Gentlemen of the Academy:
The problem of artificial flight is of such great importance to civilization; so interesting and fascinating, not only to the student, but to every one; and it allows us to indulge in such a wide field for speculation as to the great changes which will be wrought by the practical solution of it in the social, political and commercial world, that I must beg of you to consider only my good intentions in appearing before you, and pardon my shortcomings as a lecturer. It is my first attempt, and is simply undertaken to bring the subject more understandingly before the public, that they may assist, morally, and pecuniarily, the several inventors who are wrestling with it more or less successfully—some rather less. If only one inventor in a hundred should meet with flattering results, the attention bestowed upon all will be repaid a thousand fold by that one's success.
The idea of sailing through the air in a flying machine is not new, nor such an absurd one as is generally supposed; and it is indeed important to investigate and lay it before the public more directly than has been done heretofore through the medium of great, musty and long-winded volumes. If found to seem practicable and feasible, it is for you, gentlemen, to see that the future great State of California shall also be ahead in this—one of the greatest and most important inventions of the age—as she is, and has been in many other things before.
The subject has really been taken hold of in a thorough and scientific manner only the last few years; but with such earnestness and scientific knowledge and intelligence, not only by the foremost and principal society for the advancement of the art—the Aeronautic Society of Great Britain—to whom, really, the most credit must fall—but in every civilized country; and so much has been done already to prove, not only the possibility but the absolute certainty of an early practical solution of the problem, that soon we will see the air traversed in all directions, by aspiring man. Many seeming impossibilities of the present, need only time and effort to become realities in the near future.
II.—HISTORY AND FABLE.
In turning our thoughts to History, reaching back even into the mazy and wonderful ages of fable, we find that from time immemorial the great science of ærostation has occupied the minds of philosophers and inventors. There can be little doubt that it was known and made use of in olden times in isolated cases, but was again lost, like many other important inventions.
We are furnished with many interesting proofs of this. Old Chinese, Arabian and Hindu fables give some beautiful descriptions of ærial chariots, in which wizards, princes and fairies sped over the fertile and populous plains of their native country, disbursing good or evil, according to their disposition, to the poor devils crawling in the dust beneath them. The Jews had their cherubim. The Assyrians have left us their winged bulls; the Greeks, their Sphinxes; while the Roman writers describe how that mythical personage, Daedalus, a famous Athenian artificer, and builder of the Cretan labyrinth, constructed wings with which he flew across the Ægian Sea, to escape the resentment of Minos. But his son, Icarus, undoubtedly of his strength giving out, fell into the water and was drowned. Their nation has bequeathed to us various bas-reliefs, illustrative of what appear well-proportioned wings.
Archytos, the great geometrician, made a wooden dove that flew like a natural one, and the famous German astronomer, John Mueller, who died suddenly in Rome, at the age of forty, in 1476, and whose memory was celebrated last month in Germany, constructed an artificial eagle, which flew out to greet the Emperor, Charles V, when he visited Nuremberg. This Mueller was more widely known by the assumed name of "Regiomontanus,"—the "Kingshiller"—that is, "one from Kœnigsberg," a small village in the heart of Germany; the custom of the times being for learned men to adopt the latin name of their birthplace. He invented the almanac, and prepared the first astronomical tables, by the aid of which mariners, who, up to that late day could only make coasting voyages, were enabled to trust themselves to the open sea, with some degree of assurance; and Columbus was among the earliest to use these tables, twenty years afterwards, on his first discovery voyage to America.
Another German, a young watchmaker's apprentice, constructed a flying machine, with which he, when showing the same to his ignorant townspeople, flew away to escape mobbing. His bones and pieces of the machine were found some years afterward in a wild and isolated part of the Black Forest. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Giovanni Battista Dantes, of Perugia, flew several times over the Thrasimenian Sea; he certainly must have been at a considerable elevation, for he fell on a church steeple and broke a leg. Another account, particularly noticed in history, is that of a man who flew high in the air in the City of Rome, under the reign of Nero, but lost his life in the descent.