THE FIRST MAN TO FLY.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 March 1933, Page 17 (Supplement)

THE FIRST MAN TO FLY.

MONUMENT FOR THE WRIGHTS. Mrs. Mollison has accomplished another wonder and shown the world once more what an English girl is made of;' and in the United States they are setting up a monument to the first flying-men, so short a time js it ago. The world races on and we can scarcely keep pace with it. ’ While men in one part of the world have been raising a memorial to mark the first aeroplane flight (by a man who thought aeroplanes would always be just for one or ttyo men only), in another they have been conferring how best to limit in war the planes that have become so numerous and powerful. The memorial stands on a sand dune at the foot of the Kill Devil Hills in the wilds of North Carolina, for there it was that one winter morning 29 years ago a man rose in an aeroplane and flew with the birds. That man was Wilbur Wright, who, with his brother Orville, invented, built, and flew the first petrol-driven aeroplane. The memorial on the sand dune bears the names on one side and on the other this quotation from Pindar: The long toil of the brave is not quenched in darkness nor hath counting the cost fretted away the zeal of' their hopes.' O’er the fruited Earth and athwart the sea hath passed the light of noble deeds unquenchable for ever. Round the base is written!

In commemoration of the conquest of the aii- by the brothers Wilbur and Orville i Wright. Conceived by genius, achieved .by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith. The memorial, which has taken five years to build, is in the form of a great white granite pylon, 60 feet high, carved with a folded wing design and centred on a base star-shaped like the insignia bornd by every American naval of military plane. From its top can be seen old Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, another historic spot, for there Virginia ' Dare, the first white child of the New World, was born. It was from the heights of the Kill Devil Hills that the two brothers experimented with their gliders, having come here as a place recommended by the weather experts for its strong steady winds. For three years they lived in a hut in this wilderness, working and experimenting, scrapping, and starting again, till one day in 1903 they no longer needed the height of the hills for a start, but were actually seen to rise from the plain in their wonder machine. It was not the first aeroplane, however, for seven years earlier another American, Samuel Pierpont Langley, had sent a model steam-driven aeroplane skimming through the air, but when he demonstrated with a full-sized machine it crashed to the ground and brought him nothing but ridicule. That was in the year the Wrights made their epic flight; but it was not till 1914 that someone dragged Langley’s aeroplane from the workshop in which it had been lying all those years, climbed into the seat, started the engine, and flew with it. Its inventor had been dead eight years, and had died convinced that his life-work had failed; but it was known that day that Langley was the maker of the first aeroplane, though the Wrights were the first to fly in one. BRAVE MEN OF PEACE. NOT LESS RENOWNED THAN WAR. Here is a noble example of the saying of the industrial North of England that it takes the poor to help the poor. Miners of the Bickerstaffe Colliery in Lancashire met the other day to vote help for their stricken comrades of the Ashton-in-Makerfield pit disaster. They are all poor men, yet £3O had been promised when they left the meeting. ■ And then outside they found that a fire had started in their own pit, with a shift still at work below. From the heroism of “going without that others may share” they dashed to the rescue,. Brave deeds followed brave, words. ’ The winder steadily continued winding up cage after cage of men, although sur- ■ rounded by blazing buildings. The boilermen kept up the steam pressure in the boilers under the raging fire itself. The under-manager ; coolly descended the pit andmarshalled the 140 men out of the workings without fuss or panic. . AH were saved, but the 500 meh of Bickerstaffe are now out of work, and it will be weeks before they can start again. Everyone would understand if they kept the £3O for themselves, but the.idea never entered their heads. They are still hoping to collect even more for ' those worse off than themselves. Of such stuff are miners made.

MAID FROM THE MANSE. HOW A WISH CAME TRUE. When Marion Stevenson first wanted to be a missionary she was a little girl living at the manse of Forfar, in Scotland, where her father was minister. Some stories she heard of missionary work fired her imagination, arid as she grew up her purpose never changed. In a book the story of her wonderful life-work in East Africa is told by one of her fellow-missionaries.

