Salt Lake Tribune | 1919-05-27 | Page 6 | Hawker Rescued

HAWKER RESCUED. Nothing more thrilling has come over the cables in a long time than the news of the rescue in midocean of Harry G. Hawker and his machinist, picked up by a little Danish steamer laboring its way througji the northern seas. Tho two indomitable aviators had been given up for lost. Apparently they had comploted more than half of their transatlantic trans-atlantic flight when forced to descend. No more daring air flight was over undertaken un-dertaken than that which, prompted by the example of rival American aviators, started Hawker and his companion com-panion for the Irish coast with none of the elaborate precautionary measures which marked tho venture of Towers and Eead and Bellinger from Trepassey bay to the Azores. Americans will share in the delight expressed by their British cousins at the safety of the nervy Australian aviator avia-tor and his English companion. They did not succeed in their undertaking, but they have written a chapter in the history of air navigation which will be worth reading for a long time to come. For centuries it has boen the dream of men to conquer the air. As far back as the year 1500 runs the history of human endeavor along this line. In that year Jean Baptiste Dante made "flights" with a glider with non-vibrant wings in Perugia, Italy. Nearly two hundred and fifty years later, in 1742, the Marquis do Bacqueville used imitation flapping wings from a house in the Seine to the garden of the Tuileries, and was laughed out of public view by tho Parisians of his day. A hundred years later Henson patented his monople, to be driven by steam engine. It was never put to practical test, so far as any published record goes. In 1S71 M. Penaud constructed a toy model which flew for a considerable distance dis-tance in the garden of the Tuileries. Five years later he designed an airplane air-plane with two propellers. Then, in 180C, Professor Samuel P. Langley of Pittsburg attempted a flight over the Potomac river in a steam driven monoplane. Langley 's machine ma-chine travelled at a speed of from twenty to twenty-five miles an hour at an altitude of 3000 feet. The machine ma-chine fell into the river and Langley was laughed at, just as the Marquis de Bacqueville had been more' than a century before him. But derision never killed an idea of value. So in the same year that Langley withdrew from public pub-lic notice, later on to die, as Pitts-burghers Pitts-burghers say to this day, from wounded pride, Lillienthal used a biplane glider and killed himself in tho experiment, which was only partially successful. Then came the Wrights of Dayton, also laughed at by their follow townsmen, towns-men, who noted their tinkering in a shed in a vacant lot which afterwards Daytonians were proud to point out as "Wright's field," center of airplane activities. This was in 1900, and from that day to the present time the navigation navi-gation of the air has steadily progressed until it has become the serious study of tho scientific world. Eidicule very often spurs to astonishing achievements; achieve-ments; then it turns to admiration and acclaim.