Book Description

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1909 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's Sons Subjects: Drama / Continental European Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Science Fiction / General Fiction / Science Fiction / Adventure Fiction / Science Fiction / Short Stories Fiction / Short Stories Fiction / Westerns Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: FILMER In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men -- this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the steam- engine. And surely of all honoured names none is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Fil- mer's, the timid, intellectual creature who solved the problem over which the world had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations, the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare and well-nigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never has that recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man in the face of the greatness of his science found such an amazing exemplification. Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain, profoundly obscure -- Filmers attract no Bos- wells -- but the essential facts and the concluding scene are clear enough, and there are letters, and notes, and casual allusions to piece the whole together. And this is the story one makes, putting this thing with that, of Filmer's life and death. The first a...