MAN'S TRIUMPH OVER AIR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 18, 23 January 1933, Page 6

MAN'S TRIUMPH OVER AIR.

On November 19 -at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, there was unveiled, the monument which commemorates the first flight in history of a power-driven aeroplane (says a writer in a recent issue of the "New York Herald-Tribune"). It is ,in the form of an enormous granite wing, rising as if on the point of taking flight above the lonely sand dunes and the blue line of sea where the Wright brothers'twenty-nine years ago first got their primitive, erate-like structure into the air. A year or two before Wilbur Wright, in a moment of exasperation over the impregnable difficulties into which their passion seemed to be leading them, had exclaimed that it would be "a thousand years" before man could fly. Yet in lS&l more than half a million passengers flew on regularly-scheduled U.S. air lines, alone; there is scarcely an hour of the day'when the commercial "ships" are not roaring out of our airports with their heavy loads of passengers and mail, and Orville Wright has lived to see the monument to that first aeroplane quite naturally take the form of a beacon to guide its descendants on their swift and certain passages through the skies. Tho design of the monument itself is singrflarly appropriate. To combine the massive solidity of granite with tho sensitive lightness of a bird's wing may seem to bo doing violence to Nature; yet it was precisely in the resolution of those seeming incompatibles that the Wright brothers led the way. The simple, basic principle of flight was obvious to anyone who had ever sent up a kite. What the Wright brothers did was to work out, through theory and experiment, the first real understanding of the true forces involved and to demonstrate in the process that "the insubstantial air" was a misnomer. Tho modern transport (which differs in no fundamental way from the "contraption" of the Wrights and represents simply a refinement of the ideas and calculations that they worked with) suggests, first of all, when you see it upon thj ground, a sense of almost ponderous solidity. The idea that all that weight of metal—those massive engine's and fuel tanks and heavy wings —can actually drag itself into the air, carrying passengers and crew besides, seems to be absurd. But as she lifts gracefully from the field, riding upon so solid a cushion that passengers may stroll up and down in" the corridor without disturbing the trim, one realises what air in motion really is: That is the knowledge which the Wrights, at the cost of risk and patient headj work, first established; and it is upon that knowI ledge that man into the heavens.