A Project for Flying.
In Earnest at Last!
1871
Price, TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.
A Project for Flying.
In Earnest At Last.
The following appeared in one of our public journals of the date indicated
To the Editor of the Tribune.
Sir:--You rightly appreciate the interest with which the popular mind regards all efforts in the direction of navigating the air.
One man of my acquaintance was deeply interested to know the results of the California Experiment, because he alone, as he believed, had questioned Nature and learned from her the great secret of aerial navigation.
To-day's Tribune brings us the full account of the machine, its performance and modus operandi; and without the authority of my friend, I can pronounce at once that the thing is simply ridiculous. It is the same old useless effort, with the same impossible agents. But to-day, within twenty miles of Trinity steeple, lives the man who can give to the world the secret of navigating the air, in calm or in storm, with the wind or against it; skimming the earth, or in the highest currents, just as he wills, with all the ease, and all the swiftness, and all the exactitude of a bird.
My friend is only waiting for an opportunity to perfect his plan, when he will make it known.
Yours truly,
W. H. K.
New York; June 14th, 1869.
Two years have passed and no progress has been made in aerial navigation.
The California Experiment failed. The great Airship "City of New York," had previously escaped the same fate, only because more prudent than her successor she declined a trial. The promising and ambitious enterprise of Mr. Henson has hardly been spoken of for a quarter of a century. And notwithstanding the fact that the number of ascensions in balloons in the United States and Europe must be counted by thousands, and although the exigencies of recent wars have made them useful, yet it must be confessed that the art of navigating the air remains in much the same state in which the brothers Montgolfiers left it at the close of the last century.