The Dominion MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1928. A CELEBRATION, AND SOME VISIONS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 71, 17 December 1928, Page 10

The Dominion MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1928. A CELEBRATION, AND SOME VISIONS

Twentv-five years ago to-day Orville Wright startled the world by flying for eleven minutes and twelve seconds a heavier-than-air macWne S driven by its own power. It may be questioned, however, whether he or anyone else could at that tune have even famtlv imagined the heights of achievement to which the co-ordinated sk nf the inventor and the engineer have carried aviation since then. . ° f f The tXpSs of aerial navigation are all so recent that their enumeration is unnecessary. The interesting thing however, is that while achievement has tarried till the present century, the visions of those who have dreamt of men flying through the air go back into the mists of antiquity. There is the story ° f . 1 g J ° fled with his father, on wings, to escape the wrath of Minos. Unto tunately he flew so high that the sun melted the wax with wh ch the wings were cemented, and the airman fell into that part of the Aegean Sea which is named after him. Then there was of Archytas, the Oracle of Hierapohs, which Lucian professes to have seen raise itself in the air. . , President Coolidge no doubt mentioned these at the International Aeronautical Conference in his historical outline of aviation from antiquity to the present day, reported briefly m a cablegram on Saturday- None of the ancients, however, or any other imaginative writer of later times, have paralleled the almost uncanny accuracy ot Tennyson’s prophecy in his poem, Locksley HaU. Tennyson was born 'in 1809, four years after the Battle of Trafalgar. In his day men went up in balloons, but there was nothing in sight or talked of. to quicken the imagination of the average mortal to such a daring vision as these lines depicted: “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, “Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; “Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails, “Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; “Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew “From the nations’ airy navies, grappling in the central blue.” These lines were written in 1865. Tennyson had a deep respect for scientific thought and achievement, but his mind could leap to heights far above the dreams of the scientific workers. Kipling once wrote a story about the air mail that was prophetically sound enough to withstand the facts of subsequent events. Collingwood, a popular writer of adventure stories for boys, published oyer thirty years ago the story of a craft that could fly in the air and be navigated under the sea. Jules Verne frequently anticipated scientific achievements in his novels, and so did H. G. Wells. Whether these facts may induce scientific men to look to the writers of imaginative prose and poetry for future inspiration may be doubted. Possibly it is the other way about—that the hopes of the scientists supply the inspiration for the writers. Controlled electricity has projected words and pictures through the ether. People are now wondering whether it may be possible in the future to project human thought, to send messages to Mars, to fire a projectile to the moon. Such speculations seem fantastic, but in earlier days so did flying and wireless. To some sceptical minds even the idea of a warless world seems impossible, but the poet who wrote the above lines also wrote of a “Parliament of Man.” where: “. . . the common sense of most shall hold a fretful world in awe And the kindly earth shall slumber, wrapped in universal law.” The achievement of this would be the greatest marvel of all.