In a lecture before the Royal Society of Arts,
reported
in Engineering, F. W. Lanchester took the position
that
practical flight was not the abstract question which some
apparently considered it to be, but a problem in locomotive
engineering. The flying machine was a locomotive
appliance, designed not merely to lift a weight,
but to transport it elsewhere, a fact which should be
sufficiently obvious. Nevertheless one of the leading
scientific
men of the day advocated a type in which this, the
main function of the flying machine, was overlooked.
When the machine was considered as a method of transport,
the vertical screw type, or helicopter, became at
once ridiculous. It had, nevertheless, many advocates
who had some vague and ill-defined notion of subsequent
motion through the air after the weight was raised.
