H represents a long and very slender air-receptacle made of thin rubber and inflated; this should be pointed at both ends. It may be used to keep the machine afloat when experiments are made near the water. I have not yet used this, but have allowed my machines to go to pieces. The design here given calls for aeroplanes as being more easily made than aerocurves modelled after the wings of birds, but in all probability the latter will eventually displace the former.
We are brought now, after this consideration of the greatest mechanical problem of the age, to ask, What shall be done to bring to our own century the credit and honor of reaching the solution?
The answer is, encourage experiments with soaring machines. Have regattas and large prizes. Appeal to the people’s love of sport, and show what possibilities of recreation have been suggested by the experiments of Otto Lilienthal. Tobogganing on ice we can have only a few weeks in the year: tobogganing on air is possible at all seasons. When we have made our aeroplanes or aerocurves automatic in their steering action, flights like Lilienthal’s will be, to say the least, no more dangerous than football and quite as interesting.
In order to encourage the designing and construction of soaring machines, I suggest that a sum of money be raised to be offered as a prize to the constructor of the most successful soaring-machine, the award to be made after a public trial of the same, to take place early in September of the present year (1894).
I will subscribe one hundred dollars if others will subscribe, in any sums they choose, nine hundred dollars more, to make a purse of one thousand dollars, provided that the publisher of some journal of wide influence will be custodian of the fund.
One or two more thoughts in conclusion. We have seen how the soaring bird tacks, first up, then down, then up again, and then down again. That conveys the idea of the perfection of rapid transit for passengers and freight. With the captive balloon we can tack up, with the soaring machine we can tack down. Short tacks up, long tacks down; there is no calm for the aeroplane; give it altitude and it can seize from the calm the wind of flight.
Imagine a bowling alley four hundred feet long, perfectly level, with an athlete at one end and a boy at the other. Let the chute which returns the balls have a drop of fifteen inches in every one hundred feet; imagine the game to be one of rapid transit instead of ten-pins. It is a competition between the two ends of the alley to see which end can make the most of what energy it has. Let the athlete exert all his strength to propel the spheres; see them arrive at the end of the alley after their journey of four hundred feet, with sluggish speed; the boy lifts them to a height of five feet to the chute, gives them a gentle push, and they are returned to the athlete’s end, arriving, not as sluggards, but as filled with energy. A short tack up and a long tack down is what does it.
There you have the old and the new methods of transit represented. The athlete represents the steam locomotive which, with all its polish and glitter, wastes energy. The boy represents the balloon, the lifter, which stores energy in matter by giving it altitude. The chute represents the free highway which through all the centuries men have supposed to be lacking.