Page:Bedford-Jones--Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril.djvu/160

 "Well, anyway, the locksmith kept a-going till he tried the second story and then the third, and finally he was able to fly over houses and rivers, so they say. I wasn't there. So other people, on down through the centuries, kept juggling their brains, and projecting and projecting. At last, somebody in France invented the 'aeronautical fish' that attracted a lot of attention. This was a sort of balloon, shaped like a fish, and was propelled with wings, or fins, worked by cranks—not human ones. But the trouble with even the best of these devices was that they could operate only when the air was absolutely still, so of course they were of no practical service. It was evident, too, to more sensible men that the fish idea was off, so far as the air was concerned, but, if anything serviceable was to come, the machine would have to be modeled after a bird, which is going back to the Greeks, after all.

"Even the balloon idea doesn't go so far back," proceeded Turner. "It depended on the discovery of hydrogen gas about a hundred and fifty years ago. Then somebody thought of filling hogs' bladders and paper-bags with this