to soar by
means of the lighter-than-air globes and to be navigated aloft by oars
and sails.

But while philosophers in their libraries were designing airships on
paper and propounding their theories, venturesome men, "crawling, but
pestered with the thought of wings," were making pinions of various
fabrics and trying them upon the wind. Four years after Lana suggested
his airship with balls and oars, Besnier, a French locksmith, made a
flying machine of four collapsible planes like book covers suspended
on rods. With a rod over each shoulder, and moving the two front
planes with his arms and the two back ones by his feet, Besnier gave
exhibitions of gliding from a height to the earth. But his machine could
not soar. What may be called the first patent on a flying machine was
recorded in 1709 when Bartholomeo de Gusmao, a friar, appeared before
the King of Portugal to announce that he had invented a flying machine
and to request an order prohibiting other men from making anything
of the sort. The King decreed pain of death to all infringers; and to
assist the enterprising monk in improving his machine, he appointed him
first professor of mathematics in the University of Coimbra with a fat
stipend. Then the Inquisition stepped in. The inventor's suave reply,
to the effect that to show men how to soar to Heaven was an essentially
religious act, availed him nothing. He was pronounced a sorcerer, his
machine was destroyed, and he was imprisoned till his death. Many other
men fashioned unto themselves wings; but, though some of them might
glide earthward, none could rise upon the wind.

While the principle by which the balloon, father of the dirigible, soars
and floats could be deduced by men of natural powers of observation and
little science from the action of clouds and smoke, the airplane,
the Winged Victory of our day, waited upon two things--the scientific
analysis of the anatomy of bird wings and the internal combustion
engine.

These two things necessary to convert man into a rival of the albatross
did not come at once and together. Not the dream of flying but the need
for quantity and speed in production to take care of the wants of a
modern civilization compelled the invention of the internal combustion
engine. Before it appeared in the realm of mechanics, experimenters were
applying in the construction of flying models the knowledge supplied
by Cayley in 1796, who made an instrument of whalebone, corks, and
f