Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/602

 cheering of the spectators and the tooting of automobile horns the machine sped away toward the two captive balloons which marked the coarse and gave some idea of the proper altitude to maintain. It grew smaller and smaller in the distance, and it could be seen that the wind was carrying it slightly out of its course toward the east, but it turned and made for the balloon marking the turning point, where representatives of the United States Signal Corps were stationed. They took the official time of the turn, and the machine started back. There was a moment of suspense when it disappeared from view. The strong downward currents of wind bore the aero- plane lower and lower until it was hidden by the trees. Soon it came into sight again and rapidly grew more distinct until it swept over the finishing line, almost over the heads of the cheering crowds, and with a graceful circle landed near the aeroplane shed. The greatest aeronautical event in history was finished. The time was fourteen minutes and forty-two seconds, which meant a speed of a little more than forty-two miles an hour.

Just before he left for Europe, Orville Wright stated that the machine could fly for a period of twenty-five hours; and if it maintained a speed of forty miles an hour, this would mean covering about a thousand miles, which, in the light of present developments, does not seem too much to. expect. He is not over-sanguine about the aeroplane's revolutionizing the transportation of the future. It will scarcely displace the railroad or the steamboat; its expenditure of fuel is necessarily too great. The airship, he thinks, will have its chief value for warfare, and for reaching inaccessible places : it may also be used for service like carrying mail. The eventual speed of the aeroplane will be easily sixty miles an hour with a probability of its being forced up to a hundred miles an hour. Orville Wright objects that many writers have characterized the brothers as mechanics, and have taken it for granted that their invention has come from mechanical skill. "We are not mechanics," he said, including his brother, "we are scientists."