When this happens she simply floats on the water
until the damage is repaired, or help reaches her. Unless we are
to suppose for the flying-machine, in addition to everything else,
an immunity from accident which no human experience leads us to
believe possible, it would be liable to derangements of machinery,
any one of which would be necessarily fatal. If an engine were
necessary not only to propel a ship, but also to make her float--
if, on the occasion of any accident she immediately went to the
bottom with all on board--there would not, at the present day, be
any such thing as steam navigation. That this difficulty is
insurmountable would seem to be a very fair deduction, not only
from the failure of all attempts to surmount it, but from the fact
that Maxim has never, so far as we are aware, followed up his
seemingly successful experiment.
There is, indeed, a way of attacking it which may, at first sight,
seem plausible. In order that the aeroplane may have its full
sustaining power, there is no need that its motion be continuously
forward. A nearly horizontal surface, swinging around in a circle,
on a vertical axis, like the wings of a windmill moving
horizontally, will fulfil all the conditions.
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