CONQUERING THE AIR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 157, 24 June 1908, Page 2

CONQUERING THE AIR.

AXOTHEK AEiWI'UKMS SCCCEKS,

Heceived aril, 10.2 p.m.

Koine, June 2!). Delay range's aeroplane flew IS kilometres in 10Vi minutes at Milan without touching the ground

l'p to th« present time men have taken up Hying partly from scientific interest, partly from sport, and partly from business reasons, but a time is rapidly approaching when the art will have reached a state of development such that men can practice it without the necessity of maintaining a private laboratory or a manufacturing plant, writes Wither "Wright in the Scientific American. Considered as a sport, flying possesses attractions which will appeal to many persons with a force beyond that exercised by any of the similar sports, such as boating, cycling, or autoniobiling. There is 11 sense of exhilaration in Hying through the free air, an intensity of enjoyment, which possibly mny he due to the satisfaction of an in-s bom longing transmitted to us from the days when our early ancestors gazed wondoringly at the free flight of birds and contrasted it with their "6'wn slow and toilsome progress through the unbroken wilderness. Though methods of travel have been greatly improved in the I many centuries preceding our own, men have never ceased to envy the birds and long for the day when they might rise above the dust or mud of the highways and fly through the clean air of the heavens. Once above the tree-tops, the narrow roads no longer arbitrarily fix the course. The earth is spread out before the eye with a richness of. color and beauty of pattern never imagined by those who have gazed at the landscape edgewise only. The view of the ordinary traveller is as inadequate as that of an ant crawling over a magnificent rug. The rich brown of freshly- l turned earth, the lighter shades of dry ground, the still lighter browns and yel-' lows of ripening crops, the almost innumerable shades of green produced by grasses and forests, together present a sight, whose beauty lias been confined to balloonist* alone in the past. With the coining of the (Iyer, the pleasures of ballooning are joined with those of automobiling to form a supreme conation.