Excerpt from The Conquest of the Air: The Romance of Aerial Navigation Then we have a m mler of crank inventors who imagine that they have discovered a way of causing gravity to pull in the other direction, and a still less number who claim to have discovered how flying machines may be worked without any motive power at all. Except by a system of Springs, levers, and pistons, which to their mind gives a kind of an unbalanced pressure which will push the machine either upward or forward as may be desired. All these gentlemen expect courteous replies to their epistles, and I have thought that it would be a good plan to publish a cheap, short, and concise treatise on flying machines and balloons, and then recommend each to purchase and read the work before writing to me a second time. By a perusal of Mr. Alexander's work, I am happy to find the exact treatise that I had in my mind. In this little publication, we have in one hundred and sixty pages the whole history of the subject; in fact everything that is worth knowing, which although written in a short and concise manner is still very attractive, in a word the exact book that is required at the present moment; and I can recommend its careful perusal to everyone who is studying this much-discussed question. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.