HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR
BASED ON OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS
BY DIRECTION OF THE HISTORICAL SECTION OF
THE COMMITTEE OF IMPERIAL DEFENCE

THE WAR IN THE AIR

Being the Story of
The part played in the Great War
by the Royal Air Force

VOL. I

BY

WALTER RALEIGH

OXFORD
THE CLARENDON PRESS
1922

Oxford University Press

London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen
New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town
Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai

Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University

PREFACE

The History of which this is the first volume is, in the main, the history of the part played in the war by British air forces. It is based chiefly on the records of the Air Ministry collected and preserved at the Historical Section. The staff of the Section have spared no trouble to collect an immense amount of material and arrange it for use, to consult living witnesses, to verify facts down to the minutest details, and to correct any errors that may have crept into the narrative. Their main purpose has been to secure that any statement of fact made in this book shall be true and demonstrable. If in any particular instances they have failed in this purpose, it has not been for lack of pains and care.

Official records do not in themselves make history. They are colourless and bare. In the business of interpreting and supplementing them we have been much helped by the kindness of many military and naval officers and of many civilian experts. Their help, most of which is acknowledged in the text, has supplied us with the liveliest things in this book. We could wish that we had more of it. Naval and military officers do not advertise, and are reluctant to speak publicly of the part that they played in the war. They are silent on all that may seem to tell to their own credit or to the discredit of others, and this silence easily develops into a fixed habit of reticence. We are the more grateful to those who have helped us to a true account by telling of what they saw. The best part of the book is yet to come; if the theme is to be worthily treated, it must be by the help of those who remember and of those who know.

The writer of this history has endeavoured to make his narrative intelligible to those who, like himself, are outsiders, and, with that end in view, he has avoided, as far as possible, the masonic dialect of the services. For the few and cautious opinions that he has expressed he alone is responsible. In controverted questions, though he has not always been careful to conceal his own opinion, he has always tried so to state the grounds for other opinions that those who hold these other opinions may think his statement not unfair. If his own opinion is wrong, the corrective will usually be found near at hand. The position of an outsider has grave disabilities; if a measure of compensation for these disabilities is anywhere to be found, it must be sought in freedom from the heat of partisan zeal and from the narrowness of corporate loyalty.

Some of the men who early took thought for their country's need, and quietly laboured to prepare her against the day of trial, are here celebrated, and their names, we hope, rescued from neglect. The men who flew over the fire of enemy guns were so many that comparatively few of their names, and these chosen almost by accident, can here be mentioned. There were thousands of others just as good. The heroes of this story, let it be said once and for all, are only samples.

Some apology perhaps is necessary for the variety which has been found inevitable in naming particular men. A man's christian name and surname are his own, but change and promotion were rapid during the war, so that the prefixes to these names varied from year to year. Where we are describing a particular deed, we give the actors the rank that they held at the time. Where we speak more generally, we give them the rank that they held when this history was written.

WALTER RALEIGH.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION pp. [1-14]

New means of warfare in the Great War—submarines and aircraft. The first free flight of an aeroplane, December 17, 1903. Attitude of the peoples; English stolidity. The navy and the air. The German menace hastens the making of our air service. The British air force at the outbreak of the war, and at its close. The achievement of the British air force. Uses of aircraft in war extended and multiplied—reconnaissance, artillery observation, photography, contact patrol, battle in the air, bombing. Naval developments—kite balloons, coast patrol, convoy of vessels, seaplanes and seaplane-carriers, work against submarines. Secret dropping of agents. Development of machines. New scientific devices. Men of science and men of action. The supremacy of the infantry in war. The making of its tradition by the Royal Air Force.

CHAPTER I. The Conquest of the Air. pp. [15-66]

Our ignorance of man's history. The conquest of the sea and the conquest of the air. Pioneers of flight. The physical basis of flight. Essential features of an aeroplane. Two kinds of aircraft—floating machines and soaring machines. Early legends and adventures. Progress the reward of risk. Wilbur Wright's view. Progress towards aerial navigation in the age of Louis XIV, and of the French Revolution. The Royal Society and Bishop Wilkins. Joseph Glanvill's prophecies. Sir William Temple's satire. Study of the flight of birds by Borelli. Lana's aerial ship. The discovery of gases. Soap-bubbles filled with hydrogen in 1782. The Montgolfier hot-air balloon, 1783. The hydrogen balloon of Professor Charles. The first aeronaut—Pilâtre de Rozier. First ascents in Great Britain; James Tytler and Vincenzo Lunardi. Lunardi's narrative. Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole on balloons. The Great Nassau. The balloon as a spectacle. Scientific work of James Glaisher. His highest ascent, September 5, 1862. Pioneers of aviation—Sir George Cayley, John Stringfellow. Foundation of Aeronautical Society, 1866. Francis Wenham's paper on aerial locomotion. Fermentation of ideas. The study of soaring birds—Cayley, M. Mouillard. The gliders; stories of Captain Lebris; the work and writings of Otto Lilienthal; his death and influence. Percy Pilcher and his work. Other experiments—Montgomery, Chanute, Phillips, Maxim, Ader. Laurence Hargrave; his inventions; his public spirit. Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley; his whirling table; his discoveries. His flying machine of 1896. His design of a machine to carry a man; failure of trials in 1903. Wilbur and Orville Wright; their method of attacking the problem; practice in equilibrium. The history of their experiments; difficulties and disappointments. Their perseverance, and their great discovery—the combination of wing-warping with a movable rudder. Their glider of 1902—the victory machine. Their perfect control. Their first power machine. Their flights on December 17, 1903. The age of the flying machine had come at last.

