This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest in flying, which had become a little fagged and flat by too much hearing and reading about the thing and not enough participation.  Sixteen years ago, in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one of the few journalists who believed and wrote that flying was possible; it affected my reputation unfavourably, and produced in the few discouraged pioneers of those days a quite touching gratitude.  Over my mantel as I write hangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photograph that Professor Langley sent me sixteen years ago.  It shows the flight of the first piece of human machinery heavier than air that ever kept itself up for any length of time.  It was a model, a little affair that would not have lifted a cat; it went up in a spiral and came down unsmashed, bringing back, like Noah’s dove, the promise of tremendous things.

That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall how cautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying.  I was quite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we should see men flying.  But I qualified that by repeating that for many years to come it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and skill.  We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks.  I was deeply impressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge mathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitch fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching must increase until up went its nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife.  We exaggerated every possibility of instability.  We imagined that when the aeroplane wasn’t “kicking up ahind and afore” it would be heeling over to the lightest side wind.  A sneeze might upset it.  We contrasted our poor human equipment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has had ten million years of evolution by way of a start....

The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with Mr. Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt.

Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity to speculations about the psychological and physiological effects of flying.  Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high tower feel some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread.  Even if men struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn’t they be smitten up there by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose all self-control?  And, above all, wouldn’t the pitching and tossing make them quite horribly sea-sick?

I have always been a little haunted by that last dread.  It gave a little undertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I got aboard the waterplane this morning—­that sort of faint, thin funk that so readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; when one tries one’s first dive, for example, or pushes off for the first time down an ice run.  I thought I should very probably be sea-sick—­or, to be more precise, air-sick; I thought also that I might be very giddy, and that I might get thoroughly cold and uncomfortable None of those things happened.