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So definite for a time was this view on the eastern side of the Channel that for some years practically all the progress that was made in the development of power-driven planes was made in Britain.
In 1807, the first practical steamboat puffed slowly up the Hudson, while the people ranged along the banks gazed in wonder. Even the grim walls of the Palisades must have been surprised at the strange intruder. Robert Fulton's Clermont was the forerunner of the fleets upon fleets of power-driven craft that have stemmed the currents of a thousand streams and parted the waves of many seas.
Nearly thirty years later in 1837 he made the first attempt at establishing an aeronautical society, but at that time the power-driven plane was regarded by the great majority as an absurd dream of more or less mad inventors, while ballooning ranked on about the same level as tight-rope walking, being considered an adjunct to fairs and fetes, more a pastime than a study.
It embodied the results of very lengthy experiments carried out both with gliders and power-driven machines by Colonel Capper, Lieut. Gibbs, and Lieut. Dunne, and constituted the longest step so far taken in the direction of inherent stability.
There was, furthermore, little of that curse of impersonality and indifference which too commonly prevails in the factories of the present-day world where power-driven machinery sets the pace, where the employers have no relations with the employed outside of work hours, where the proprietors indeed are scattered to the four winds, where the directors confine their attention to finance, and where the one duty of the superintendent is to procure a maximum output at a minimum cost.
However, it would be of little or no advantage in reducing the size of the motor in a power-driven machine, because the lessened thrust would be counterbalanced by the increased speed per minute.
At the same time it was realised that there was a definite relation between lateral balance and directional control, and the rudder controls and wing-warping wires were accordingly connected This ended the pioneer gliding experiments of Wilbur and Orville Wright though further glides were made in subsequent years as the following year, 1903, saw the first power-driven machine leave the ground.
If Ader actually did what he claimed, then the position which the Wright Brothers hold as first to navigate the air in a power-driven plane is nullified.
A good glider launched from a second-floor window facing a large lawn should travel many yards before coming to grass. Large gliders of the types detailed above can be made of very stout paper stiffened with slips of cane or bamboo; but the time they demand in construction might perhaps be more profitably spent on a power-driven aeroplane such as forms the subject of the next chapter.
One could not have little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the same world.
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