s we know it--and Penaud was twenty-seven when his patent was
published.

For three years longer he worked, experimenting with models,
contributing essays and other valuable data to French papers on the
subject of aeronautics. His gains were ill health, poverty, and neglect,
and at the age of thirty a pistol shot put an end to what had promised
to be one of the most brilliant careers in all the history of flight.

Two years before the publication of Penaud's patent Thomas Moy
experimented at the Crystal Palace with a twin-propelled aeroplane,
steam driven, which seems to have failed mainly because the internal
combustion engine had not yet come to give sufficient power for weight.
Moy anchored his machine to a pole running on a prepared circular track;
his engine weighed 80 lbs. and, developing only three horse-power, gave
him a speed of 12 miles an hour. He himself estimated that the machine
would not rise until he could get a speed of 35 miles an hour, and his
estimate was correct. Two six-bladed propellers were placed side by side
between the two main planes of the machine, which was supported on a
triangular wheeled undercarriage and steered by fairly conventional tail
planes. Moy realised that he could not get sufficient power to achieve
flight, but he went on experimenting in various directions, and left
much data concerning his experiments which has not yet been deemed
worthy of publication, but which still contains a mass of information
that is of practical utility, embodying as it does a vast amount of
painstaking work.

Penaud and Moy were followed by Goupil, a Frenchman, who, in place of
attempting to fit a motor to an aeroplane, experimented by making the
wind his motor. He anchored his machine to the ground, allowing it two
feet of lift, and merely waited for a wind to come along and lift it.
The machine was stream lined, and the wings, curving as in the early
German patterns of war aeroplanes, gave a total lifting surface of about
290 sq. ft. Anchored to the ground and facing a wind of 19 feet per
second, Goupil's machine lifted its own weight and that of two men as
well to the limit of its anchorage. Although this took place as late
as 1883 the inventor went no further in practical work. He published a
book, however, entitled La Locomotion Aerienne, which is still of great
importance, more especially on the subject of inherent stability.

In 1884 came the first patents of Horatio Phillips, whose work l