future in the way of
peaceful service, notwithstanding the exploits of the _Deutschland_
in the ocean-carrying trade. But perhaps it too will find its place
in industry when awakened man shall be willing to spend as much
treasure, as much genius, as much intelligent effort, and as much
heroic self-sacrifice in organizing for the social good as in the
last four years he has expended in its destruction.

CHAPTER II

THE EARLIEST FLYING MEN

The conquest of the air has been the dream of mankind for uncounted
centuries. As far back as we have historic records we find stories
of the attempts of men to fly. The earliest Greek mythology is full
of aeronautical legends, and the disaster which befell Icarus and
his wings of wax when exposed to the glare of the midsummer sun in
Greece, is part of the schoolboy's task in Ovid. We find like
traditions in the legendary lore of the Peruvians, the East Indians,
the Babylonians, even the savage races of darkest Africa. In the
Hebrew scriptures the chief badge of sanctity conferred on God's
angels was wings, and the ability to fly. If we come down to the
mythology of more recent times we find our pious ancestors in New
England thoroughly convinced that the witches they flogged and
hanged were perfectly able to navigate the air on a broomstick--thus
antedating the Wrights' experiments with heavier-than-air machines
by more than 250 years.

It is an interesting fact, stimulating to philosophical reflection,
that in the last decade more has been done toward the conquest of
the air, than in the twenty centuries preceding it, though during
all that period men had been dreaming, planning, and experimenting
upon contrivances for flight. Moreover when success came--or such
measure of success as has been won--it came by the application of an
entirely novel principle hardly dreamed of before the nineteenth
century.

Some of the earlier efforts to master gravity and navigate the air
are worthy of brief mention if only to show how persistent were the
efforts from the earliest historic ages to accomplish this end.
Passing over the legends of the time of mythology we find that
many-sided genius, Leonardo da Vinci, early in the sixteenth
century, not content with being a painter, architect, sculptor,
engineer and designer of forts, offering drawings and specifications
of wings which, fitted to men, he thought would enable them to fly.
The sketches are still preserved in a museum at Par