Ray Stannard Baker was born in 1870 at Lansing, Michigan, and came to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, with his parents at the age of five. Here he spent his boyhood and youth. He returned to the Agricultural College of his native state for study, and received his degree from that institution, afterwards attending the University for a short time. He then went into business with his father at St. Croix Falls, but the desire to write was strong upon him, and he began his career of authorship. During recent years his residence has been in Amherst, Massachusetts, but he visits Wisconsin every summer. He is one of the state's most voluminous writers. He has the habit of keen and sympathetic observation, and this quality, when combined, as it has been in his case, with extensive and judicious travel and reading, usually results in a considerable literary output. Those of us who have read Mr. Baker's magazine articles and books feel that the writer has seen a great many things,—that he has seen them with his own eyes, and that he has seen them intelligently. Aside from the fact that nearly all of his works grow rather from observation of men and things than from a study of philosophy or metaphysics, Mr. Baker's range of interest has been exceedingly wide. Perhaps he is best known as a writer on social, political, and economic subjects, but the selections given here from "The Boys' Book of Inventions," (I and II), indicate a field of interest that is entirely apart from politics.

The editors feel bound, in justice to Mr. Baker, to say that he feared that our readers would think that we had erred in choosing the accounts of inventions which have progressed so immeasurably since his articles were written. The editors, on the other hand, desired to do precisely the thing that Mr. Baker feared to have them do. They desire to show what a keen, well-trained observer saw in these inventions, which now play so vital a part in our lives, when the inventions were new. Further, it is our desire that the name of Professor Langley, of Washington, D. C., should be properly honored in connection with the advance of the science of aviation. Indeed, but recently, when tried by an experienced aviator, his machine flew successfully. Professor Langley died as an indirect result of his untiring, unselfish, and heroic efforts in this then new cause. In spite of ridicule and contempt, in spite of lack of support, he went courageously ahead; and it is right that the boys of Wisconsin should know that a young man of their state has given due credit in his book to this heroic soul.

THROUGH THE AIR

From "THE BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS," Chapter IX, by Ray Stannard Baker.
Copyright, 1899, by Doubleday, Page & Co.

Probably no American inventor of flying machines is better known or has been more successful in his experiments than Professor S. P. Langley, the distinguished secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. Professor Langley has built a machine with wings, driven by a steam-engine, and wholly without gas or other lifting power beyond its own internal energy. And this machine, to which has been given the name Aerodrome (air-runner), actually flies for considerable distances. So successful were Professor Langley's early tests, that the United States Government recently made a considerable appropriation to enable him to carry forward his experiments in the hope of finally securing a practical flying machine. His work is, therefore, the most significant and important of any now before the public (1899).

The invention of the aerodrome was the result of long years of persevering and exacting labor, with so many disappointments and set-backs that one cannot help admiring the astonishing patience which kept hope alive to the end. Early in his experiments, Professor Langley had proved positively, by mathematical calculations, that a machine could be made to fly, provided its structure were light enough and the actuating power great enough. Therefore, he was not in pursuit of a mere will-o'-the-wisp. It was a mechanical difficulty which he had to surmount, and he surmounted it. Professor Langley made his first experiments more than twelve years ago at Allegheny, Pennsylvania.... Professor Langley formed the general conclusion that by simply moving any given weight in plate form fast enough in a horizontal path through the air it was possible to sustain it with very little power. It was proved that, if horizontal flight without friction could be insured, 200 pounds of plates could be moved through the air and sustained upon it at the speed of an express train, with the expenditure of only one horse-power, and that, of course, without using any gas to lighten the weight.

Every boy who has skated knows that when the ice is very thin he must skate rapidly, else he may break through. In the same way, a stone may be skipped over the water for considerable distances. If it stops in any one place it sinks instantly. In exactly the same way, the plate of brass, if left in any one place in the air, would instantly drop to the earth; but if driven swiftly forward in a horizontal direction it rests only an instant in any particular place, and the air under it at any single moment does not have time to give way, so to speak, before it has passed over a new area of air. In fact, Professor Langley came to the conclusion that flight was theoretically possible with engines he could then build, since he was satisfied that engines could be constructed to weigh less than twenty pounds to the horse-power, and that one horse-power would support two hundred pounds if the flight was horizontal.

