Salt Lake Tribune | 1906-01-02 | Page 4 | Bell's Progress

BELL'S PROGRESS Occasionally some great fact appears from the sclentlOc resean h of men who are engaged in aeronautics whhh are of more value to I In- world than all the alleged airships that are bull,! and sailed for exposition purposes One of these facts comes from Sydney. Nova Scotia, through the Associated Press, which announces that Prof Alexandei Graham Bell has so far succeeded suc-ceeded in his great experiments is to construct a kite, self-rising and carrying car-rying a weight of two hundred ami twenty-seven pounds in addition to the weight of the kite itself, making a total to-tal of two hundred and eighty-eight pounds Prof Bell related to ihe present writer ,-t some length three yens ago the efforts whhh he was making ,ii hlg laboratory in Nova Scotia to solve the problem Of aeronautics. Like Hiram Maxim, he recognizes that an airship which must he lifted and maintained by artificial means is likely to he forever for-ever impracticable as a human utility Locating his laboratory where currents of air were best to be observed and where the flight of hirds was almost Incessant, ids labors began with the primitive facts For years he has be II seeking to diSCdvei that law by which the bird rises and maintains Itself in flight and station, carrying, of course, a weight greater than that of the atmosphere at-mosphere which it displaces Then has been nothing f i harlatanism in his work, nothing of display; hufr he has been laboring purely in the Interest of scientific advancement, hoping that through his own labors and those of men who shall build upon what he may-leave may-leave behind, the great problem maybe may-be solved. It is worth everything to America that men like Bell shall devott R part of their valuable time and their great wealth to pure research. This man's mind is methodically rli h In original power and In acquired fact He proposes pro-poses to build in this domain exactly as he built In the domain of the telephone tele-phone on Ihe self-same occasion of his re-itai to the present writer concerning con-cerning his work in aeronautics, he showed the original tracings on the smokc l glasses m ob-hy his hi st transmitter trans-mitter of the telephone and that llrst transmitter was constructed from the bones of the human ear with an artificial arti-ficial membrane. While Bell himself was not the inventor of the actual transmitter used on his telephone, his was he idea, not only of the transmitter trans-mitter but of transmission itself. We may hope for something In aeronautics aero-nautics from Bdi and M ixlri.