Chapter 89

FLYING.

A lecture which I gave at the Royal Aquarium on September 28, 1883, on the Art of Human Flight, attracted at the time a good deal of newspaper notice; my friend Colonel Fred. Burnaby being in the chair, supported by several other aeronautical notables. From a rough copy by me I have thought fit to preserve the exordium here, just as spoken.

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"'Tis sixty years since,"--as the title-page to Waverley has it,--'tis sixty years since a little Charterhouse schoolboy of thirteen called on one Saturday afternoon (his half-holiday) at a shabby office up a court in Fleet Street, with a few saved-up shillings of pocket-money in his hand. His object was secretly to bribe a balloon agent to give him a seat in the basket on the next flight from Vauxhall: however as, either from prudential humanity or commercial greed, the clerk stated that five pounds was the fixed price for a place, and as the aforesaid little gentleman could only produce ten shillings, the negotiation came to nothing,--and I, who had coveted from my cradle the privilege that a bird enjoys from his nest, was fortunately refused that juvenile voyage in the clouds: whereof when I told my excellent mother, her tearful joy that I had _not_ made the perilous ascent affectionately consoled my disappointment.

So it is that, as often happens throughout life, and I am a living proof of it, our Failures prove to be the best Successes: for certainly if my boyish whim had been granted, and I had thereafter taken habitually to such aeronautical flights, at once perilous and unsettling, that young Carthusian would scarcely have stood before you this day as an ancient Proverbial Philosopher.

However, let that pass: I only acted--as oftentimes I since have longed to act--on the desire we all feel to have "the wings of a dove, and fly away and be at rest,"--floating afar from the dross and dust of earth into the blue expanse of the heavenly ether:--a thing yet to be accomplished!--or I will confess to be no prophet: in these days of electricity, concentrated and accumulative after the fashion of M. Faure, aided perhaps by some lighter gas, some condensed form of tamed dynamite,--these elevating and motive powers being helped by exquisite mechanism either as attached to the human form (if the flier be an athlete) or quickening a vehicle with flapping wings impelled by electricity, in which he might sit (if said flier is as burdened with "too solid flesh" as some of us)--these mixed potencies, I say, of electricity and gas, ought at this time of the day to be so manipulated by our chemists and mechanicians as to issue--very soon too--in the grand invention than would supersede every other sort of locomotion,--human flight.

I once met at Baltimore, and since elsewhere, a clever young American mathematician and engineer, Henry Middleton by name, who showed me, at his father's place in South Carolina, parts of a model energised by the motive-powers of gas and electricity, which he hoped would successfully solve the problem of flying; but the Patent Office at Washington was burnt down soon after, and in it I fear was his machine. At all events I have heard nothing of his project since.

I may mention, too, that I believe I have among my audience this evening Mr. De Lisle Hay, the author not only of that recent very graphic book "Brighter Britain," but also of another, more cognate to our present topic, entitled "Three Hundred Years Hence," now out of print, though published only three years ago. In this latter work he has a chapter on "Our Conquest of the Air," and imagines a lighter gas called by him "lucegene," as also a bird-like human flight very much as I had conceived it forty-one years ago. He tells me also that the best vehicle for flying might be an imitation of the sidelong action of a flat fish in water; but how far he has worked upon this idea I know not. Possibly, if in the room, he may tell us after I release you.

It is most worthy of notice, that in the almost solitary Biblical instance of winged angels (see Isaiah vi. 2, and a corresponding passage in Ezekiel--all other angelic ministers being represented as etherealised men) these are somewhat like birds in outline, though having more wings,--with twain covering the head so as to cleave the air, with twain to cover the feet so as to be a sort of tail or rudder, while with twain they did fly: even as Blake, and Raffaelle, and some other painters have depicted them. I mentioned this once to Professor Owen, our great natural philosopher, in a talk I had with him on human flight, and he thought such seraphim very remarkable in the light of analogous comparative anatomy.

Ovid also in a passage before me advocates our imitation of birds if we would fly bodily: in his "De Icari Casu," he says (with omissions)--

"Naturamque novat: nam ponit in ordine pennas A minimâ coeptas, longam breviore sequenti: ... Sic imitentur aves: geminas libravit in alas Ipse suum corpus, motâque pependit in aurâ."

Which, being interpreted, means this,--

"Nature he reproduces, ranging fine From least to longest feathery plumes aline, Thus imitating birds, that on the air With balanced wings are poised in lightness there."

Whilst our noble Laureate in "Locksley Hall" goes in for aerial machines, "Argosies of magic sails," and "airy navies grappling in the central blue."

As to that essay of mine published in the first number of Ainsworth's Magazine, August 1842, long before the Patent Aerial Company started their projects, and very much noticed at the time,--Mr. Claude Hamilton ingrafted it in his work on Flying; the Duke of Argyll in a note before me commends this principle of copying nature as the true one; a Signor Ignazio of Milan in 1877 adopted almost exactly my Flying Man,--which was for the lecture enlarged from Cruikshank's etching of my own sketch: an aerial flapping machine, a sort of flying wheelbarrow, was some twenty years ago exhibited at Kensington: whilst in the _Daily Telegraph_ for July 10, 1874, you will find recorded the untimely death of one M. de Groof, the Flying Man, who unhappily perished at Cremorne after a successful flight of 5000 feet. All these are on record.

Extract from Proverbial Philosophy (Series iv. p. 375).

_Of Change and Travel._

"All of us have within us the wandering Crusoe spirit; We come of Norse sea-rovers, and adventurers full of hope: And man was bade to tame his earth, to rule it and subdue it,-- Whereby our feet-soles tingle at an untrod Alpine peak-- But shall we not fly anon with wings, to shame these creeping paces, Even as steam hath worked all speed on land and sea before? Is not this firmament of air part of the human heritage, Which man must conquer duteously, as first his Maker willed? There needeth but a lighter gas, well-tutored to our skill, The springing spirit to some shape of delicate steel and silk,-- A bird-like frame of Daedalus, and gummed Icarian plumes, Ancient inventions, long forgotten, to be found anew! When shall the chemist mix aright this rarer lifting essence To make the lord of earth but equal to his many sparrows? When will discovery help us to such conquest of the air, And teach us swifter travel than our creeps by land and water?"

And finally from my "Three Hundred Sonnets" hear Sonnet No. 189--

"_Spirit._"

"Throw me from this tall cliff,--my wings are strong, The hurricane is raging fierce and high, My spirit pants, and all in heat I long To fly right upward to a purer sky, And spurn the clouds beneath me rolling by; Lo thus, into the buoyant air I leap Confident and exulting, at a bound Swifter than whirlwinds happily to sweep On fiery wing the reeling world around: Off with my fetters!--who shall hold me back? My path lies there,--the lightning's sudden track O'er the blue concave of the fathomless deep,-- O that I thus could conquer space and time, Soaring above this world in strength sublime!"