like an eagle. In the midst of excitable and talkative continentals, he appeared quiet, taciturn. An utterance of his, "The only birds that talk are parrots, and they are not birds of high flight," was thoroughly characteristic of the man.

Wilbur made flights to altitudes of 300 feet and more, surprising in those days, created universal enthusiasm, and concluded a very satisfactory arrangement with a French syndicate for the construction of his machine in France. He returned to the United States, and as we have seen, accompanied his brother in the final trials at Fort Myer.

On his return, he made his historic flights from Governors Island, N. Y., around the Statue of Liberty and to Grant's Tomb and return, during the HudsonFulton celebration. These flights constituted the outstanding feature of the celebration, and resulted in the formation of the American Wright Company.

Subsequent flights were now watched with passionate interest by newspapers, and full reports increased the Wrights' fame in their own country. They made many fresh records, and fully held their own with other men who had now entered the field.

In their business dealings they encountered many difficulties. They finally concluded negotiations in England, France, Germany, Italy and America. But while they received very material rewards for their

efforts, they did not attain anything like the wealth which this prodigious invention would certainly have earned for men more avaricious than they were.

Wilbur Wright lived to gain wide fame and recognition, but died of typhoid fever May 30, 1912, just as the airplane was approaching its modern development, which only Orville was to witness in its full glory. By many Wilbur was considered the more dominant of the two. Perhaps it was his great height and commanding countenance compared to the mildfeatured Orville, which gave this impression, but it certainly was not true. At the outset of the experiments he was relatively much older and somewhat bet ter informed, but Orville came rapidly to the front and bore an equal share of the burden, and no analysis could ascribe any experiment to one or the other of the two brothers. Griffith Brewer, an early friend of the Wrights and a famous aviation pioneer, remarks on this point: "In the arguments, if one brother took one view, the other brother took the opposite view as a matter of course, and the subject was thrashed to pieces until a mutually acceptable result remained. I have often been asked since these pioneer days, 'Tell me, Brewer, who was really the originator of those two?' In reply, I used first to say, 'I think it was mostly Wilbur,' and later, when I came to know Orville better, I said, "The thing could not have

been done without Orville.' Now when asked, I find I have to say, 'I don't know,' and I feel, the more I think of it, that it was only the wonderful combination of these two brothers, who devoted their lives together to this common object, that made the discovery of the art of flying possible.

After his brother's death, Orville continued to live quietly in Dayton with his sister Katherine and old Bishop Wright. He built a more modern aerodynamic laboratory, continued his scientific experimentation and his flying. During the war, he received his commission as Major in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps and strange to say, was not asked to pass a flying examination! He rendered invaluable service in an advisory capacity during the war. He remains a great authority on every phase of aviation, consulted in every difficult phase of the art.

The brothers always hated publicity, remained modest at the very height of their success, and such Orville has remained to this very day, seeking always to avoid publicity, hating nothing so much as the eulogy of banquets and ceremonies, always a simple American gentleman.

Space will not permit us to describe how the great work of the Wrights was followed by the rapid development of the airplane in every civilized country, how speed, altitude, duration and safety constantly

increased, how important, and towards the end of the war, how overwhelming a role the airplane was called upon to play, and how rapid has been its extension to the field of commercial application since the war.

December 17th, 1923, marked the 20th anniversary of the first flight, and a great demonstration was held in Dayton in honor of the famous inventor, and the achievements of this year epitomized the great work of the intervening twenty. Lieutenants John A. Macready and Oakley Kelly flew across the continent in a non-stop flight from New York to San Diego, California, covering a distance of some 2500 miles in 26 hours. Lt. Maughan, also of the Army Air Service, flew in one day, between dawn and dusk, following the sun, from New York to San Francisco. Lt. "Al" Williams, once a pitcher for the New York Giants, won the Pullitzer Race at St. Louis in a Curtiss Navy racer flying 246 miles an hour, more than four miles a minute. The Post Office Department, with its pilots flying by night across the prairie between Chicago and Cheyenne, Wyoming, on a route illuminated by giant beacons of 600,000,000 candle power, carried letters from New York to San Francisco in an average time of twenty-eight hours. Besides these wonderful records, the airplane had become undoubtedly the first arm of our national defense, likely to render our coasts impregnable to all attack.

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always to him da ir vida in the field of bet bat as a history of two gear me vit had a form their OWN TO to the tremendous tasks; who used native innaleen and inity to solve scientific prob lems that bed the most beamed: who demonstrated that nothing is impossible to the pioneer spirit of young America: who crename the discouragement