In 1842 an Englishman, W. S. Henson, was optimistic enough to patent his monoplane _Ariel_ for a flight from Britain to India. Though his design had a cambered, or slightly curved, wing, tricycle landing gear, and excellent bracing, it never got beyond the model stage. Another Englishman, John Stringfellow, worked for four years on his steam-driven monoplane. It also did not progress beyond a few model flights. In 1876, a young Frenchman, Alphonse Penaud, read an article that ridiculed man’s presumptuous attempts to fly. This angered the boy and he determined forthwith to conquer the air. Though lack of money balked his ambition, he constructed a number of models which contained many features found in present-day airplanes. Incidentally, Penaud was the first to use an elastic band to propel his model, as boys do. Laurence Hargrave, an American, was the first man to make a study of the cellular or box-kite type of wing construction. He confined his efforts to building models. His ideas influenced the work of Lilienthal, who incorporated them in the powered airplane he was building at the time of his death. AVIATION IN AMERICA IN ITS EARLY DAYS The story of the heavier-than-air machines that flew really begins in the United States in the early 1890’s. Octave Chanute, born in France and reared in America, was one of the first men to make a scientific approach to the problem of flying machines. A thorough scientist, he had followed the progress of all flight experiments the world over. He built gliders with one, two, and even five pairs of wings and tested all of them on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan. His most successful glides were made with a biplane glider. In 1894, he published a book called _Progress of Flying Machines_, which covered all the efforts of men like himself who had experimented with man-carrying gliders and flying machines. This book, without doubt, was responsible for bringing to this country the honor of being the birthplace of the first successful, man-carrying, power-driven, flying machine. A copy of Octave Chanute’s book fell into the hands of two ambitious and enterprising young bicycle makers of Dayton, Ohio--Orville and Wilbur Wright. [Illustration] [Illustration] At the time when Octave Chanute was experimenting with his gliders on the Michigan sand dunes, another aviation pioneer was hard at work in his laboratory in Washington, D. C. This man was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In this position he had the opportunity to pursue his studies in the aëronautical side of physics. After much study and experimentation, he succeeded in building a tiny, steam-powered model which flew for six seconds. Langley was so much encouraged by the performance of his first model that he built a larger one. This model, weighing 26 pounds and powered with a one-horsepower steam engine, made a flight of three thousand feet in 1896.