as now been so enormously
improved, that it comes near to developing one horse-power for every
pound of weight. The violent have taken the kingdom of the air by force:
in Pilcher's day the problem was more delicate. He worked at his engine
in his leisure time, and, leaving the firm of Maxim & Nordenfeldt, by
whom he had been employed from 1896 onwards, made, in 1898, his own
firm of Wilson & Pilcher. In the spring of 1899 he was much impressed
by Mr. Laurence Hargrave's soaring kites, exhibited by the inventor at a
meeting of the Aeronautical Society, and it seems that he embodied some
of Mr. Hargrave's ideas in his latest built machine, a triplane. He
intended to fly this machine at Stanford Hall, Market Harborough, where
he was staying with Lord Braye, but on the day appointed, the 30th of
September 1899, the weather proved too wet. Nevertheless Pilcher
consented to give some demonstrations on The Hawk, towed by a light
line; during the second of these, while he was soaring at a height of
thirty feet, one of the guy-wires of the tail broke, and the machine
turned over and crashed. Pilcher never recovered consciousness, and died
two days later. His name will always be remembered in the history of
flight. If he had survived his risks for a year or two more, it seems
not unlikely that he would have been the first man to navigate the air
on a power-driven machine. He left behind him his gallant example, and
some advances in design, for he improved the balance of the machine by
raising its centre of gravity, and he provided it with wheels, fitted on
shock-absorbers, for taking off and alighting.

Lilienthal and Pilcher are pre-eminent among the early gliders, for
their efforts were scientific, continuous, and progressive. But there
were others; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the
comparative value of experiments carried on, many of them in private, by
inventors of all countries. Professor J. J. Montgomery, of California,
carried out some successful glides, on machines of his own devising, as
early as 1884; and Mr. Octave Chanute, the best historian of all these
early efforts, having secured the services of Mr. A. M. Herring, a much
younger man who had already learned to use a Lilienthal machine, made a
series of experiments, with gliders of old and new types, on the shores
of Lake Michigan, during the summer of 1896. About the same time some
power-driven machines, attached to prepared tracks, were succe