How We Went to War (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI THE MASTERY OF THE Am THE two most effective weapons used in the World War have been the machine-gun and the airplane. Both are American inventions. Yet when we declared war on Germany even the little army we had was insufficiently supplied with machine-guns, and possessed not a single fighting-plane. In April, 1917, the army air service consisted of 65 officers and 1,120 men. It had 300 second-rate planes and three small flying-fields. It is a fact not generally known that even the Zeppelin had its forerunner in America, and that in the early nineties Congress appropriated $100,000 for the construction of a lighter-thanair machine. Its designer was a Doctor de Boussuet, a Frenchman, who planned a rigid balloon made of very thin steel plates, supported inside by light steel tubing. He was to obtain buoyancy by exhausting the air from the cylinder, and to propel it by the simple gas-engine of that day. All his figures as to strength and power were approved by naval engineers. It was designed to carry mail, but it was never built, because a disagreement arose between the government and its inventor as to his reward, should it prove a success. I can remember the doctor in his house in Brooklyn in 1896, sitting surrounded by a confusion of detail drawings, bewailing the stupidity of a government which was so parsimonious as to block his experiment, because of a matter of a few thousand dollars. At that time Samuel P. Langley was experimenting in heavier-than-air machines. He was working on the correct principle of aeronautics--simply put, the faster you skate over thin ice the less is the likelihood of breaking through. He lacked satisfactory means of propulsion, yet in 1896 a model of his, driven by steam, did fly, and...