The Hartford Herald

PRESENT USE OF
THE AEROPLANE
Has
Revolutionized
the
Mode Of Warfare.

INITIAL FLIGHT 11 YEARS AGO
American
Inventions
Play
Great Part in the Strife
Of the Nations.

THE ART
OF
DEATH DEVICES
The European conflict would have
assumed an entirely different char-
acter, and might already have been
ended by a decisive defeat, except
for a certain experiment which was
made a little over eleven years ago,
December 17, 1903, on the barren
Kill Devil sandhills near Kitty
Hawk, N. C. There a couple of
"crazy Yankees," Orville and Wil-
bur Wright, the sons of a Dayton,
O., clergyman, tested a contraption
consisting of wings, a rudder, a lit-
tle gasoline motor and twin propel-
lers. The precious pair of young
fools actually expected this machine,
weighing 200 pounds, to carry one
of them through the air! Funny
thing about it--it did! Four suc-
cessful flights were made on that
historic day at Kitty Hawk. The
aeroplane--for that was what "those
crazy Wright boys" called their con-
trapion--rose in the air and travel-
ed a distance of 852 feet, carrying
one of the inventors with it--this
being the first instance in history
"where a person had been carried
from the ground in actual flight by
mechanical means without artificial
aids."
While the aeroplane has not in it-
self been made an engine of destruc-
tion to any marked degree, it has
entirely changed the character of
warfare. Aeroplane scouts are able
to keep so close a watch on the
movements of the enemy that sur-
prises are almost impossible, and
without surprises, decisive victories
over a foe at all equal in numbers
and generalship become almost im-
possible.
The heavier-than-air flying ma-
chine is not the only "Yankee no-
tion" which is playing a big part in
the present war. The Wright broth-
ers, who invented the flying ma-
chine in the intervals between their
regular job of repairing bicycles,
have had many predecessors. There
was Richard J. Gatling, a native of
North Carolina, who invented a ma-
chine for spewing out bullets, and
the improved descendants of his
death-dealing gun are responsi-
ble for thousands of widows and or-
phans. This year marks the cen-
tenary of the construction of the
first steam war vessel, and the in-
ventor was Fulton, an American, who
thus became the father of the great
navies of the present day. The re-
peating rifle, the torpedo, smokeless
gunpowder, the Hotchkiss shell, the
revolver, and hosts of other devices
for wholesale and retail murder, are
the creations of American inventive
genius.
Another "Yankee notion" which
promises to revolutionize naval war-
fare is the submarine. John P.
Holland was a native of the Emer-
ald Isle, but an adopted son of Un-
cle Sam. His first under-water
craft was a failure, and it now lies
at the bottom of the Passaic river,
but Holland persevered until he had
succeeded.