man could
ever compass. So definite for a time was this view on the eastern side
of the Channel that for some years practically all the progress that was
made in the development of power-driven planes was made in Britain.

In 1800 a certain Dr Thomas Young demonstrated that certain curved
surfaces suspended by a thread moved into and not away from a horizontal
current of air, but the demonstration, which approaches perilously near
to perpetual motion if the current be truly horizontal, has never been
successfully repeated, so that there is more than a suspicion that
Young's air-current was NOT horizontal. Others had made and were making
experiments on the resistance offered to the air by flat surfaces, when
Cayley came to study and record, earning such a place among the pioneers
as to win the title of 'father of British aeronautics.'

Cayley was a man in advance of his time, in many ways. Of independent
means, he made the grand tour which was considered necessary to the
education of every young man of position, and during this excursion he
was more engaged in studies of a semi-scientific character than in the
pursuits that normally filled such a period. His various writings prove
that throughout his life aeronautics was the foremost subject in his
mind; the Mechanic's Magazine, Nicholson's Journal, the Philosophical
Magazine, and other periodicals of like nature bear witness to Cayley's
continued research into the subject of flight. He approached the subject
after the manner of the trained scientist, analysing the mechanical
properties of air under chemical and physical action. Then he set to
work to ascertain the power necessary for aerial flight, and was one of
the first to enunciate the fallacy of the hopes of successful flight by
means of the steam engine of those days, owing to the fact that it was
impossible to obtain a given power with a given weight.

Yet his conclusions on this point were not altogether negative, for as
early as 1810 he stated that he could construct a balloon which could
travel with passengers at 20 miles an hour--he was one of the first to
consider the possibilities of applying power to a balloon. Nearly thirty
years later--in 1837--he made the first attempt at establishing an
aeronautical society, but at that time the power-driven plane was
regarded by the great majority as an absurd dream of more or less mad
inventors, while ballooning ranked on about the same level as tight-rope
walking