The aerodrome was launched successfully with the engines working under a pressure of 110 pounds of steam. The head rose continually until the mid-rod stood up at an angle of about 60°, checking all further advance. It remained in the air in a stationary position for nearly a second, and then slid ‹backward› into the water, striking on the end of the rudder and bending it. The distance flown was about 12 metres, and the time of flight 3 seconds. One of the propellers was broken short off, and the shaft was bent. It thus became clearly evident that some cause prevented the proper balancing of the machine, which was necessary to secure even approximately the theoretically simple condition of horizontal flight. It was all-important that the angle of the front wing should be correct, but its position could not be accurately known in advance of experiment, and this experiment could only be made with the machine itself, and involved the risk of wrecking it. These trials gave a very vivid object lesson of what had already been anticipated,[31] that the difficulties of actual flight would probably lie even more in obtaining exact balance than in the first and more obvious difficulty of obtaining the mere engine power to sustain a machine in the air. The immediate problem was to account for the totally different behavior of the two aerodromes in the two flights, under not very different conditions. Observations of the movement of the two aerodromes through the air, as seen by the writer from the shore, seemed to show, however, that the wings did not remain in their original form, but that at the moment of launching there was a sudden flexure and distortion due to the upward pressure of the air. The time of flight was too short, and the speed too great, to be sure of just what did occur, but it seemed probable that the wings flexed under the initial pressure of the weight which came upon them at the moment of launching, and that they were in fact, while in the air, a wholly different thing from what they were an instant before, so that a very slight initial difference in the angle at which they first met the air might cause the air to strike in the one case on the top of the wings and throw the head down, and in the other case so as to throw the head up. To ascertain the extent and character of this flexure, caused, it will be observed, by [p099] the ‹weight› of the aerodrome suddenly thrown on the wings, I inverted the aerodrome and distributed a weight of dry sand equal to that of the whole machine evenly over the supporting surfaces. It was found that under the weight of the sand the extremity of the wings bent to an angle of 45° downwards (and consequently must have bent to an angle of 45° upwards in the air), a condition of affairs worse than anything that had been suspected, and seeming to demand the entire reconstruction of the wings with a strength and consequent weight for which there was no means of providing.