d in the few discouraged pioneers
of those days a quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I write
hangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photograph that Professor
Langley sent me sixteen years ago. It shows the flight of the first
piece of human machinery heavier than air that ever kept itself up for
any length of time. It was a model, a little affair that would not have
lifted a cat; it went up in a spiral and came down unsmashed, bringing
back, like Noah's dove, the promise of tremendous things.

That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall how
cautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying. I was
quite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we should
see men flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years to
come it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and
skill. We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeply
impressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge
mathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitch
fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching _must_ increase until up went
its nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggerated
every possibility of instability. We imagined that when the aeroplane
wasn't "kicking up ahind and afore" it would be heeling over to the
lightest side wind. A sneeze might upset it. We contrasted our poor
human equipment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has had
ten million years of evolution by way of a start....

The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with Mr.
Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt.

Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity to
speculations about the psychological and physiological effects of
flying. Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high tower
feel some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread.
Even if men struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn't they be
smitten up there by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose all
self-control? And, above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing make
them quite horribly sea-sick?

I have always been a little haunted by that last dread. It gave a little
undertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I got
aboard the waterplane this morning--that sort of faint, thin funk that
so readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; w