That was the beginning of the aerodrome. Professor Langley had worked out its theory, and now came the much more difficult task of building a machine in which theory should take form in fact. In the first place, there was the vast problem of getting an engine light enough to do the work. A few years ago an engine that developed one horse-power weighed nearly as much as an actual horse. Professor Langley wished to make one weighing only twenty pounds, a feat never before accomplished. And then, having made his engine, how was he to apply the power to obtain horizontal speed? Should it be by flapping wings like a bird, or by a screw propeller like a ship? This question led him into a close study of the bird compared with the man. He found how wonderfully the two were alike in bony formation, how curiously the skeleton of a bird's wing was like a man's arm, and yet he finally decided that flapping wings would not make the best propeller for his machine. Men have not adopted machinery legs for swift locomotion, although legs are nature's models, but they have, rather, constructed wheels—contrivances which practically do not exist in nature. Therefore, while Professor Langley admits that successful flying machines may one day be made with flapping wings, he began his experiments with the screw propeller.

There were three great problems in building the flying machine. First, an engine and boilers light enough and at the same time of sufficient power. Second, a structure which should be rigid and very light. Third, the enormously difficult problem of properly balancing the machine, which, Professor Langley says, took years to solve....

Professor Langley established an experimental station in the Potomac River, some miles below Washington. An old scow was obtained, and a platform about twenty feet high was built on top of it. To this spot, in 1893, the machine was taken, and here failure followed failure; the machine would not fly properly, and yet every failure, costly as it might be in time and money, brought some additional experience. Professor Langley found out that the aerodrome must begin to fly against the wind, just in the opposite way from a ship. He found that he must get up full speed in his engine before the machine was allowed to go, in the same way that a soaring bird must make an initial run on the ground before it can mount into the air, and this was, for various reasons, a difficult problem. And then there was the balancing.

"If the reader will look at the hawk or any soaring bird," says Professor Langley, "he will see that as it sails through the air without flapping the wing, there are hardly two consecutive seconds of its flight in which it is not swaying a little from side to side, lifting one wing or the other, or turning in a way that suggests an acrobat on a tight-rope, only that the bird uses its widely outstretched wings in place of the pole."

It must be remembered that air currents, unlike the Gulf Stream, do not flow steadily in one direction. They are forever changing and shifting, now fast, now slow, with something of the commotion and restlessness of the rapids below Niagara.

All of these things Professor Langley had to meet as a part of the difficult balancing problem, and it is hardly surprising that nearly three years passed before the machine was actually made to fly—on March 6, 1896.

"I had journeyed, perhaps for the twentieth time," says Professor Langley, "to the distant river station, and recommenced the weary routine of another launch, with very moderate expectation indeed; and when, on that, to me, memorable afternoon the signal was given and the aerodrome sprang into the air, I watched it from the shore with hardly a hope that the long series of accidents had come to a close. And yet it had, and for the first time the aerodrome swept continuously through the air like a living thing, and as second after second passed on the face of the stop-watch, until a minute had gone by, and it still flew on, and as I heard the cheering of the few spectators, I felt that something had been accomplished at last; for never in any part of the world, or in any period, had any machine of man's construction sustained itself in the air before for even half of this brief time. Still the aerodrome went on in a rising course until, at the end of a minute and a half (for which time only it was provided with fuel and water), it had accomplished a little over half a mile, and now it settled, rather than fell, into the river, with a gentle descent. It was immediately taken out and flown again with equal success, nor was there anything to indicate that it might not have flown indefinitely, except for the limit put upon it."

MARCONI AND HIS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS—NEW EXPERIMENTS IN WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY

From "SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS," Chapter VII, by Ray Stannard Baker.
Copyright, 1903, by Doubleday, Page & Co.

