"The wing, both when at rest and when in motion," Pettigrew
declared, "may not inaptly be compared to the blade of an
ordinary screw propeller as employed in navigation. Thus the
general outline of the wing corresponds closely with the outline
of the propeller, and the track described by the wing in space IS
TWISTED UPON ITSELF propeller fashion." Numerous attempts to
apply the newly discovered principles to artificial birds failed,
yet came so close to success that they fed instead of killing the
hope that a solution of the problem would one day ere long be
reached.
"Nature has solved it, and why not man?"
From his boyhood days Samuel Pierpont Langley, so he tells us,
had asked himself that question, which he was later to answer.
Langley, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1834, was another
link in the chain of distinguished inventors who first saw the
light of day in Puritan New England. And, like many of those
other inventors, he numbered among his ancestors for generations
two types of men--on the one hand, a line of skilled artisans and
mechanics; on the other, the most intellectual men of their time
such as clergymen and schoolmasters, one of them being Increase
Mather. We see in Langley, as in some of his brother New England
inventors, the later flowering of the Puritan ideal stripped of
its husk of superstition and harshness--a high sense of duty and
of integrity, an intense conviction that the reason for a man's
life here is that he may give service, a reserved deportment
which did not mask from discerning eyes the man's gentle
qualities of heart and his keen love of beauty in art and Nature.
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