The American Air Service; A Record of Its Problems, Its Difficulties, Its Failures, and Its Final Achievements (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OP AMERICAN AVIATION Langley 's aerodrome ? Its scientific success, its tragic failure, and its final vindication ? Early experiments of the brothers Wright ?Their first nights ? Interest of the War Department awakened ? The first Government specifications for aircraft ? Official demonstration of the conquest of the air ? Birth of Army aeronautics ? Apathy of Congress ? Foreign military developments ? First Congressional appropriation ? Establishment of the first Army flying school ? American airplanes in military operations ? The first military planes ? Transfer of the Army training school to San Diego ? Low state of American aviation in 1913 ? Unpopularity of the service in the Army ? The Aviation Section created in the Signal Corps on the eve of the European War. Aviation in the United States opened with one of the hardest fought and most thrilling battles in the history of science, a battle the almost startling success of which was wholly negatived by a tragedy of misunderstanding. The story of Professor Samuel Pier- pont Langley and " Langley's Folly" shows as few others can the marvelous overcoming, one after another, of almost insuperable obstacles through the cold, logical working of a master mind threading its way through a scientific wilderness. At the end came tragedy, for just as success was about to be attained, a burst of ridicule flared out and the age-long ambition to fly had to be left unfulfilled by the first discoverer of the physical means. Langley's interest in flight dated back, as with so many others, to the days when, as a boy, he had lain in the pastures and watched the birds soaring overhead. In 1886, when his mind had become highly trained in science, he was roused to an active study which was destined to lead him through ...