MY AIRSHIPS
inventor and constructor. Yet with all these advantages you will soon find that possession of the perfected machine does not necessarily mean that you shall go spinning over the highways with it. You may be so unpractised that you will fall off the bicycle or blow up the automobile. The machine is all right, but you must learn to run it.
To bring the modern bicycle to its perfection thousands of amateurs, inventors, engineers, and constructors laboured during more than twenty-five years, trying endless innovations, one by one rejecting the great mass of them, and, after endless failures by the way of half successes, slowly nearing to the perfect organism.
So it is to-day with the automobile. Imagine the united labours and financial sacrifices of the engineers and manufacturers that led, step by step, up to the road-racing automobiles of the Paris-Berlin competition in 1901—the year in which the only working dirigible balloon then in existence won the Deutsch prize against a time limit that was thought by many a complete bar to success. Yet of the 170 perfected automobiles registered for entry to the Paris-Berlin competition only 109 completed the first day's run, and of these only 26 finally reached Berlin.
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