across an account of Lilienthal; the reading of it
impressed him as deeply as it impressed the Wrights. Here was a man, he
thought, who had discovered the right way of learning to fly; if only
the way were followed, success was sure. Like the Wrights, Ferber lays
stress chiefly on practice. It was he, not Lilienthal, who was the
author of the saying, 'To design a flying machine is nothing; to build
one is nothing much; to try it in the air is everything'. In the book on
aviation which he wrote shortly before his death in 1909 he expounds his
creed and narrates his experiences. His mathematical knowledge, he says,
served him well, for it saved him from being condemned as an empiric by
those dogmatic men of science, very numerous in France (and, he might
have added, in the universities of all countries), who believe that
science points the way to practice, whereas the most that science can
do, says Ferber, is to follow in the wake of practice, and interpret it.
So he set himself to work on a plan as old as the world--first to create
the facts, and then to expound them in speech and writing.

He began to build gliders, but had no success with them until he found
out for himself what he had not gathered from his reading of
Lilienthal--that an up-current of wind is necessary for a prolonged
glide. His first successful flight was made with his fourth glider on
the 7th of December 1901. He got into touch with Mr. Chanute, another of
Lilienthal's scattered disciples, and through him was supplied with
papers and photographs concerning the gliding experiments of the
Wrights. These were a revelation to him, and he used them in making his
fifth glider, which was a great improvement on its predecessors. He
lectured at Lyons to the Aero Club of the Rhone on the progress of
aviation by means of gliding, and published his lecture in the _Revue
d'Artillerie_ of March 1904. About this time the air was full of rumours
of flight. M. Ernest Archdeacon, of Paris, took up the subject with
ardour, wrote many articles on it, and encouraged others to work at it.
A young man, called Gabriel Voisin, who heard Captain Ferber lecture at
Lyons, came on to the platform after the lecture and declared that he
wished to devote his life to the cause of aviation. The next morning he
started for Paris, and with the help of M. Archdeacon founded the
earliest aeroplane factory in France--the firm of the brothers Voisin,
which became the mainstay of early Frenc