CHAPTER II. The Aeroplane and the Airship. pp. [67-109]

The Wrights improve their machine, and practise it in many flights over Huffman Prairie. Indifference of the neighbouring farmers; and of American, French, and British Governments. Wilbur Wright's visit to France, 1908. Record flights. Struggle to secure patents. Death of Wilbur Wright.

European pioneers. Ellehammer. German airships and French aeroplanes. Mr. Haldane's prophecy. French airship experiments. Successful voyage of La France, 1884. German airships of Wölfert and Schwarz. Brutality of the crowd. Alberto Santos Dumont; his airships. Controversy on the rotary principle. Santos Dumont's successes. Disasters to the airships of Severo and Bradsky. Count von Zeppelin. His first airship. Advantages and disadvantages of the rigid type. Early trials. List of pre-war Zeppelins. Wrecks and progress. Parseval airships. Schütte-Lanz airships. French aviation. Captain F. Ferber. The Antoinette engine. The Voisins. Delagrange, Farman, Blériot, Esnault-Pelterie. First aeroplane flight over French soil by Santos Dumont. Diverse experiments. French improvements. The monoplane. Tractors and pushers. Ailerons. Centralized control. The wheeled undercarriage. The horizontal tail-plane. Early French flights. Wilbur Wright at Le Mans. Competitions and prizes. Blériot's cross-Channel flight. Grahame-White and Paulhan. Glenn Curtiss. The Circuit de l'Est. Aviation meetings. The Champagne week. The Gnome engine. Blackpool and Doncaster. Chavez flies across the Alps. Record-making and record-breaking.

CHAPTER III. Flight in England. pp. [110-45]

English aviation late and sporadic. Private adventure and sport as against continental organization. Prospect of war the cause of the formation of the Royal Flying Corps. A few pioneers encouraged by the Government—Mr. Cody, Lieutenant Dunne. The Dunne aeroplane. The history of Mr. A. V. Roe. He makes the first flight over English soil, in 1907, at Brooklands. Receives notice to quit. Is refused the use of Laffan's Plain. Is threatened with prosecution for flying over Lea Marshes. His perseverance and success. The famous Avro machine, 1913. Dependence of England on private effort. The Aero Club. Mr. Sopwith and Mr. de Havilland. Their famous machines. Mr. José Weiss and his gliders. Mr. Howard Wright sets up the first aeroplane factory in 1908. The Hon. Alan Boyle makes the first cross-country trip, 1910. The Short Brothers at Shellness, Isle of Sheppey. Their work for the Aero Club. Mr. Cecil Grace and the Hon. Charles Rolls. Mr. Moore-Brabazon flies a circular mile, 1909. Mr. Frank McClean establishes the aerodrome at Eastchurch. Mr. G. B. Cockburn teaches four naval officers to fly. Beginnings of the naval air service. Mr. Holt Thomas brings Paulhan to Brooklands, where an aerodrome is made. Paulhan makes a flight of nearly three hours. Beginners at Brooklands. Mr. Alan Boyle's story. The Arcadian community at Brooklands. Foundation of the London aerodrome at Hendon. Aeroplane races. The 'Circuit of Europe' and the 'Circuit of Britain'. Crowds of spectators at Hendon. Promoters of flight; Mr. Holt Thomas. The Larkhill aerodrome. Military flying; Captain Fulton; Captain Dickson, his skill as a pilot, his appearance at the army manœuvres of 1910, his patriotism, his death in 1913; Lieutenant Gibbs, his adventures in Spain. Civilians at Larkhill; Mr. Robert Loraine, Mr. Barber, Mr. Cockburn. The Bristol Flying School at Larkhill; M. Henry Jullerot, Mr. Gordon England, Mr. Harry Busteed. Creation of the Air Battalion, Royal Engineers, in February 1911. Debt of the nation to Captain Fulton and Mr. Cockburn. Private enterprise more useful to military than to naval flying.

