KRONFELD ON GLIDING AND SOARING.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

FAMOUS CONTEMPORARIES 49
to unforeseen events, all of which qualities are of the highest
value to him later when he must handle a heavy enginedriven
machine which exacts the highest degree of
concentration and extreme rapidity of decision at critical
moments."
ENGLAND
" Mr. Jose Weiss as is our English custom is much
better known in the United States as a great painter
of English landscapes than he is in this country in his
more important manifestation as a great pioneer of aviation."
Thus speaks Mr. F. Grey, the editor of the English aviation
journals, The Aeroplane and All the World's Aircraft,
in his preface to a book by Weiss's son, Bernard, who
gives an excellent account of the development of gliding
and soaring up to his time in his Gliding and Soaring.
" In 1909, when I first had the honour of meeting him,
Jose Weiss knew more about the aerodynamic design of an
aeroplane than do any but a minute number of our leading
aeroplane designers and aeronautical scientists to-day.
I say this deliberately and not as a figure of speech, for our
brightest brains to-day are constantly announcing with the
air of a Christopher Columbus discoveries which to Jose
Weiss were mere commonplace facts."
Everyone has seen in the circus artistes who balance
various objects on their noses and foreheads. When such
a man has acquired sufficient practice he can hold a walkingstick
so still that you would think it was suspended in the
air. But should the attention or the activity of the artiste
falter for a moment, the stick falls to the ground at once.
With a pendulum the exact opposite occurs. You may
place it in any position you like, but it returns of its own
accord to the only one in which it can find safe repose.
It corrects mechanically every disturbance of its equilibrium.
This maintenance of equilibrium is what Jose Weiss
meant by " natural stability." His train of thought was
a completely independent one, and yet it developed along
very similar lines to those which Etrich had followed.
Both told themselves that an aeroplane must be able to
fly by itself before human beings could be entrusted to it.