I have now been engaged since the beginning of the year 1887 in experiments on an extended scale for determining the possibility of, and the conditions for, transporting in the air a body whose is greater than the air, and I desire to repost my conviction that the obstacles in its way are not such as have been thought; that they lie more in such apparently difficulties as those , and , than in what may appear to be the primary difficulties due to the nature of the air itself, and that in my opinion the evidence for this is now sufficiently complete to engage the serious attention of s to the practical solution of these secondary difficulties, and to the development of an art of mechanical flight which will bring with it a change in many of the conditions of individual and national existence whose importance can hardly be estimated.
— SAMUEL LANGLEY