CHAPTER IV. The Beginnings of the Air Force. pp. [146-97]

English respect for precedent. The air force developed by stages from a balloon detachment of the Royal Engineers. The balloon in war. Balloon experiments at Woolwich and Chatham. Balloons in Bechuanaland, 1884; in the Soudan, 1885. Success of balloons at Aldershot manœuvres, 1889. Balloon Factory established at South Farnborough, 1894. Balloons in South African War, 1899-1900. Energy of the factory. Colonel Templer and Colonel Capper. The first British army airship, the Nulli Secundus, 1907. Appointment of Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1909, to combine theory and practice. The National Physical Laboratory. Growth of the factory under Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, 1909-16. Its services to aviation. Private makers of aircraft stand aloof. The designing office at the factory. Its services during the war. Famous factory types of aeroplane—the B.E., the F.E., the S.E., the R.E. The question of stability; work of Mr. Lanchester and Professor Bryan. The story of Mr. Busk. Workmanship and safety. Notable devices invented at the factory.

The navy employs private firms of aircraft makers. The Short brothers. Factory airships from 1908 to 1913. All airships assigned to the navy in 1913. The Mayfly fiasco, 1908-11. Captain Murray Sueter and Captain Bertram Dickson on the command of the air. The true doctrine—freedom and the open highways.

French military aviation in 1911. Reports of Lieutenant Glyn and Captain Sykes. German aeronautics in 1912. Report of Captain Sueter and Mr. O'Gorman. Changed conditions of naval warfare. British naval airship section reconstituted. Purchase of foreign airships. British rigid airships ordered in 1913, too late for the war. German belief in the airship. Private efforts of British naval officers. Commander Oliver Swann first gets off the water in an Avro aeroplane fitted with floats, 1911. Lieutenant C. R. Samson flies off the deck of H.M.S. Africa, 1911. Lieutenant Samson's first seaplane. The first flying boat.

The problem of the making of an air force. The need of discipline. Early doings of the Air Battalion, 1911. Difficulties of policy. Lighter than air and heavier than air. Aeroplanes few; airships unpopular. Royal Engineers and others. Mr. Cockburn teaches the battalion to fly. They fly from Larkhill to Farnborough. Cross-country flights. Army manœuvres of 1911; adventurers of the Air Battalion. The accident to Lieutenant Reynolds. Record flight of Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett. Death of Lieutenant Cammell. Our apprenticeship in the air. The English fashion.

CHAPTER V. The Royal Flying Corps. pp. [198-276]

Institution of the Royal Flying Corps. Plans prepared by General Henderson, Captain Sykes, and Major MacInnes. History in the making. Choice of the squadron as the unit of the new force. Pressure of time. Institution of the Central Flying School. The question of the rank of pilots. The question of the independence of the Flying Corps. The attitude of the navy. The Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps becomes the Royal Naval Air Service. The Naval Flying School at Eastchurch. The case against the independence of the air force; and the case for it. The temper of the air. The language difficulty. The Air Committee of 1912 and its functions. Need for an Air Ministry. Experimental work of the Naval Air Service. Uses of the Military Wing of the Royal Flying Corps. Debt to the Royal Engineers. Training and establishment. Variety of trades enrolled. The group of early officers, under Captain Sykes. Captain Patrick Hamilton. The first two aeroplane squadrons, commanded by Captain Brooke-Popham and Captain Burke. The Airship Company of the Air Battalion becomes No. 1 Squadron of the Flying Corps. The story of Major Maitland. The airships handed over to the navy, 1913. Development of wireless telegraphy. A brief history and description of wireless telegraphy. Experiments in adapting it for the use of aircraft. The work of Captain Lefroy; and of Lieutenant Fitzmaurice. Success of wireless at the manœuvres of 1912. Improvement of apparatus. Wireless in seaplanes; successes of 1913. Wireless in aeroplanes.

Work of the headquarters staff of the Military Wing. The beginnings of a great tradition. The experimental branch. The story of Major Musgrave. The work of the aeroplane squadrons. Captain Eustace Loraine. Fatalities of 1912. The ban on monoplanes. Mr. Howard Flanders. Work at the Central Flying School. Fatal accidents. Formation of new squadrons.

No. 3 Squadron on Salisbury Plain. Co-operation with artillery and infantry. Military aeroplane trials. 'Military airmen also flew.' Co-operation with cavalry. No. 3 Squadron at the manœuvres of 1912. Lessons of the manœuvres. Winter difficulties. Manœuvres of 1913. Reports by Major Brooke-Popham and Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett. Details and efficiency. Experiments with machine-guns; and with cameras. The first night flight. Non-commissioned pilots. Major McCudden on No. 3 Squadron.

