The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-05-24

was an airship that would not capsize when the wind was blowing.
 Writing in a recent issue of Mcclure magazine, George Kibbe Turner quotes the Wright brothers as asserting that no one who had not navigated the ar can appreciate the real difficulty of me- ehancal dight-that the great problem the problem of equilibrium-neyer occurs to any one who has not actually tried flying. Thus the real question Of the ny ing machine is how to keep it from turning over
 ..The chief trouble' the brothers ex- pIained. lis the turmoil of the air. The common impression is that the atmos- phere runs in comparatively regular cur rents which we call winds. NO one who has not been thrown about on q gliding aeroplane--rising or falling l0, 2O or even 30 feet in a few seeonds-can understand how utterly wrong this loea is. The air along the surface or tne earth as matter of fact is continually churning. It is thrown upward from every irregularity, like sea breakers on a coast nne every hill and tree and building sends up a wave or slanting current And it moves not directly back and forth upon it's coast line, like the sea. but in whirling rotary masses Some of these rise up hundreds of yards In a fairly strong wind the air near the earth is more disturbed than the Whirl- pools of Niagara.
 ''The problem of mechanical flight IS how to balance in this moving fluid which supports the flying machine; or, tech nically speaking, how to make the cen- ter of gravity coincide with the center of air pressure The wind often veers sey- eral times a second, quicker than thought and the center of pressure changes with it. It is as difficult to follow this een- ter of pressure as to keep your ringers on the flickering blot of light from a prism swinging in the sun.
 ''It has been the common aim of ex- perimenters with the aeroplane to solve the problem of equilibrium by some au- tomatic system of balancing. We believe that the control should be left to the operator The sense of equilibrium is very delicate and certain. If you lie upon a bed three quarters of an inch out of true. you know it at once. And this sense of equilibrium is just as reliable mile above the earth as it is on it.
 "The management of our aeroplane, like that of the bicycle, Is based upon the sense of equilibrium of the operator. The apparatus for preserving the balance of the machine consists of levers operated by simple uniform movements which re-
 
 to the air. The movement of these lev CTS very soon becomes automatic with the aviator as does the balancing of biey- cle In fact, the aeroplane is easier to learn In all our experiments with glid- ing and flying machines we have not even sprained limb we have scarcely scratched our flesh"
 Among the first to undertake the task of demonstrating that a mechanical flying machine is possible was Otto Lilllenthal, a German mechanical engineer. He made a study of the flight of birds and even tually concluded that very little was known of the laws which govern the flight of the feathered tribe He began experimenting in 1891, using wings con structed like those of soaring birds, Equipped with these, he sailed down the hillsides into valleys. After series of more than 2000 flights one of his wings gave way one day and in his tumble to earth he dislocated his spine and died the following day.
 That was In 1896. Three years later an Englishman, Percy s. Pitcher began ex'