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Updated: May 20, 2025
So wrote a newspaper correspondent who was present at the famous meeting, and his words may stand, being more than mere journalism; for the great flying week which opened on August 22nd, 1909, ranks as one of the great landmarks in the history of heavier-than-air flight.
There were about twenty-two establishments making different types of heavier-than-air machines, monoplane and biplane, engined for the most part with the four-cylinder Argus or the six-cylinder Mercedes vertical type engines, each of these being of 100 horse-power it was not till war brought increasing demands on aircraft that the limit of power began to rise.
It would seem to be equally essential in the case of heavier-than-air machines, but this point is still debated. Certainly it affords the occupant of a falling aeroplane a chance, no matter how slender, of reaching the ground in safety, and, for that reason, it would seem to have a place in aviation as well as in aerostation.
The following statement from him refers to a type of aeroplane of great novelty and ingenuity: "James Gordon Bennett came to me and asked that I try some primary experiments to see if aerial navigation was feasible with 'heavier-than-air' machines.
The ever increasing size, power and stability of the heavier-than-air machine is plainly shown in the latest types of battle planes, in which a spread of wings exceeding seventy-five feet is no longer a novelty.
The very fame that was attained by such pilots as became casualties conduced to the advertisement of every death, and the dangers attendant on the use of heavier-than-air machines became greatly exaggerated; considering the matter as one of number of miles flown, even in the early days, flying exacted no more toll in human life than did railways or road motors in the early stages of their development.
Its quadruple floats, each the size of a tugboat and each capable of being exhausted of air, constituted a potential lifting-force of enclosed vacuums that very largely offset the weight of the mechanism. It was still a heavier-than-air machine, but the balance could be made nearly perfect.
We should not have been so proud, I think, of our own little exploits, had we remembered those of the pioneers in aviation, so many of whom lost their lives in experiment with the first crude types of the heavier-than-air machines. They were pioneers in the fine and splendid meaning of the word men to be compared in spirit with the old fifteenth-century navigators.
Perhaps, however, this is too much to claim for any heavier-than-air machine; but at all events the new design certainly appears to give greater stability, and it is to be hoped that by this and other devices the progress of aviation will not in the future be so deeply tinged with tragedy.
"Ideas" are the very foundation-stones of invention if we may be allowed the figure of speech and Englishmen are proud, and rightly proud, to number within their ranks the original inventor of the heavier-than-air machine. For many years after the publication of Sir George Cayley's articles and lectures on aviation very little was done in the way of aerial experiments.
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