Santos-Dumont called his biplane an aeromobile. The two main planes had perpendicular surfaces enclosing them so that the wings of each side looked like two box kites hitched together side by side, as shown in the picture. The rudder extended to the front and it also looked like a box kite. The pilot sat just in front of the wings and could manipulate his rudder from side to side or up and down. Thus he could steer his machine from right to left, upward or downward. The Brazilian had not solved the problem of keeping his aeromobile from tipping sideways, so he arranged its wings in a dihedral angle, which balanced it fairly well. The starting and alighting device was a set of wheels which we know so well to-day. The biplane contained 65 square feet of plane surface and the total weight was 645 pounds. Perhaps the most important factor in this machine was an eight-cylinder 50-horsepower Antoinette gasoline motor. This was the first time that this now famous motor was used in an aeroplane and it gave promise at that time of the prize-winning capabilities it later developed. The propeller, which was made of aluminum, was about six feet in diameter, or about two feet less than the diameter of the twin screws in the early Wright biplanes. [Illustration: Copyright H. M. Benner, Hammondsport, N. Y. THE JUNE BUG Glenn Curtiss making a flight in one of his first aeroplanes.] [Illustration: ORVILLE WRIGHT MAKING A FLIGHT AT FORT MYER The aeroplane first became well known in this country when the Wright brothers carried on their Fort Myer tests.] [Illustration: Courtesy of the _Scientific American_ THE FIRST LETTER EVER WRITTEN ABOARD AN AEROPLANE IN FLIGHT This was written at the time Ovington was carrying aeroplane mail from Garden City to Mineola, by aeroplane.]