Thirty years passed before Marion Stevenson’s wish came true. During a long and disappointing period of illhealth she prepared herself at home for mission service. Then in 1906 her chance came. She heard of the great need for help in the work among women and girls at the Kikuyu Mission in what is now Kenya. She offered her services, and by the following spring was on her way to Africa. Many were Miss Stevenson’s difficulties when she arrived at Kikuyu. The people, a branch of the Bantus, seemed dour, secretive, sulky, and suspicious. But she learned to like them. She saw many kind and intelligent faces about her in the villages and realised that these dark-skinned people were “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, just ourselves in different garb.” The youths, lithe and graceful, with muscles rippling under chocolate-coloured skin, were like bronze statues come to life. They recall the figures on old Egyptian wall paintings, for they wear their hair/elaborately twisted and lengthened by strips of calico. And we are told that the Kikuyu borrow many of their fashions from the Masai, who are .of Nilotic origin. . Many were the battles MiSs Stevenson had to fight before she was able to work up the small mission school, and she almost gave up hope of ever reaching the girls and women, who were elusive and independent. At last she made friends with them, visiting them in their huts in the evenings when their long day’s work was over. Gradually she persuaded the people to give up bad old tribal customs. As the years passed she did wonderful work for education. In another district she saw the little school at Tutumutu grow into a big centre, with over 40 branch schools, where nearly . 4000 scholars were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. ' Three times a year she visited these schools, making hazardous journeys and tramping across the difficult hilly country under the fierce sun. She met buffaloes and rhinoceroses, and more than once she saw a splendid leopard strolling about in the moonlight outside her sleeping quarters. ' Once she came upon a hyena’s dancing ground, where some forty of these creatures gathered after dark and gambolled about -before setting out on their nightly expeditions. The ground was trampled hard; no villagers dared to go there at night. Native lookers-on were puzzled when, on striking camp, she collected the litter and burned it in the camp fire, but her houseboy explained to them that this was the European’s way of tidying up. AN ESSAY ON BANANAS. x BY A JAPANESE BOY. As we all know, essay writings at school is, especially to some boys, a difficult subject, even when they write in their own language; but how very hard it would be to attempt one in another language. > The following is one we have lately been shown, written by a Japanese boy who was learning English, about bananas: . Tire banana are great remarkable fruit. He are constructed in the same architectural style as sausage, difference being skin of sausage are habitually consumed, while it is not advisable ,to eat wrapping of banana. The banana are held aloft while consuming; sausage are usually left in reclining position. Sausage depend for creation on human being or stuffing machine while banana are Pristine Product of honourable Mother Nature. In case of sausage, both conclusions are attached to other sausage; banana on other hands are attached to one end to stem and opposite termination entirely loose. Finally banana are strictly of vegetable kingdom, while affiliation of sausage often undecided. It seems to uS a very brave effort, better than anything we could write on chrysanthemums in Japanese! ALI-BABA’S OIL JARS. Those of you who have been to the pantomime and seen the large jars of the “Forty Thieves” may have wondered if they did have such jars in the old They most certainly did! Many of the old oil jars are still to be seen in Crete, the island in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as other places, and some of them are so huge that you wonder how people managed to move them. One row of 1 such ancient jars is composed of most beautifully carved specimens, all of which stand over ten feet in height, measure even more than that round the middle, and are capable of holding several hundreds of gallons of Ali-Baba’s jars were not quite so large, but were still .big enough to contain the thieves, according to the story. . Nowadays, of course, oil is stored in huge iron tanks, some of them being as big as fair-sized lakes. Even the tanks on the steamers that bring oil across the ocean are large enough to hold ten thousand or more gallons.. As for the tanks used to store petroleum, these are even bigger, and are really more dangerous when empty than when filled. When “empty” they are actually full of deadly fumes that would ignite and result in a terrible explosion were a naked light brought within a few yards of them. OLD-FASHIONED “FLOWER” SWEETS Had you lived in the days of Queen Elizabeth you would have been obliged to “candy” flowers before making these sweets. Now candied violets and roseleaves can be bought for a few pence, and you can make delicious sweets such as the children ate hundreds of years ago. . , Put a pound of white sugar into a saucepan with three table-spoonsful of rose-water— you can buy rose-water at the chemist’s quite cheaply, or you may use tap water flavoured with any essence you like. Dissolve the sugar slowly, then boil the syrup carefully for about five minutes, or till a little tried in cold water hardens at once. You must not allow this syrup to colour; the whiter it is, the prettier your sweets will be. Have ready a slightly buttered dish. Remove the saucepan from the fire, let the syrup go off the boil, then coat the flowers with it. Take a violet on a spoon, dip it into the syrup, coat it well and place it on the dish to dry in a’warm place. Treat the other flowers in the same way. If the syrup begins to harden, stand the saucepan in boiling water. The colour of the flowers should show through the coating of sugar. EARLY IN THE MORNING, Here is a little fact to think of when next you find it hard to get up in the morning. In the course of 40 years the difference between rising every morning at six o’clock and eight o’clock amounts to about 29,000 hours, or considerably more than three years. How much you could do in that time!