The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-06-17

NNFN'N
 have seen it from childhood, Perhaps
 if we had seen cannon balls floating in
 the air from our childhood we would
 not stop to inquire how they did it, any
 more than we now do how the turkey
 buzzard does it. I am speaking now,
 of course, not of birds that fly by tlap-
 ping their wings, and with almost no visible expenditure of force"
 It was from watching the turkey
 bu22ard that Professor Langley came
 to conclude that it was possible to
 build solid models very much heavier
 than the air and drive and direct such
 machine with such an ordinary force
 as steam. That is to say, he became
 convinced that there are certain shapes
 in which matter can be disposed of
 that the more rapidly it moves through
 the air, in a senSa, the less power 1t
 takes to move it, and that @ machine could be built to skim through the air very much as a skater skins along the surface of very thin iCe-the faster you
 go the less danger.
 Professor Langley believed that soar
 ing birds have an intuitiVe knowledge
 of certain properties in the air by
 
 rising and falling, soaring up and sail
 ing down and turning about in circles without any Tapping of their wings or apparently any other effort. Just what these properties were he attempt ed to find out and develop by eXperi- | ment. I believe that in this work he
 was associated with his friend, Graham Bell, or at any rate, Professor Bell spent a great deal of time oyer the
 same subject, and has mass of note books filled with records of his eXperi-
 ments.
 Well, the upshot of the matter was
 that from these experiments it was de- monstrated that a machine, not bal
 loon, can be made which will produce enough mechanical power to support itself in the air and fly. Though Professor Langley adds "this is not saying that we have yet got skill enough to manage this power so as to
 rise and fly about in the air and de-
 scend safely" What is actually de- monstrated repeated hundreds of
 times in the laboratory, and finally
 with the successful machine which
 Professor Langley built, is that the fly ing machine is possible. All that now
 remains is to perfect it and learn how
 to manage it.
 The experiments which Professor Langley carried on resulted in showing that an expenditure of one horse pow CT, in horizontal flight, will support about two hundred pounds and at the same time carry this burden at a rate | of fifty miles an hour through the air. Now there have recently been built steam engines which with fuel and wa i ter for a short flight weigh a good deal 1 less than twenty pounds. The relative weight of an engine decreases with the
 number of it's horse power, so that there seems no reason to doubt that
 what Professor Langley has done on a small scale may be done on large one, and very shortly at that.
 | Professor Langleys machine meas
 ures but fourteen feet from tip to tip, weighs complete twenty four pounds, 1 is solidly built of steel, and, compared with the air which supports it. has a weight of a thousand to one. It has no | balloon arrangement of any sort, and | instead of trying to build a vessel 1 lighter than the air and filling it with | gases to make it rise, Professor Lang | ley has practically built a machine as | heavy as he likes and relied upon its
 shape and power for successful flight. l This is just the opposite of what al- most every other eXperimenter i'll this | field has tried to do although it was | apparent to every one that a flying machine to be Of any commercial or | practical value whatever would have to | be heavy enough and powerful enough | to drive straight against or across and | in and out of the stoutest gale that | blows Otherwise it would forever be at the mercy of the element. What | was necessary was a ship which would ride a storm in the air as a great ocean | liner rides a storm at sea.
 | Professor Langley has been very careful to say that he never expressed i his opinion that man could fly by his 1 own strength. But he has demonstra- 1 ted that powerful machines, thousands | of times as heavy as the air itself, can | be built to navigate the air. As to just i the measure of his present. success the
 secretary of the Smithsonian is exceed | ingly reticent-as retiCent, in fact, as Professor Bell is enthusiastic. The lat | ter says that he entertains no doubt | whatever that a practical air ship for use in war is but a very short way off. | Indeed, Professor Bell inclines to tho l idea that within five years his friend | Langlcy's invention will have absolute l ly changed the face of warfare, will | have made armies an impertinenCe and
 our four million dollar prize battleships
 so much useless junk. Just so soon, he | thinks, as it is possible to build a ma
 chine that will carry half a ton or ton of dynamite through the air and be
 easily manageable nobody will want | to fight. An army will not care to rest | under the constant apprehension of | having ton of high explosive, sutli-
 cient to blot them out in second,
 dropped down upon them. Nor will q | battleship be of any avail against a | similar attacking force.
 | It is agreed now that it is practically | impossible to hit a swiftly moving war
 ship with the speed of twenty knots or
 more with land gun-that is, at any | considerable distance. How much
 more impossible will it be to hit a com
 pact mass of steel lowering SO high
 overhead as to seem dwarfed to a
 speck and circling at the rate of thirty
 or fifty miles an hour!
 Literally Professor Bell believes that
 we shall soon realize Tennyson'S poetic | fancy of the WarshipS of the world: 1 GraDpling in the central blue.