delanceyplace.com 2/25/08 - flying machines and editorials

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In today's excerpt - flying machines and editorials. In the years surrounding 1900, the press is consumed with hundreds of stories of men who are attempting make the first flight - but all these attempts fail. After the typically disastrous flight attempt of the distinguished Professor Langley in October 1903, in an editorial entitled 'Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly', the New York Times pronounces that it will take a million years for man to take flight:

" 'The ridiculous fiasco which attended the attempt at aerial navigation in the Langley flying machine was not unexpected, unless possibly by the distinguished Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who devised it, and his assistants -- including Professor Manly, who undertook the voyage. ... At the supreme moment, the device was shot down the incline from which it was to derive, by gravity its initial momentum. When the instant came when it was to defy gravity ... it described a relatively long and very graceful trajectory, the chord of which was about a hundred yards, and when its impetus was exhausted gradually curved downward until it disappeared, 'plunk,' into the river. ... Professor Manly came to the surface thoroughly wet, but smiling, explanatory, and delightfully confident that the principle of the Langley device is all right. ...

"Professor Langley and his assistants are very learned men. ... They have undoubtedly worked out the equations of levitation, so to speak, with infinite patience and infallible exactness. The difficulty probably resided in the fact that the apparatus was not made just as it was calculated ... and ... the least margin of variation permissible in exact mechanics is probably much too wide to warrant the ... results sought. ...

"It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitavle material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation. ... Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all, and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one to ten million years. ... No doubt the problem has attraction for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.'

"Note that on the same day this editorial appeared, on Kill Devil Hills, N.C., in his diary, a bicycle mechanic named Orville Wright wrote: 'We unpacked rest of goods for new machine.' "