THE DELIGHTS AND DANGERS OF FLYING
Few things have more charm for man than flight. The soaring of a bird is beautiful and the gliding of a yacht before the wind has something of the same beauty. The child’s swing; the exercise of skating on good ice; a sixty-mile-an-hour spurt on a smooth road in a motor car; even the slightly passé bicycle: these things have all in their time appealed to us because they produce the illusion of flight—of progress through the intangible air with all but separation from the prosaic earth.
But these sensations have been only illusions. To actually leave the earth and wander at will in aerial space—this has been, scarcely a hope, perhaps rarely even a distinct dream. From the days of Dædalus and Icarus, of Oriental flying horses and magic carpets, down to “Darius Green and his flying machine,” free flight and frenzy were not far apart. We were learnedly told, only a few years since, that sustention by heavier-than-air machines was impossible without the discovery, first, of some new matter or some new force. It is now (1911) only eight years since Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, with the aid of the new (?) matter—aluminum—and the “new” force—the gasoline engine—in three successive flights proved that a man could travel through the air and safely descend, in a machine weighing many times as much as the air it displaced. It is only five years since two designers—Surcouf and Lebaudy—built dirigible balloons approximating present forms, the Ville de Paris and La Patrie. It is only now that we average people may confidently contemplate the prospect of an aerial voyage for ourselves before we die. A contemplation not without its shudder, perhaps; but yet not altogether more daring than that of our grandsires who first rode on steel rails behind a steam locomotive.