What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to ….

A few years later the Naval Academy was founded at Annapolis, and a similar course was pursued to provide it with a corps of instructors..

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it….

I was taught the alphabet by my aunts before I was four years old, and I was reading the Bible in class and beginning geography when I was six..

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it..

I had not yet gotten into the world of light. But I felt as one who, standing outside, could knock against the wall and hear an answering knock from ….

If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to m….

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible..

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint..

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope. . . . The example of the bird does not prove that man can f….

Ten decimal places of π are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to a fraction of an inch, and thirty decimal places would give the circ….

Construction of an aerial vehicle which can carry even a single man . . . requires the discovery of some new metal or force. Even with such a discove….

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been….

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rude….

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope..

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn t….

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exc….

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical m….

The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walke….

Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth o….

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy..