What Wilbur Thought of Gas Bags

摘要

More than three years after Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had still failed to market their airplane in the US. It was then that they received a request from a German arms dealer, Isidor Loewe. Loewe saw military potential in their invention and asked for a comparison of heavier-than-air flyers and airships. Hard as it is to believe today, France and Germany were pinning their airpower hopes on gas-filled dirigibles; France had just built a huge one, "La Patrie." Wilbur sent to Loewe a letter of reply. It is a classic of acerbic technical criticism, the point of which, as he accurately noted, was that airships indeed "were a thing of the past," and the future belonged to the airplane.