HOW IT FLIES Chapter I. INTRODUCTORY. The sudden awakening--Early successes--Influence of the gasoline engine on aeroplanes--On dirigible balloons--Interested inquiry--Some general terms defined. In the year 1908 the world awakened suddenly to the realization that at last the centuries of man’s endeavor to fly mechanically had come to successful fruition. There had been a little warning. In the late autumn of 1906, Santos-Dumont made a flight of 720 feet in a power-driven machine. There was an exclamation of wonder, a burst of applause--then a relapse into unconcern. In August, 1907, Louis Bleriot sped free of the ground for 470 feet; and in November, Santos-Dumont made two flying leaps of barely 500 feet. That was the year’s record, and it excited little comment. It is true that the Wright brothers had been making long flights, but they were in secret. There was no public knowledge of them. In 1908 came the revelation. In March, Delagrange flew in a Voisin biplane 453 feet, carrying Farman with him as a passenger. Two weeks later he flew alone nearly 2½ miles. In May he flew nearly 8 miles. In June his best flight was 10½ miles. Bleriot came on the scene again in July with a monoplane, in which he flew 3¾ miles. In September, Delagrange flew 15 miles--in less than 30 minutes. In the same month the Wrights began their wonderful public flights. Wilbur, in France, made records of 41, 46, 62, and 77 miles, while Orville flew from 40 to 50 miles at Fort Myer, Va. Wilbur Wright’s longest flight kept him in the air 2 hours and 20 minutes. The goal had been reached--men had achieved the apparently impossible. The whole world was roused to enthusiasm. Since then, progress has been phenomenally rapid, urged on by the striving of the inventors, the competition of the aircraft builders, and the contests for records among the pilots. By far the largest factor in the triumph of the aeroplane is the improved gasoline engine, designed originally for automobiles. Without this wonderful type of motor, delivering a maximum of power with a minimum of weight, from concentrated fuel, the flying machine would still be resting on the earth. [Illustration: The Renard and Krebs airship _La France_, at Chalais-Meudon.] Nor has the influence of the gasoline motor been much less upon that other great class of aircraft, the dirigible balloon. After 1885, when Renard and Krebs’ airship _La France_ made its two historic voyages from Chalais-Meudon to Paris, returning safely to its shed, under the propulsion of an electric motor, the problem of the great airship lay dormant, waiting for the discovery of adequate motive power. If the development of the dirigible balloon seems less spectacular than that of the aeroplane, it is because the latter had to be created; the dirigible, already in existence, had only to be revivified.