THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR.
THE month of November, 1906, will probably be looked back upon as a landmark in the history of mankind. It will be recognised as the date on which there first began a serious, general effort on the part of inventors all over the civilised world to achieve the conquest of the air. Hitherto the work of inventors bent on success with airships, dirigible balloons, and other forms of flying machines has been spasmodic and irregular, hampered as regards individuals by lack of money to carry on expensive experiments, and delayed, from a public point of view, by the natural selfishness of men working in secret. The knowledge and experience of each of the in- ventors, who have hitherto been working apart, would probably, if thrown into the common stock, have resulted before now in the solution of the problem of aerial navigation. However, a certain amount of work has been tested before the public, and as a consequence public interest has been greatly aroused, and that interest has been duly reflected in the action of the news- papers. M. Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian engineer, who some five years ago first steered a dirigible balloon round the Eiffel Tower, succeeded the other day in mounting into the air on an aeroplane, which may be roughly described as a motor-
driven machine buoyed by flat surfaces, and flew a distance of two hundred and thirty yards. That may not, perhaps, be the longest flight with an aeroplane on record, for there are two brothers of the name of Wright working at Dayton, Ohio, who claim to have accomplished much with their flying machine which they are unwilling to show at present to the public. But M. Dumont's continued successes have had immediate and remarkable results. The Paris Malin began by offering a prize of £4,000, which was increased by public subscription to £10,000, to the winner of an air-race from Paris to London in 1908. The Daily Mail on Saturday last bettered this by an offer of a prize of £10,000 for the first flight made by aero- plane from London to Manchester. Other prizes have been offered, designed particularly to attract British inventors, including a very spirited offer by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu on behalf of his paper, the Car. He offers a trophy worth I:500, a prize of £1,000, and further, he will allow inventors to try experiments on a portion of his Hampshire estates which is specially well suited for the purpose. If the chief difficulty which has hitherto impeded invention has been the lack of ally prospect of financial success, that difficulty has been removed.
M. Santos-Dumont has stated to an interviewer that he thinks it is quite possible that the prize offered for the flight from London to Manchester may be won next year. Whether it is won next year or the year after, or in the next ten years, one thing is practically certain, that the problem of flight through the air either by aeroplane or some other contrivance is within measurable distance of solution. If a man can make a flight on a motor-driven aeroplane for over two hundred yards, he will be able to make longer and longer flights with improvements in the make of his motor and with fresh experi- ence as to the lifting power of flat surfaces presented to the air. Now that so considerable a beginning has been made, the rest is bound to follow. It was always, of course, antecedently probable that man would some day discover the principle of the flight of birds, because, to begin with, the body of a bird is in itself heavier than air, and therefore it must be by the beating of flat surfaces by muscular action against the air that flight is possible ; and next, because with the knowledge that muscular action was in some way applied, it remained only to go through the various ways in which it could be applied in order to discover the right one. But if any one were inclined to doubt the probability of the success of some form of flying machine, now that an inventor has actually "flown" a short distance, he might be recommended to study the evolution of all new methods of locomotion. It is only ninety-two years ago that Stephenson's first locomotive engine ran at the rate of six miles an hour, and it is within the memory of men still living that the Liverpool and Man- chester Railway Company offered the prize of £500 for the best locomotive which was won by Stephenson's `.Rocket.' In later years, the evolution of the bicycle and motor-car has been even more rapid. The " safety " bicycle is an invention practically of the last twenty years ; at the Jubilee Sports held at Windsor in 1887, for instance, all the principal prizes in the bicycle races were won by the old-fashioned high
velocipede. As for the motor-car, it was suggested only the other day that a collection should be made of the mildewy models of ten and twelve years ago, to be presented to a museum for future generations to laugh over. It may well be that M. Dumont's aeroplane of to-day may be gazed at as a venerable curiosity by museum sightseers ten years hence.
The question which is chiefly interesting, however, is not whether flying machines will be built, but what difference they will make to us. If it once became possible for a journey
by aeroplane to be as easy and inexpensive as a journey by train or steamer, the change of conditions under which
humanity spends its life on this planet would be the greatest in the history of the world. In comparison with so great a change as that, all other changes in methods of locomotion would be small and almost unimportant alterations. The speed of horses, which until a century ago limited the speed of wheeled traffic, has remained the same from the days when the Sun-god was first imagined as driving a chariot to the present time ; and the increase of pace from the twenty miles an hour at which a four-in-band could be driven to the fifty or sixty miles an hour of a Scottish express is nothing pro- digious after all. But no one knows yet the possibilities of pace through the air. The flight of certain birds we know to be greater than the fastest express ; teal, for instance, have been timed to fly at the rate of one hundred and twenty miles per hour, and probably in a gale many birds fly faster than that. But the question of speed, although interesting, is not the most important question. The most important question is whether flight can be made safe. The first experiments in the use of flying machines, it is pretty certain, will result in considerable loss of life ; and it is not impossible that inventors may find themselves in a few years fighting with extremely stringent legislation. It is not difficult, when contemplating the intense resentment evoked in turn by the railway train, the bicycle, and the motor-car, to imagine the explosion of hatred which would follow on the killing of a pedestrian by a broken aeroplane, or the panic which would result if, say, an air-omnibus tipped its passengers into the Straits of Dover, or, worse than that, into a London thoroughfare. There would be petitions signed in half the parishes of the United Kingdom praying Parliament to make illegal the use of such diabolical inventions ; and, indeed, it would be diffieult to withhold sympathy from petitioners attempting, like Mark Twain acting as second in his famous duel, to ensure the safety of "disinterested parties passing in between." Legislation of some kind would certainly be necessary, if only to preserve the privacy of householders and owners of landed property. It would be intolerable if no single win low of a house were secure from the prying eye of the ill-mann‘tred aeronaut, and it might possibly be found necessary to prss a law making effective the theoretical rights of the owner of land to the air for a certain height above the level of his park or garden,—a sug- gestion which recalls the story of the outraged gardener who. explaining his inability to keep a neighbour's pigeons out of his master's grounds, remarked in an aggrieved tone that it was "no use building fences against things what flies." As to more serious legislation, one of the first uses which prophets of the future have determined for the flying machine is as the battleship of the air. That may come ; but there will follow or precede the air-battleship a Berne Convention limiting its work. The future of battling in the air may possibly be a contingency for which progressing humanity may find it needless to provide.
But with all the possibilities of progress in the actual making of air machines considered, there yet remains one enormous factor to be taken into account in estimating the future of air travelling. That is the intense dislike which the majority of men and women have to looking down from a height. You may improve aeroplanes to any extent, but you cannot alter the constitution of the human body, and only persons with a good " head " will ever get into a flying machine. So long as there is no absolute necessity to travel by methods different from those of to-day, most people will prefer to travel along the ground or on the water. When travel by air becomes generally possible the aeroplane will begin as a toy, and the last stage to which it will come will be the commercial. When that stage comes, and companies are being formed to build air-omnibuses and air-liners, the great fact will have to be taken into account that perhaps the half of humanity have no "head." That is one of the chief reflections on the future of air travelling,—unless it be the carious thought that so great an alteration in the possibilities of human existence should have been hurried into the near future by the offer 'of a prize of mere money. Ten or twenty -thousand pounds is a good round sum ; but that a sum of money relatively so small should be a determining factor in deciding the question whether men shall or shall not have flying machines will be pointed out in the schoolrooms of future generations as one of the wonders of history.
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