THE MAXIM AEROPLANE
Maxim's great machine was claimed as the first successful aeroplane. In trials it rose a few inches off the ground.
MEDALS WON BY THE WRIGHT BROTHERS
Top, Langley medal bestowed by the Smithsonian Institution; bottom, medal authorized by Act of Congress.
This, it will be seen, was a very close approach to the idea of the aeroplane as we know it to-day. It remained for another British inventor, by the name of Henson, to carry these ideas to a further development, and with his colleague, F. Stringfellow, he worked out a model that embodied most of the principles of the present-day flier of the monoplane type. They decided the proper proportion for the width and length of the plane and steadied their machine with both horizontal and perpendicular rudders. In 1844 Henson and Stringfellow built a model of their aeroplane and equipped it with a small steam engine. A subsequently constructed steam-propelled model made a free flight of forty yards. This is claimed to be the first flight of a power-driven machine, although it was only a model. In 1866 F. H. Wenham, another Englishman, took out a patent on an aeroplane made up of two or more planes, or, as the scientists call it, two or more superposed surfaces. Immediately following this, Stringfellow constructed a steam-propelled model of triplane type, but it was no more successful than his monoplane. This latest model may be seen in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington to-day along with other models marking the progress of aeroplanes.
In the years following other inventors contributed much valuable information to the data concerning aviation. Among these was Warren Hargrave, the Australian, who had discovered the box kite, and who had seen in it the principle for the aeroplane. Hargrave even built a small monoplane weighing about three pounds and propelled by compressed air, which flew 128 feet in eight seconds.
Though the Wright brothers were the first to make a practical man-carrying, power-propelled aeroplane, they were not the first men to be carried off the ground by such a machine. The first man admitted by most authorities to have flown in a power-driven aeroplane was Clement Ader, a Frenchman, who had spent his life in the study of air navigation. His first machine was of monoplane type driven by a forty-horsepower steam engine. It was called the Eole and it had its first test before a few of the inventor's friends near the town of Gretz on October 9, 1890, making, according to witnesses, a free flight of 150 feet. Ader built two more machines in subsequent years and succeeded in interesting the French military authorities. In October of 1897 he made several secret official tests of his last machine, the Avion. It had a spread of 270 square feet, weighed 1,100 pounds, and was driven by a forty-horsepower steam engine. The day for the trial was squally but he persevered. The flier ran at high speed over the ground, several times lifted its wheels clear off its track and finally turned over, smashing the machine. The officials did not consider the exhibition successful, and the support of the army was withdrawn. Ader in disgust gave the Avion to a French museum and abandoned aviation, with success almost within his grasp.
Shortly before this time Prof. Samuel Pierpont Langley of the Smithsonian Institution and Octave Chanute, the great American pioneers in aviation, were making their early experiments. Professor Langley experimented with numerous kinds of model fliers, and finally, on May 6, 1896, launched a steam-propelled model over the Potomac River. According to the scientist Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who was present, it flew between 80 and 100 feet and then "settled down so softly and gently that it touched the water without the least shock, and was in fact immediately ready for another trial." The second test was equally successful. The speed was between twenty and twenty-five miles an hour and the distance flown about 3,000 feet. Professor Langley's first aerodrome, as he called it (the word is now used to mean aviation field), was made in the form of a tandem monoplane about sixteen feet long from end to end and with wings measuring about thirteen feet from tip to tip. The steam engine and propellers were placed between the forward and aft planes. The whole machine weighed about thirty pounds and of course was too small to carry a pilot.