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Updated: May 12, 2025
Danti's story may be taken as fact or left as fable, and with it the period of legend or vague statement may be said to end the rest is history, both of genuine experimenters and of charlatans.
While this of itself is also a business of considerable magnitude in its aggregate yearly transactions, it calls for no special comment in regard to commercial production, except to note that a corps of experimenters is constantly employed refining and perfecting details of the machine. Its basic features of operation as conceived by Edison remain unchanged.
Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to the case.
Not until the eighteenth century did the experimenters with lighter-than-air devices show any practical results. Not until the twentieth century did the advocates of the heavier-than-air machines show the value of their fundamental idea. The former had to discover a gaseous substance actually lighter, and much lighter, than the surrounding atmosphere before they could make headway.
This however was left to the two Americans, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who have done more to advance the art of navigating the air than all the other experimenters whose names we have used. The story of the Wright brothers is one of boyhood interest gradually developed into the passion of a lifetime.
Twenty years ago experimenters said: 'Give us a motor that will develop 1 horse-power with the weight of a barnyard fowl, and we will very soon fly. At the present moment they had motors which would develop over 2 horse-power and did not weigh more than a 12-pound barnyard fowl. These engines had been developed I might say created by the builders of motor cars.
They boxed the brig about and braced sharp on the starboard tack, steering again by the feel of the wind and the rattling of shaking leeches aloft. The removal of bandages to ascertain the sun's position by sense of light or increase of pain brought agonized howls from the experimenters, and this deterred the rest. Not even by its warmth could they locate it.
A small steam-engine worked the apparatus a kind of a section of a boat which was tossed up and down violently; while in the centre was balanced a small platform, on which we experimenters stood. On large tables were laid out the working plans of the grand Bessemer steamship, to be brought out presently by a company.
Why had Fulton succeeded where others had failed? There was nothing new in his boat. Every essential feature of the Clermont had been anticipated by one or other of the numerous experimenters before him. The answer seems to be that he was a better engineer than any of them. He had calculated proportions, and his hull and his engine were in relation.
With the end of his experiments the work of da Vinci in relation to flying became neglected for nearly four centuries. Apart from these two experimenters, there is little to record in the matter either of experiment or study until the seventeenth century.
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