with landing-wheels which worked on pivots, like castors, began to make
short flights. On the 30th of September he flew for eighty metres.
Seeing is believing, but many of those who saw Farman fly did not
believe. The machine, they said, was only hopping into the air with the
speed it had gathered on the ground; it would never fly. When, on the
26th of October, Farman made a flight of more than seven hundred metres
the pessimists found another objection. The machine, they said, would
never be able to turn; it could only continue in a straight line. They
had hit on a real difficulty, but the Voisins and Farman himself, who,
starting without any knowledge of aeroplanes or flying, had soon
developed practical ideas of his own, were hard at work to meet it. The
Wrights had simplified the handling of a machine by combining the
control of the vertical rudder with the control of the wing-warping. In
the early Voisin machines there was no wing-warping, and the pilots had
to attempt to balance and turn the machine without it; but a rod with a
wheel attached to it was used to control both the elevating plane in
front and the vertical rudder behind. By turning the wheel the rudder
was operated, by moving the rod the elevator was raised or lowered. It
was on a machine of this kind that Farman began to practise gradual
turning movements. The lateral inclination of the machine was feared
and, as much as possible, avoided in these first experiments, though it
is not only harmless in turning movements, but is necessary for their
complete success, just as the banking of a motor race-track is necessary
to keep the machines on the course. Farman made rapid progress; and, as
has been said, by the beginning of 1908 he gained the two thousand pound
Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a closed circuit of one kilometre in
length. The wonderful skill of this achievement will be fully
appreciated only by the best modern pilots, who would not like to be
asked to repeat it on a machine unprovided with ailerons (that is to
say, hinged flaps on the trailing edge of the planes), and controlled
only by the elevator and the rudder. There is nothing very extravagant
in dating the conquest of the air, as some French writers have dated it,
from the circular flights of Farman. It is true that the Wrights had
attained a much higher skill in manoeuvring, but they had retired, like
Achilles, to their tent, whereas Farman's flight showed the way to many
others. In the