No. 2 Squadron. Major C. J. Burke; his story and character. His maxims. His famous machine, the first B.E. The squadron moves by air from Farnborough to Montrose. Practice at St. Andrews. The Irish Command manœuvres of 1913. Statistics of the squadron. Captain Longcroft's long flight. Major Burke's diary.

Other squadrons. The Concentration Camp at Netheravon. Reconnaissance in war. Other uses of aeroplanes at first claimed for airships. Uses ultimately found for aerial acrobatics—the loop, the spin. The machine-gun and the pusher machine. Aerodynamical knowledge. The S.E. 5. The 'Christmas tree'. Importance of engine power.

The Naval Wing. Problems of defence. Coastal stations. Seaplanes at the naval manœuvres of 1913. Mr. Churchill's programme. Detection of submarines. Bomb-dropping experiments. Anti-airship experiments. Machine-guns. The Central Air Office, Sheerness. Poor supply of munitions. Separation of the naval and military wings. The Royal Naval Air Service at the Naval Review, 1914. War orders.

German aviation British report on the 'Prince Henry Circuit', May, 1914. The coming of the war.

CHAPTER VI. The War: The Royal Flying Corps from Mons to Ypres. pp. [277-356]

The Prussian doctrine of war. The Serajevo murders. Austria and Serbia. Germany refuses mediation and makes war on Russia and France. Great Britain declares war, August 4, 1914. The cause of civilization. The German plan of campaign. The British army in France. Mobilization of Royal Flying Corps. The Aircraft Park. The squadrons. List of officers of the four squadrons. The machines. Amiens. Maubeuge. Flying Corps fired on by British troops. Union Jack markings. The German wheel through Belgium. French strategy. The retreat from Mons. First aerial reconnaissances. The reconnaissances of August 22. Sergeant-Major Jillings wounded in the air. Lieutenants Waterfall and Bayly brought down. Aerial reconnaissance on its trial. Early mistakes. List of places occupied by H.Q., R.F.C., during retreat. German movements observed. A typical air report. The western wind. The finding of Sir Douglas Haig. Help to General Smith-Dorrien at Le Cateau. The detection of enveloping movements. The British army escapes from von Kluck. Von Kluck wheels towards the Oise. His change of direction observed from the air. One of the reports. British retreat continues. The Sixth French Army on the Ourcq. Summary of British aerial work during the retreat. Alarms. Experiences of pilots. High spirits. Early bomb-dropping. First German machine seen by British at Maubeuge. Fighting in the air. German machines brought down. The battle of the Marne. Machines assigned to corps commands, September 6.

Observation of the battle. Advance of headquarters to Fère-en-Tardenois. General Joffre's thanks to the Flying Corps. Storm of September 12. The battle of the Aisne. Adventure of Lieutenants Dawes and Freeman. Position warfare. Artillery observation. Wireless—Lieutenants Lewis and James. An early wireless message. The clock code. Popularity of wireless. Photography. The dropping of darts. German 'Archies'. The race for the sea. British army moves north; Flying Corps shifted to St. Omer. No. 6 Squadron arrives. Strategic reconnaissance. Long-distance flights. The battle of Ypres. Union Jack marking abolished. Photography and wireless. Earlier methods of ranging. Their inferiority. Fighting quality of British aeroplanes; German prisoners' evidence. The losses of Ypres. Withdrawal of German troops observed from the air. Sympathy of Flying Corps for the infantry. The German officer and his pilot.

CHAPTER VII. The Royal Naval Air Service in 1914. pp. [357-409]

Strength of the Naval Wing. Progress in wireless and in armament. Uncertain purposes. The stimulant of war. Mr. F. K. McClean. Coastal patrols. Channel patrols. Airship logs. A Zeppelin sighted. Hardships of North Sea patrols. Squadron Commander Seddon's experience. Practice value of patrols. Seaplanes at Scapa Flow. Seaplane-carriers—Empress, Engadine, and Riviera. Imperfections of the seaplane. The doctrine of the initiative in war. Offensive policy of the Royal Naval Air Service. The Eastchurch Squadron under Commander Samson goes to Ostend, August 27, 1914. Their motor-car reconnaissance to Bruges. They are ordered to return to England. Delayed by an accident. The Admiralty changes its policy, and orders them to operate from Dunkirk against Zeppelins. Adventures in armed motor-cars. Fight with Germans between Cassel and Bailleul. The expedition to Lille. Armoured cars. Marine reinforcements. The fight outside Doullens. Advanced base at Morbecque. Attacks designed on German communications in co-operation with French territorials and cavalry. The affair at Douai—Commander Samson's story. Diverse activities of Naval Air Service. Shortage of machines. Storm of September 12. The Naval Air Service co-operates on the Belgian coast with the Seventh Division of the British army. Air raids on Düsseldorf. The evacuation of Antwerp. The British Empire and 'side-shows'.

Naval aeroplanes work for the British army. The base at Dunkirk; its importance, and its influence on the war.

The air raid on Friedrichshafen, November 21, 1914. Secret preparations. The course from Belfort to Lake Constance. Lieutenant Sippe's log. Effect of the bombs. Squadron Commander Briggs taken prisoner. German alarm and later costly defences. The praise of the Avro. The question of Swiss neutrality.

The air raid on Cuxhaven, Christmas Day 1914, supported by light cruisers and destroyers. The purposes of the raid. The supporting force unmolested in the Bight of Heligoland. Inspected by Zeppelins. Commodore Tyrwhitt's remarks on Zeppelin tactics. Reconnaissance flight of seaplane No. 136 over the German navy.

The war in 1914. Increase of British responsibilities, and of the air force. The temper of the air force. The Epic of Youth.

CHAPTER VIII. The Expansion of the Air Force. pp. [410-89]

The squadrons take to France, in August 1914, all efficient pilots, and all serviceable machines. What was left. Further call for fighting aeroplanes. The making of the new air force. British mastery of the air by July 1916.

British power of organization. Early control of military aviation. The Military Aeronautics Directorate. Sir David Henderson takes command in France. Major Trenchard and Major Brancker take charge at home.

General Trenchard and the Royal Flying Corps. His previous history. Given command of the Military Wing at Farnborough, to make something out of nothing. Helped by Major Brancker, who is appointed Deputy Director of Military Aeronautics. Previous history of Major Brancker. His flight as observer during cavalry manœuvres in India, 1911. Returns to England, learns to fly, and joins Military Aeronautics Directorate.

Lord Kitchener at the War Office asks for new squadrons. Bold action of Directorate. Enlistment of mechanics. Agreement with Admiralty for allotment of machines and engines. The placing of orders. Avoidance of standardization. Opinion of pilots on their machines liable to error. Examples—the Sopwith Tabloid and the D.H. 2. Sudden demands of the war. Machines ordered. New firms employed.

Training scheme for pilots. New aerodromes all over England. Lord Kitchener's energy. Formation flying. Fifty new squadrons demanded. Official objections. 'Double this. K.' Good repute of British aviation for safety, quality, and performance. The architecture of the new air force. Institution of wings to co-operate with army corps, November 1914. Transfers and promotions. Wings paired to form a brigade. Army wings and corps wings. Introduction of equipment officers who do not fly. Race for efficiency in machines. The importance of morale. Harmful newspaper agitations. General Trenchard's achievement. Lessons of experience. Fighting aeroplanes; wireless; anti-aircraft guns; photography. Experimental machine with every squadron. Training of pilots at the Central Flying School. Training of observers begins late in the war. Meaning of the observer's badge.

General Henderson relinquishes command. His death, 1921, and character.

Continuous growth of Flying Corps. Observation and fighting. Bombing raids and night-flying. Programmes of the Royal Flying Corps command. Contrast between German and British artillery observation. Need for British anti-aircraft guns. Number of machines in a squadron raised to eighteen in 1916. Programmes of 1916 and 1917. The war ends before the latter is completed. Small early reinforcements. The supply of pilots. French supply machines to us during earlier years of the war. Military and naval officers posted to Paris to arrange supply.

The expansion of the Royal Naval Air Service. The problem of helping the navy from the air. The seaplane. The vessels designed to carry aircraft. Difficulty of landing an aeroplane on the deck of a moving vessel. The feat first accomplished, August 1917.

Kites and balloons. The Parseval kite balloon. The Drachen and the Cacquot. Wing Commander Maitland's report. Kite-balloon centre established at Roehampton. The first kite-balloon ship—the Manica. Experiments with kite balloons towed by ships. Demand of the army for kite balloons on the western front. This demand supplied by the navy.

The invention of the type of small airship called the Submarine Scout. The flying boat. Sopwith Bat boat. Work of Colonel J. C. Porte at Felixstowe. His earlier career. Achievements in 1918 of Felixstowe flying boats.

Torpedo aircraft. Experiments. Use of the torpedo seaplane at Gallipoli. Slowness of its practical development. Causes of this delay. Operational difficulties. The Cuckoo, a torpedo aeroplane, produced in 1917. The Argus built to carry torpedo aeroplanes, 1918. The value of torpedo aircraft. Dreaded by Dreadnoughts. Unpopular with pilots.

