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He next proceeded to steam-driven models in which for a time he found an insuperable difficulty in keeping down the weight, which, in practice, always exceeded his calculation; and it was not till the end of 1893 that he felt himself prepared for a fair trial.
The plow and scythe of the New England colonist on his little farm were metamorphosed into the colossal steam-driven shapes, in which machinery seems transmuted into intelligence, as he moved to the conquest of the acres of the West which summoned him to dominion. First the need was felt; the contrivance was created in response.
The domestic industry of the cottage and the individual labor of the artisan gave place to the factory with its regiment of workers and its steam-driven machinery. The economic isolation of the single worker, of the village, even of the district and the nation, was lost in the general cohesion in which the whole industrial world merged into one. The life of the individual changed accordingly.
And through it all thundered the roaring of the storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the propeller lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of every plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.
His left hand beat at Lee's face, struck and battered again only to come back like a steam-driven piston to hammer again. But Bud Lee's pain-racked body clung on, his thumb and fingers sank and sank deeper into the corded muscles of the heaving throat, crooked like talons, white and hard and relentless. Trevors's eyes were terrible, filled with hatred, red-flecked with rage.
He had, for the most part, after great struggles, secured a shorter workday, but if the hours were shorter the work was more tense and racking than in the days before steam-driven machinery supplanted the hand tool. The mass of the workers were in a state of dependence and poverty.
Then the engines took their turn, and the yacht exchanged the steady roll of a topsail schooner for the quivering uneasiness of a steam-driven ship.
It was a very subdued, scarcely apparent sound, but it was there it was unmistakable. And suddenly though in those days we were only just becoming familiar with them I knew what it was the engine of some sort of automobile; but not in action; the sound came from the boilers or condensers, or whatever the things were called which they used in the steam-driven cars.
The inventor stated that 'all being arranged, the steam was up in a few seconds, when the whole apparatus spun around like any top, and mounted into the air faster than a bird; to what height it ascended I had no means of ascertaining; the distance travelled was across two fields, where, after a long search, I found the machine minus the wings, which had been torn off in contact with the ground. This could hardly be described as successful flight, but it was an advance in the construction of machines on the helicopter principle, and it was the first steam-driven model of the type which actually flew.
Several inventors were busy trying to solve the difficulty. They all knew that steam would have to be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam engine was very old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century before Christ, has described to us several bits of machinery which were driven by steam. The people of the Renaissance had played with the notion of steam-driven war chariots.
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