But in the end Cody fought down ridicule and won fame, for in competition with some of the finest machines of the day, piloted by some of our most expert airmen, he won the prize of L5000 offered by the Government in 1912 in connection with the Army trials for aeroplanes. In these trials he astonished everyone by obtaining a speed of over 70 miles an hour in his biplane, which weighed 2600 pounds.
In the opening years of the present century Cody spent much time in demonstrations with huge box-kites, and for a time this form of kite was highly popular with boys of North London. In these kites he made over two hundred flights, reaching, on some occasions, an altitude of over 2000 feet. At all times of the day he could have been seen on the slopes of the Palace Hill, hauling these strange-looking, bat-like objects backward and forward in the wind. Reports of his experiments appeared in the Press, but Cody was generally looked upon as a "crank". The War Office, however, saw great possibilities in the kites for scouting purposes in time of war, and they paid Cody L5000 for his invention.
It is a rather romantic story of how Cody came to take up experimental work with kites, and it is repeated as it was given by a Mohawk chief to a newspaper representative.
"On one occasion when Cody was in a Lancashire town with his Wild West show, his son Leon went into the street with a parrot-shaped kite. Leon was attired in a red shirt, cowboy trousers, and sombrero, and soon a crowd of youngsters in clogs was clattering after him.
"'If a boy can interest a crowd with a little kite, why can't a man interest a whole nation?' thought Cody—and so the idea of man-lifting kites developed."
In 1903 Cody made a daring but unsuccessful attempt to cross the Channel in a boat drawn by two kites. Had he succeeded he intended to cross the Atlantic by similar means.
Later on, Cody turned his attention to the construction of aeroplanes, but he was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. His machines were built with the most primitive tools, and some of our modern constructors, working in well-equipped "shops", where the machinery is run by electric plant, would marvel at the work accomplished with such tools as those used by Cody.
Most of Cody's flights were made on Laffan's Plain, and he took part in the great "Round Britain" race in 1911. It was characteristic of the man that in this race he kept on far in the wake of MM. Beaumont and Vedrines, though he knew that he had not the slightest chance of winning the prize; and, days after the successful pilot had arrived back at Brooklands, Cody's "bus" came to earth in the aerodrome. "It's dogged as does it," he remarked, "and I meant to do the course, even if I took a year over it."
Of Cody's sad death at Farnborough, when practising in the ill-fated water-plane which he intended to pilot in the sea flight round Great Britain in 1913, we speak in a later chapter.