe, covering the distance across the Atlantic in considerably less than twenty hours. 
  "My expectation," said Dr. Bell, "is that an airship will be perfected capable of making 100 to 200 miles an hour.  My opinion, however, is that the next step in aerial flight will make the former such improvements as will make possible the creation of aerial battleships.  The actual problem of the navigation of the air has already been solved by the Wright brothers.  Naturally there will be development along commercial lines, a feature of which will be a great increase in speed, but the most attention will be paid to adapting airships to the purposes of war.
  "My belief is that America will be the first country to perfect aerial battleships.  This belief is based on inside information, and from the same source I get reliable statements on which I base my prediction of the early production of an airship of enormous speed.
  "I hope to be able to add much to what is known of aerial flight by experiments at Cape Breton Island this summer.  My problem this year will be to propel my kites with a specially constructed engine of fifteen horsepower, weighing 120 pounds.  I hope to get a machine of the heavier-than-air variety that will support a man and the necessary equipment to operate it at low, rather than high, velocity.  Last December [[cut off]] vehicle that suppor [[cut off]] man in a ten-mile bre[[cut off]] to fly a machine ca[[cut of]] at ten or fifteen mil [[cut off]] can accomplish this th[[cut off]] the aviators or the m[[cut off]] ing to solve flight o[[cut off]] will be able to avoid [[cut off]] long enough to learn h[[cut off]] a bird has to learn [[cut off]] with the bird, one of [[cut off]] derations is safety, so [[cut off]] to go slow before he g[[cut off]] 
  "I am confident that long before flying ma[[cut off]] everywhere.  The devel[[cut off]] next few months will b[[cut off]] ed, but the most inter[[cut off]] that only very few k[[cut off]] America is right now [[cut off]] question which will rev [[cut off]] fare throughout the [[cut off]] the construction of a p[[cut off]] battleship."
  Dr. Bell is in London [[cut off]] degree of doctor of scie [[cut off]] on May 2.

Inquirer
Philadelphia
30 Apr 1907.
Flying Two Hundred Miles an Hour
Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who has made an enormous fortune from the telephone, rises up to inform us that aerial navigation is practicaly settled and will be an accomplished fact "soon." He says that airships will fly from this country to Europe at the rate of two hundred miles an hour and that incidentally flying battleships will come first. If this statement had been issued by Mr. H. G. Wells, who imagines wild things, we should smile and say nothing, but as Dr. Bell has a reputation as a scientist, it is impossible to dismiss his prophecies quite so summarily.

Unfortunately for the high hopes aroused by the preliminary statement, it seems that he has been working on the problem for years and has gotten no further than the expectation of flying kites next fall which will take a man up in the air and give him a navigable status. This is not much when we consider that Santos-Dumont has flown miles in his airship and Walter Wellman hopes to reach the North Pole this summer in an airship which he has constructed for the purpose. Dr. Bell appears to be following the lines of the late Professor Langley, of the Smithsonian Institution, and to have an aeroplane rather than a balloon for his basis of operations.

We realize that in this age it is unwise to assert that anything which is in the slightest degree possible is improbable. There may be new developments any moment which will totally disarrange our views of mechanical possibilities, but at the same time we desire a good deal additional data before sharing the hopes of the telephone inventor. From Darius Green to the present there has been some progress, but not much, to indicate that any of us are going over the ocean at the rate of two hundred miles an hour.

Anyhow, it is not worth while to cancel steamship engagements or postpone European trips until the aerial route is in operation.

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