LONGECITY

When will people like this just stop, and join in on helping to make it happen, rather than being the perpetual drag, the boat anchor. We are trying to "get to the Americas" but they keep saying "wait, but look here, we must stop immediately!" with their anchors dragging along the bottom, snagging the boat on every rock and ship wreck along the way. Many of the boats are perpetually quagmired and blown down by the storms.

We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly....For students and investigators of the Langley type there are more useful employments.

New York Times, December 10,1903, a week before the Wright Brothers Kitty Hawk flight.

The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships...It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht. Another popular fallacy is to expect enormous speed to be obtained. It must be remembered that the resistance of the air increases as the square of the speed and thework as the cube...If with 30 h.p. we can now attain a speed of 40 m.p.h., then in order to reach a speed of 100 m.p.h., we must use a motor capable of 470 h.p...it is clear that with our present devices there is no hope of competing for racing speed with either our locomotives or our automobiles.

- William Pickering