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Aviation History
1909
1909 - 0354.PDF
JUNE 19, 1909. FRESH IN the very active world of flight progress comes to light in gushes. At least, that is the situation that obtains as far as the public is concerned. Students and the relatively few who are initiate in the matter of the endeavours that are being made towards the advance- ment of the science in its various phases are well aware that the moments of striking achievements that attract attention throughout the civilised world are merely the fruits of years of patient and, for the most part, obscure, if not actually secret, endeavour. It takes long trial to reach a crowning point. The public goes only by demonstration. That is why the history of inventive progress dates everything from the time that practical results are achieved. Thus, when the history of flight comes to be written in future generations, it will be found that up to the period of a month ago successful flight with heavier-than-air machines will be recorded as having been to the credit of biplanes, for to that period it will be said that, beyond demonstrating their superiority in the matter of speediness, monoplanes could not match the other points of utility revealed by the leading types of biplanes, in that, with possibly one exception— namely, the flight of M. Bleriot from Toury to Arthenay and back with one halt en route—monoplanes had only fluttered. During the last three weeks, however, Mr. Hubert Latham has leapt into sudden fame by a series of astonishing; performances with an " Antoinette " monoplane, which, it chances, is not even one of latest design ; while within the last week the indefatigable and plucky M. Bleriot has done an utterly unprecedented thing for any heavier-than-air type of machine by driving one of his large monoplanes in a flight with a total of three people on board. It is the combination of these two sets of performances that indicates that the monoplane has "arrived." Mr. Latham has demonstrated duration of flight to a sufficient extent to prove to the satisfaction of intelligent folk that, under favourable weather conditions, the flying of the Channel would be a mere theatrical performance on his part, just as it would for any thoroughly trained sports- man put in charge of a Wright biplane, to name but one type. That is to say, those two classes of machines have been proven capable of remaining in the air, a monoplane for well over an hour, and a biplane for over two and a quarter hours, without alighting. But whereas in the case of the biplane the public mind has been prepared for six or eight months past for almost any performance in units of hours in the matter of durability, when we turn to the monoplane it is merely within the last three weeks that the necessary, proof of the potential range of use and duration of flight of these machines has been supplied. Among other points it bears out the line that has always been adopted in these pages, that power flight will not be confined to any one make of machine. There are fundamental principles that man has had to comply with when building watercraft, and those principles have been learnt only as the result of trial and error, for the savage races that evolved crude boats and " dug-outs" for themselves did so merely by essay and observation, the most suitable type for their needs being evolved as the inevitable result of generations of making shift. In the matter of aircraft, more scientific and less haphazard methods have been adopted, but the nature of the process is precisely the same in both cases. Knowledge of what may be called the pheno- mena of flight has been gradually and painstakingly gained, frequently at the cost of human life and through generations of investigation, often interrupted for long spells, and not occasionally of a kind wherein there has been an overlapping of labours owing to the non-existence in former years of means of keeping experimenters informed of the fruits of trials carried out by fellow- workers in the same field of science. Those dark days are overpast. By reason as well of the aeronautical institutions established in all the leading countries of the world, as of the special Press that is being devoted entirely to the science of human flight, it is now possible to economise all that dissipation of effort, and to codify what certain knowledge has been acquired concerning the phenomena of the subject. Let us put the matter in popular parlance. " If you had a tea-tray and a sufficiently light and powerful motor, together with effective propellers, nothing on earth could prevent your flying if you once got up the requisite speed," observed a student of aeronautics the other day. And there is a deal of truth underlying the quite conscious and intentional exaggeration of wording. This question of flying with monoplanes seems to lead us to the conclusion that up to the stage of present achieve- ment, but under all reservation as concerns the future, these single surface machines have called for an eminently sporting class of man. For example, M. Bleriot has probably had more miraculous escapes than any other living man ; M. Esnault-Pelterie is a man whose tempera- ment combines all the dash and daring of the sportsman with amazing engineering ability; and Mr. Hubert Latham has certainly displayed a deal of " devil-may-care " conduct that affords about the most striking contrast conceivable with the cautious, calculated and infinitely patient method of procedure followed by such men as Wilbur and Orville Wright, for example. There is something Byronic in the methods of the latest " Frenchman of English blood " to leap prominently into the public view in connection with human flight. Of Mr. Latham, it may be said that he awoke one morning to find that he had a motor that could work, so he set it going and it made his machine fly, and himself famous. Not for him the cautious system of increasing flights at the rate of ten minutes each day. As long as his machine would keep in the air, so long would he have it to stay there with himself aboard. That is the spirit that has in a large measure enabled the single-surface machines to come once more within close range of the most successful performances that have yet been made "with two deckers. The purely scientific class of flying-man will not Utter a word concerning what he hopes to do on the morrow ; the intrepid sportsman of the Latham type wagers with his friends that he will cross the Channel by air before the first of August. Now that the preliminary scientific work is at an end we are in need of such men, because their delight and their real bent is in demonstration. They revel in " breaking the record," and reck not for risks run. Of course, there must be the inevitable toll of accidents ; but in view of the magnitude of such a thing as the achievement of enabling mankind to ride the air at will, we must expect to pay the usual price in human life. Meantime, it is extraordinary that so much has been achieved at numerically so small a cost. 356
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