AEROPLANES FOR SALE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 383, 2 August 1911, Page 7

AEROPLANES FOR SALE.

A dozen factories in France are now advertising aeroplanes for sale. Fifty-two orders, it is reported, were received in one week by the makers of the Bleriot monoplane. The motor that has made flights of over a hundred miles possible was designed only a few months ago. May we not look forward to flights extending ccr the whole twenty-four hours of a day with improvements in motors and in facilities for carrying the fluid fuel ? It would be rash to affirm in this era of overcoming seeming impossibilities that aerial transportati n will not become as fixed a fact a > land transportation, and that the airship will not be as safe and comfortable as the railway train, th.2 ocean liner, or the motor-car—pos-sibly safer than the latter. What the flying machine will be an 1 do fifty years hence is a thought which fairly staggers the imagination. This is what Mr. Thomas Baldwin, inventor of the United States dirigible airship, has to say on the subject of flying for hcaUh. "The influence of even sporadic flight on the physical body and the health ia remarkable. In balloon voyages I have been in the air as long as four days at a time. Once I made a voyage almost an invalid from iheumatism. I could scarcely raise my arms on a level with my head. My blood was dark. The doctor would not permit me to taste meat. Within a few hours every drop of blood in my body had become a bright red liquid, looking like flame, and I

seemed unable to appease my appetite for strong animal food, of which I had none too much abroad. From the tortures of rheumatism that voyage conveyed me to the tortures of hunger." He tells of a friend who was very low with consumption, who was persuaded by him to make a balloon trip from St. Louis to th.> Atlantic Coast twenty years ago and was completely cured. Another friend whose lungs were badly injured by iron and copper dust was healed by a few balloon trips. There is, we are told, a striking jure for mental depression in an airflight. "When one begins to feel at ease on an airship, the elimination of the force of gravity affects the habits of gravity. The mind's freedom is denoted by an enormous increase of energy and power of action. The gravity of every square inch of the plane on which one stands of every ounce of one's, body, have been neutralised by a buoyancy of a gas lighter than air or by mechanical force and pressure upon the air. . After spending a few hours at a n altitude of two miles in an airship, I have felt as if I could walk on naked space with all the steadiness I walk on the street, or that I could step from cloud to cloud as I have stepped from stone to stone in the bed of a shallow rivulet. In every atom of my mind and body I felt the power and capacity of flight. My feet seemed barely to touch the deck of the ship, At thre-2 miles in the air I have put one of my feet out on the sea of space, or let my body hang well over the side of the ship. Instead of a feeling of dizziness and a fear of falling, as from a high building, I experienced a feeling of buoyancy like that of float jng on the water."