At noon on Thursday (December 12, 1901), Marconi sat waiting, a telephone receiver at his ear, in a room of the old barracks on Signal Hill. To him it must have been a moment of painful stress and expectation. Arranged on the table before him, all its parts within easy reach of his hand, was the delicate receiving instrument, the supreme product of years of the inventor's life, now to be submitted to a decisive test. A wire ran out through the window, thence to a pole, thence upward to the kite which could be seen swaying high overhead. It was a bluff, raw day; at the base of the cliff 300 feet below thundered a cold sea; oceanward through the mist rose dimly the rude outlines of Cape Spear, the easternmost reach of the North American Continent. Beyond that rolled the unbroken ocean, nearly 2,000 miles to the coast of the British Isles. Across the harbor the city of St. John's lay on its hillside wrapped in fog; no one had taken enough interest in the experiments to come up here through the snow to Signal Hill. Even the ubiquitous reporter was absent. In Cabot Tower, near at hand, the old signalman stood looking out to sea, watching for ships, and little dreaming of the mysterious messages coming that way from England. Standing on that bleak hill and gazing out over the waste of water to the eastward, one finds it difficult indeed to realize that this wonder could have become a reality. The faith of the inventor in his creation, in the kite-wire, and in the instruments which had grown under his hand, was unshaken.

"I believed from the first," he told me, "that I would be successful in getting signals across the Atlantic."

Only two persons were present that Thursday afternoon in the room where the instruments were set up—Mr. Marconi and Mr. Kemp. Everything had been done that could be done. The receiving apparatus was of unusual sensitiveness, so that it would catch even the faintest evidence of the signals. A telephone receiver, which is no part of the ordinary instrument, had been supplied, so that the slightest clicking of the dots might be conveyed to the inventor's ear. For nearly half an hour not a sound broke the silence of the room. Then quite suddenly Mr. Kemp heard the sharp click of the tapper as it struck against the coherer; this, of course, was not the signal, yet it was an indication that something was coming. The inventor's face showed no evidence of excitement. Presently he said:

"See if you can hear anything, Kemp."

Mr. Kemp took the receiver, and a moment later, faintly and yet distinctly and unmistakably, came three little clicks—the dots of the letter S, tapped out an instant before in England. At ten minutes past one, more signals came, and both Mr. Marconi and Mr. Kemp assured themselves again and again that there could be no mistake. During this time the kite gyrated so wildly in the air that the receiving wire was not maintained at the same height, as it should have been; but again, at twenty minutes after two, other repetitions of the signal were received. Thus the problem was solved. One of the great wonders of science had been wrought.

THE ROPING AT PASCO'S

By Ray Stannard Baker, McClure's Magazine, VOL XIX. p. 152.
Copyright, 1902, by S. S. McClure Company.

... Little groups of people were drifting by to the grand stand. Here and there, from the corner of his eye, as he bent to adjust the saddle-cinches, Turk McGlory caught the glint of a white skirt or of a flowing ribbon. Sometimes the girls stopped to discuss the contestants; he heard them talking of Bud Oliver, and Mason, and Buster Graham. Suddenly, as he tightened a latigo strap, a saucy, smiling face looked up at him. Her sister was evidently trying to pull her away, but she said, half teasingly:

"I'm wearing your colors, Mr. Texas. You must win."

He saw nothing but deep black eyes, and he felt the blood in his face. He couldn't have spoken if he had known that it was to save his life, and he knew that he was smiling foolishly....

"We're betting on you, Bud Oliver," came other shouts. The Texas men were not over-popular in Arizona, and yet it was a sportsmanlike crowd.

The babel of voices ceased sharply. A wiry little steer, red and white, shot into the field as if catapulted. Turk McGlory observed how like an antelope it ran—long-legged and as easily as the wind blows. The flag fell, and Bud was off; the judges riding after him were blurred in his dust. There was no roper like Bud. He waited long before raising his rope, bending close to his saddle and riding hard; then in what curious, loose, slow coils he swung it! Would he ride clean over his steer? There! he had reached out as if to catch the steer by the tail, and the rope had gone over his head like a hoop, horns and all. Now he was paying out to trip up the steer. How they were running! Turk McGlory rose suddenly in his saddle.

"Look out for the fence," he roared.