The navy and private firms. Need for fighting machines, and for powerful engines. Rivalry between military and naval air services. Demand for squadrons on western front. Two naval squadrons offered in 1914, and refused. Development of aerial fighting, and of bomb-dropping. The Fokker menace in 1916. Admiralty lend four Nieuport scouts to help No. 6 Squadron. Success of the experiment. A naval squadron on the western front near Amiens, October 1916. Four fighting naval squadrons on the western front in 1917. The achievements of these squadrons.

The problem of unity of control. The War Office and the Admiralty. Director of the Air Department responsible to each of the Sea Lords. The Central Air Office at Sheerness, under the Nore Command, abolished in February 1915, and the Royal Naval Air Service placed under the orders of the Director of the Air Department. Points of difficulty raised by Commander-in-Chief of the Nore. Verdict of the naval law branch. The question of discipline. Rapid growth of Naval Air Service. Small professional training of officers entered from civil life. The navy absorbs the Royal Naval Air Service into itself, August 1915. Consequences of this. Appointment of senior naval officers to air service commands. Discipline and science. Some advantages of the change—establishment of training depot at Cranwell, and of the famous Fifth Group at Dunkirk.

Naval plan for long-distance bombing raids over Essen and Berlin. No. 3 Wing at Luxeuil formed for this purpose. The army's needs; the Luxeuil Wing broken up. Probable effects of such raids. Believers in frightfulness are very susceptible to fright.

The emergence of the new air force. How the air will come into its own.

INTRODUCTION

When Great Britain declared war upon Germany in August 1914, she staked her very existence as a free nation upon an incalculable adventure. Two new means and modes of warfare, both of recent invention, enormously increased the difficulties of forecast and seemed to make precedents useless. Former wars had been waged on the land and on the sea; the development of submarines and aircraft opened up secret ways of travel for armed vessels under the sea and promised almost unlimited possibilities of observation and offence from the heights of the air.

Of these two new weapons the submarine was brought earlier to a state of war efficiency, and because it seemed to threaten the security of our island and the power of our navy, it excited the greater apprehension. But the navigation of the air, whether by airship or aeroplane, is now recognized for the more formidable novelty. The progress of the war has proved that within the narrow seas the submarine can be countered, and that the extension of its capabilities on the high seas is beset with difficulties. For aircraft the possibilities are immense. It is not extravagant to say that the 17th of December 1903, when the Wright brothers made the first free flight through the air in a power-driven machine, marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the world.

The differences to be looked for in this new era were both over-estimated and under-estimated, according to the temper of those who considered them. Imaginative people, and sentimental people, looked for the speedy fulfilment of Tennyson's vision:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the World.

The Germans, who as a people fall easy victims to agreeable sentiment, indulged extravagant hopes from war in the air, and expected great achievements from their Zeppelins. On the other hand, the English, who are less excitable, were comparatively slow as a nation to appreciate the importance of the new invention. Conservative and humorous minds are always conscious chiefly of the immutable and stable elements in human life, and do not readily pay respect to novelty. Those who were responsible for the naval and military defences of the country preserved great coolness, and refused to let judgement outrun experience. They knew well that the addition to man's resources of yet another mode of travel or transport does not alter the enduring principles of strategy. They regarded the experiment benevolently, and, after a time, were willing to encourage it, but 'up to the end of the year 1911', says an official report, 'the policy of the Government with regard to all branches of aerial navigation was based on a desire to keep in touch with the movement rather than to hasten its development. It was felt that we stood to gain nothing by forcing a means of warfare which tended to reduce the value of our insular position and the protection of our sea-power.' When the Wright brothers offered to sell their invention to the British Admiralty, the offer was refused.

It is natural enough that believers in the new art, who devoted years of disinterested thought and labour to getting it recognized, and who truly foresaw its enormous importance, should be impatient of so cautious an attitude. But the attitude itself was also natural and excusable. The British navy is a great trust, responsible not so much for the progress of the nation as for its very existence. Untried courses, new investments, brilliant chances, do not commend themselves to trustees. By adherence to a tried policy and to accustomed weapons the navy had ridden out many a storm that threatened national wreckage; what it had done so often it believed that it could do again; and it was slow to grasp at new weapons before their value was proved. So the progress of aerial science followed what, in this country, is the normal course. We have had many great poets and many great inventors. We sometimes starve our poets, but we make classics of their works. We sometimes leave our inventors to struggle unaided with difficulties, but when they succeed we adopt their inventions as part of the national inheritance, and pay to their names a respect greater than bounty-fed dependence can ever command or deserve. Their failures are their own, their successes belong to their country; and if success brings them no other reward, they can at least claim a part in the honour universally paid to soldiers and sailors, whose profession is sacrifice.

