INVENTORS NOBODY BELIEVED IN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 138, 10 July 1909, Page 4

INVENTORS NOBODY BELIEVED IN.

When the full story of the .Wright Brothers comes to be written and read by our descendants, the feature about the business that will almost Certainly strike them as being more extraordinary than any other is that these two you.ig men should have actually been flying ihrough the air for years before anyone realised it.

In was in 1003 that they first soared as a bird sears; not merely glided, that is to say. And jn JDOo they actually flew single distances in excess of twentytour miles,

They published! the great new« to the world, us \Vas only natural; but the world declined to believe them, ll was only another "Yankee yarn," people taid, But here, of course, they were wrong.

The Wrights' haye, however, this one csnsolation: their experience )ias but been on u par with that of mo»t others great inventors. Xobody believed Stephenson, for example, when he said that he had built an engine capable of travelling at the rate of thirtv miles an hour. It was held to be altogether impossible. Yet within a little while he had run his "Rocket" forty miles in that period of time.

It was only a little while back, again, since men were smiling sceptically at Marconi because he announced that lie ]",."' t'ueceeded in transmitting wireless signals u°' VoSi > Atlailtil; ' To-day long iue its are sc" 1 * M l ' received regularly h/wirciess backwards «I<l forwards between England and America. People thought Elias Howe was i> lunatic, and said he was a liar, when lie t nnniWM'i'tl the ailvu-.it of the sewingmachine. He was, of course, like the Wrights, an American, and long after the practical utility »i Uh had heen demonstrated in that /#Mf«fljyi English tailors laughed it to scorn, one nf their emit'enlifljli-i licifig that no machine could be made to sew unless it could also he made to sit i/w/sji-jegged, In the same way it was i>ot •tvwtuDy credited that Fulton liad propelled ships' by uteam until some ctiiwidpraljle time after that epoch-making Hzwviif]/ was sn fact.