But Bud had seen it, too, and the little roan squatted like a rabbit. The steer, reaching the rope's end, doubled up and fell—but fell against the fence. There had not been quite room enough. Bud was off saddle, and the little roan, knowing well what was going on, walked away like a man, pulling hard on the rope to keep the steer down. If it had been a larger steer or a fatter one, there would have been no trouble; but this one fought like a cat, now on its knees, now on its feet. Bud seized it by the tail, and with a single fierce toss he laid it flat, then he tied—and arms up. Turk McGlory waited with hands clenched to hear the time.

"Fifty seconds."

So Bud was beaten by a second, and beaten because he didn't have a fair field. How the crowd howled for the Arizona champion. Bud came up smiling and unconcerned.

"Now, McGlory," he said, "you must make a showing for Texas."

"What am I offered on Turk McGlory against the field?" shouted the pool-seller. "Now's your last chance."

"Hurrah for the kid from Texas!" shouted other voices.

Turk McGlory was at the line, astonished to find himself coiling his rope with so much ease. He felt that he wasn't doing it himself, but that some one else was working in him. The sun blazed hot on the field, but everything seemed dim and indistinct. To him all the voices kept shouting:

"Turk McGlory, Turk McGlory, Turk McGlory."

"Hurrah for Texas and the calico horse," came a shout from the grand stand.

"Wait till they see you run, Pinto," Turk said between his teeth, and the pinto stirred nervously under him.

"Ready," called Turk McGlory, though not in Turk McGlory's voice. He gave one glance behind him. The grand stand was a picture of a girl in blue and white; she was the picture, all the rest was frame.

There was a clatter at the pen, and the steer shot past him. Instantly he saw all its points—horns, legs, tail—and they spoke to him with the meaning of familiarity. So might the old knight have looked for the points of his adversary's armour. Now that he was off, Turk's head cleared to his work. The steer ran with hind feet swinging sideways, hog-like. He remembered a steer in the Lazy A outfit that had the same habit, and a bad one it was, too. How strange that he should think of such things at such a time! The steer was swerving swiftly to the left. The pinto, nose forward and dilating, instantly slackened pace, swerving in the same direction and cutting off distance. It was much to have a horse, pinto though he be, that knew his business. Turk's rope began to swing, but he was wholly unconscious of it. He seemed now to see only the legless body of a steer swimming on a billow of dust. The fence! He saw it with a throb, and he was yet too far off to throw. And there was the grand stand above it, the men rising, half in terror, and a color of women. The steer had swung almost round. It was a low rail fence, and between it and the grand stand lay the racing track. Dimly McGlory heard shouts of warning. Would the steer plunge into the stand? Dimly, too, glancing back, he saw the other cow-men charging after him to the rescue. There was a crash; the steer had gone through the fence as if it were pasteboard, and the pinto was now close behind. There was all too little room here in the track. The steer would evidently plunge full into the crowd. Turk McGlory's arm shot forward and the rope sped. The pinto sat sharply back, throwing McGlory well over the pommel. To those in the grand stand it seemed as if the steer, all horns and eyes, was plucked out of their faces. When they looked again, McGlory was tying, and the judges and the other punchers were swarming through the gap in the fence. Hands up; and the pinto easing away on the rope! It was all lost, McGlory felt. The fence had been in the way. Why couldn't they provide an open field, as in Texas? These Arizona men couldn't conduct a contest. The timer lifted his hand, and the shouting stopped.

"Thirty-six seconds," he announced.

"What a fool of a timer," thought Turk McGlory. "It can't be so."

Then he saw Bud Oliver stride up with outstretched hand, and a lump came in his throat.

"Good boy!" said Bud. "You've saved the day for Texas."

And then the crowd pounced on him and hooted and shouted, "McGlory! McGlory!" until he was dizzy with it all. It was not as he thought it would be. Two hundred dollars won! And he, Turk McGlory!

And then a saucy, flushed face looking up at him.

"I knew you would do it, Mr. Texas," she said.

And with that she pinned a blue and white ribbon on his vest, and he looked off over her head, and trembled.