VOL. XIV

NO. 1

66

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EE that hawk up there," said Dr. Alexander Graham Bell to me at his flying machine station near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, three years ago. "He has learned to fly, but he has never risked his life. I don't believe there is any necessity in risking human life in learning how to leader-than-air machines. I have always considered the experiments of the Wright brothers very dangerous, as, indeed, they have proved.

As Dr. Bell has spent more money than any other man in America in perfecting his flying machines, he is certainly entitled to a hearing on this important point of the risks of aviation. In all of the thousands of successful tests made of his machines at Baddeck not a life has been lost and not a limb broken.

Dr. Bell regards the many recent sacrifices of life to the science of aviation as not only unnecessary but silly.

The appalling list of fatalities in flying heavier-than-air machines during the past two years might all have been prevented if the canny Scotch caution of Dr. Bell had been shared by other aviators. But man is prone to take risks, and some men, like Hamilton, Baldwin, and Paulhan, positively delight in them. Hamilton, the greatest dare-devil of them all, thinks nothing of plunging a thousand feet at the rate of sixty miles an hour and, just as his plane seems about to crash into a terrified crowd, of scooting up into the air again with a grim smile upon his face.

They will tell you in the Aero Club that these reckless drivers are all fore

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