Clement Ader, a Frenchman, also claims this honor, saying that he was the first to make a machine that would rise and lift a passenger. On October 9, 1890, his friends say he made a short forward flight of 150 feet in a monoplane propelled by a forty horse power steam engine. In 1897 he claims to have made a number of secret flights, but a little later, in a test before officers of the French army who had become interested in the invention, the machine turned over and was wrecked. The support of the army for further experiments was withdrawn and Ader in despair abandoned the problem of aerial navigation which had claimed long years of study and unremitting effort. He stopped just short of the goal “with success almost within his grasp.” Langley’s Tandem Monoplane About this time two Americans, Samuel Pierpont Langley, of the Smithsonian Institution and Octave Chanute were conducting along scientific lines a series of experiments in aviation. On May 6, 1896, a steam-propelled model was started in a flight over the Potomac River. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who was present, declared that after a flight of eighty to one hundred feet the machine “settled down so softly that it touched the water without the least shock and was in fact immediately ready for a second trial.” Other experiments were tried with success. Langley’s first machine was a tandem monoplane, that is it had two pairs of wings, one immediately following the other. The engine and the propellers were between the two pairs of wings. In later models he used the biplane construction. Finally the United States government appropriated $50,000 to build a machine that would carry a passenger. In constructing this, Langley equipped it with a gasoline engine of about three horse power. The machine was comparatively light, weighing all told only fifty-eight pounds. On August 8, 1903, a public test was made “without a pilot,” on the Potomac River near Washington. Spectators and reporters congratulated the inventor on the success of the experiment, while he with modest satisfaction said, “This is the first time in history, so far as I know, that a successful flight of a mechanically sustained flying machine has been made in public.” This statement was no doubt true of machines of any considerable size, but as we shall presently see, toy flying machines of the _helicopter_ type had long ere this been exhibited to the wondering gaze of boys who were ultimately to bring to a practical conclusion man’s long line of effort to rise triumphant and shape his course through the ocean of air.