‘You’ll fly—lots of times—before you die,’ the father assured him.
The little boy looked unhappy.
The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and under-developed photograph. ‘Come and look at this,’ he said.
The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: ‘Here we go up, up, up—from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.’
The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘That,’ said the schoolboy, after reflection, ‘is only a model.’
‘Model to-day, man to-morrow.’
The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. ‘But old Broomie,’ he said, ‘he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, “no man will ever fly.” No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything of the sort....’
Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s reminiscences.