As soon as it became clear that no nation could without extreme peril to itself neglect the new weapon, the Government took up the problem in earnest. Private enterprise might, no doubt, have been trusted to improve and develop aircraft for the various uses of peace, but the question was a question of war. The purposes and ambitions of the German Empire had again and again been freely expressed, in no moderate language, and the German menace lay like a long vague shadow across the peace of Europe. Peaceful citizens, with many other things to think of, might fail to see it, but no such blindness was possible for those who had charge of the defences of the country. The Committee of Imperial Defence, in the few years before the war, took expert advice. The Government, acting on this advice, furnished us with the nucleus of an air force. They made their own flying school, and established their own factory for the output of aircraft. They organized an air service with naval and military wings. They formed advisory and consultative committees to grapple with the difficulties of organization and construction. They investigated the comparative merits and drawbacks of airships and aeroplanes. The airships, because they seemed fitter for reconnaissance over the sea, were eventually assigned wholly to the Naval Wing. No very swift progress was made with these in the years before the war. The expenses of adequate experiment were enormous, and the long tale of mishaps to Zeppelins seemed to show that the risks were great. The experts who were consulted pointed out that the only way to test the value of the larger type of airship was to build such airships ourselves, that Germany had patiently persevered in her airship policy in the face of disaster and loss, and that if we were to succeed with airships it would be necessary to warn the public that heavy losses, in the initial stage, were unavoidable. Opinion in this island, it is right to remember, was strong against the airship, or gas-bag, and Germany's enthusiastic championship of the Zeppelin made the aeroplane more popular in England. So our airship policy was tentative and experimental; a few small airships were in use, but none of the large size and wide range required for effective naval reconnaissance. Good and rapid progress, on the other hand, was made with aeroplanes and seaplanes, and when war broke out we had a small but healthy service, both naval and military, ready to take the air.

Four squadrons of the Military Wing, or Royal Flying Corps, that is to say, forty-eight machines, with a few additional machines in reserve, bore a part in the retreat from Mons. A detachment of the Naval Wing, or Royal Naval Air Service, was sent to Belgium, and after bearing a part in the defence of Antwerp, established itself at Dunkirk, which remained throughout the war a centre for aerial operations. These were the beginnings; in the four years and three months of the war the air service grew and multiplied a hundredfold. At the date of the armistice, the 11th of November 1918, there were operating in France and Belgium ninety-nine squadrons of the Royal Air Force. In August 1914 there had been less than two hundred and fifty officers in the service, all told; in November 1918 there were over thirty thousand. In August 1914 the total of machines, available for immediate war service, was about a hundred and fifty; in November 1918 there were more than twenty-two thousand in use, almost all of them enormously more powerful and efficient than the best machines of the earlier date. In the course of the war our air forces accounted for more than eight thousand enemy machines; dropped more than eight thousand tons of bombs on enemy objectives; fired more than twelve million rounds of ammunition at targets on the ground; took more than half a million photographs; brought down nearly three hundred enemy balloons; and suffered a total of casualties not far short of eighteen thousand. Not less important in its influence on the fortunes of the war than any of these achievements, perhaps more important than all of them, was the work done by aircraft in detecting movements of the enemy and in directing the fire of our gunners upon hostile batteries. This work cannot be exactly assessed or tabulated, but the German gunner knew where to look for the enemy he most dreaded.

A rapid summary of this kind shows that the history of the war in the air is inseparable from the history of the development of the art of flying. Of those who were competent to handle a machine in the air during the years before the war by far the greater number served with the colours. With the outbreak of war civilian flying, except for training purposes, abruptly ceased. The necessities of war compelled and quickened invention. When a nation is fighting for its life, money and energy are expended without check, and it may be doubted whether in the whole history of mankind any art in its infant stage has been so magnificently supported and advanced by war as the art of flying was supported and advanced by the greatest war of all.

