It is one of the amazing things about a sculptor that the more work he does and the more recognition he gets, the more his friends demand that he stick to his proper business. And it is probably just as amazing that the sculptor doesn’t want to and seldom does. Somebody, commenting on the varied activities and interests of Gutzon Borglum, quoted a bit of apt philosophy: “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me,” which was Borglum’s estimate of the situation, all right. The constant urge to Art was something, he thought, that made his friends seem normal. He might have been an aviator had his reflexes been faster at the time the Wright brothers made their test flights at Kittyhawk. His studio at Stamford was big enough to be a fine air laboratory, and for years it was cluttered with an odd assortment of things that were going to make flying better ... and quicker, and cheaper, and easier and safer. Gutzon was one of the observers of Orville Wright’s first sustained flight at Fort Myers when the inventors were trying to prove the value of their plane to the United States Army. He saw “a little mechanism that looked like the wreck of a covered wagon” travel around a half-mile course for sixty-seven minutes. Then, after an enthusiastic greeting to the pilot, he and Orville, Colonel Bromwell, Captain Squier and Lieutenant Selfridge rode into town aboard a streetcar. As a representative of the Aeronautical Society of America, he saw the collapse of the plane the next day and the tragic death of Lieutenant Selfridge. Still he went on. He became acquainted with Alexander Klemin and his wind tunnel. He was greatly interested in Major Ocker’s development of blind flying. He invented an airplane brake which, with modifications, was the type used in the Second World War. In a speech before the Aeronautical Society at the Astor Hotel in New York early in 1904 he outlined his plans for a “cylindrical type of machine with the engine in the pointed nose directly behind the propeller and winglike fins to steady the flight.” He demonstrated what he meant with two little models that flew gracefully over the audience. He said: Consider the bird struggling with the power of a water freshet. The model for the aeroplane should not be the bird, but the fish. The only fish that can move in stormy water is the trout, and the trout, I am convinced, gives us an unbeatable design for an airship. There is something in that speech to remind one of Cellini’s departures from art, and the activities of Da Vinci when he was looking most clearly at the patterns of a future life. But his friends weren’t impressed. Mrs. William Brown Meloney of the _Herald-Tribune_ and _This Week_ magazine, with whom he carried on a ceaseless correspondence, gave him a sharp rebuke and told him that art needed him more than the airplane business. And he sent her this prompt answer: