“And you will keep your secret, like Dr. Johnson’s artist?”
“To you I do not mind revealing this much. The vans or wings of my machine describe elliptic figures of eight.”
“I’ve seen them do that, said Barton.
“Like the wings of birds; and have the same forward and downward stroke, by a direct piston action. The impetus is given, after a descent in air—which I effected by starting from a height of six feet only—by a combination of heated naphtha and of india rubber under torsion. By steam alone, in 1842, Philips made a model of a flying-machine soar across two fields. Penaud’s machine, relying only on india rubber under torsion, flies for some fifty yards. What a model can do, as Bishop Wilkins well observes, a properly weighted and proportioned flying-machine, capable of carrying a man, can do also.”
“But yours, when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, was not carrying you at all.”
“Something had gone wrong with the mechanism,” answered Winter, sighing. “It is always so. An inventor has many things to contend against. Remember Ark-wright, and how he was puzzled hopelessly by that trifling error in the thickness of the valves in his spinning machine. He had to give half his profits to Strutt, the local blacksmith, before Strutt would tell him that he had only to chalk his valves! The thickness of a coating of chalk made all the difference. Some trifle like that, depend on it, interfered with my machine. You see, I am obliged to make my experiments at night, and in the dark, for fear of being discovered and anticipated. I have been on the verge—nay, over the verge—of success. ‘No imaginable invention,’ Bishop Wilkins says, ‘could prove of greater benefit to the world, or greater glory to the author.’ A few weeks ago that glory was mine!”
“Why a few weeks ago?” asked Barton. “Was your machine more advanced then than when I met you?”
“I cannot explain what had happened to check its motion,” said Winter, wearily; “but a few weeks ago my machine acted, and I may say that I knew the sensations of a bird on the wing.”
“Do you mean that you actually flew?”
“For a very short distance, I did indeed, sir!”