No history can be expected to furnish a full record of all the acts of prowess that were performed in the air during the long course of the war. Many of the best of them can never be known; the Victoria Cross has surely been earned, over and over again, by pilots and observers who went east, and lie in unvisited graves. The public dearly loves a hero; but the men who have been both heroic and lucky must share their honours, as they are the first to insist, with others whose courage was not less, though their luck failed them. There is a quaint system, in use in the air service, of reckoning the activities of the service in terms of hours flown, taking as the unit for addition every single hour flown by each individual machine. By this method of calculation, the hours flown by the air service, on all fronts, during the war can be shown to be much over a million. The work of an ant-hill, reckoned on the same basis, would present a stupendous total. If the heroism of the air service, that is to say, their deeds of surpassing courage and devotion, could be thus computed, the figure would run into thousands; and this would be the fairest, though not the most dramatic, statement of the case. The officers in command have always been unwilling to pay regard to 'star turns'; what they have coveted for the service is not a low range of achievement rising now and again into sharp fantastic peaks, but a high tableland of duty and efficiency. They obtained their desire, in a result more surprising than any single exploit can ever be. They made courage and devotion the rule, not the exception. The work of the air service on a war front consists of often-repeated short periods of intense strain. One pilot described it well by saying that it is like going to the dentist every day. To exact the highest standard of conduct under this strain, not as an ideal to be aimed at, but as a working rule, might well seem to be winding up human nature to a point where it must break. The commanders of the air service did not hesitate to take the risk. They trusted human nature, and were amply rewarded. The experiences of the war revealed, to a generation that had almost forgotten them, the ancient and majestic powers of man, the power of his mind over his body, the power of his duty over his mind. When the builders have been praised for their faith and for their skill, the last word of wonder and reverence must be kept for the splendid grain of the stuff that was given them to use in the architecture of their success.

Those matters are fittest for history which exhibit a process of growth. The great periods of human history are not the long periods; they are those times of change and crisis when the movements of humanity are quickened and made visible, when the stationary habits and conservative traditions of mankind are broken up, and one phase of civilization gives place to another, as the bud, long and slowly matured, suddenly bursts into flower. The story of the war in the air is a perfect example of this quickening process, whereby developments long secretly prepared, and delayed until hope is saddened, are mysteriously touched with life, and exhibit the tendencies of ages condensed in the events of a few crowded years. The flying machine, which at the end of the nineteenth century was a toy, ten years later was added to the most valuable resources of man, and ten years later again bid fair to alter the conditions of his life on the surface of the earth. The war, though it did not cause this great change, accelerated it enormously. War is exacting, and it is difficult to think of any peaceful uses of aircraft which do not find their counterpart in naval and military operations. When General Townshend was besieged in Kut, there came to him by aeroplane not only food (in quantities sadly insufficient for his needs), but salt, saccharine, opium, drugs and surgical dressings, mails, spare parts for wireless plant, money, and a millstone weighing seventy pounds, which was dropped by means of a parachute. In the actual operations of the war the uses of aircraft, and especially of the aeroplane, were very rapidly extended and multiplied. The earliest and most obvious use was reconnaissance. To the Commander-in-Chief a detailed knowledge of the enemy's dispositions and movements is worth more than an additional army corps; aeroplanes and balloons furnished him with eyes in the air. As observation was the first purpose of aircraft, so it remains the most important. During the war it was developed in many directions. The corps machines operating on the western front devoted themselves among other things to detecting enemy batteries and to directing the fire of our own artillery. As soon as a wireless installation for aeroplanes came into use, and the observer was thus brought into close touch with his own gunners, this kind of observation became deadly in its efficiency, and was the chief agent in defeating the German scheme of victory by gun-power. When once a hostile battery was located, and our guns, by the aid of observation from the air, were ranged upon it, the fire of that battery was quickly silenced. Other branches of observation, developed during the war, were photography from the air and contact patrol. Complete photographic maps of Hun-land, as the territory lying immediately behind the enemy lines was everywhere called, were made from a mosaic of photographs, and were continually renewed. No changes, however slight, in the surface of the soil could escape the record of the camera when read by the aid of a magnifying glass. Contact patrol, or reports by low-flying aeroplanes on the exact position of the advancing infantry, came later, and supplemented the use of the telephone, which was liable to be destroyed by shell-fire. Our contact patrols saved us from a world of those most distressing of casualties, the losses inflicted on troops by their own guns.

Serious battle in the air, which was engaged on no large scale until the second year of the war, was, in its essence, an attempt to put out the eyes of the other side. In the early days officers often took a revolver, a carbine, or a rifle, into the air with them, but machines designed expressly for fighting, and armed with Lewis or Vickers guns, did not appear in force until it became necessary to counter the attacks made by the Fokker on our observation machines. Then began that long series of dramatic combats, splendid in many of its episodes, which fascinated the attention of the public, and almost excluded from notice the humbler, but not less essential, and not less dangerous, duties of those whose main business it was to observe.

Lastly, the offensive powers of aircraft have been so rapidly developed, especially during the latest period of the war, that it was only the coming of the armistice that saved mankind from a hurricane of slaughter. In 1914 a few small bombs were carried by officers into the air, and were gingerly dropped over the side of the machine. Accuracy of aim was impossible. In the large modern bombing machine the heavier bombs weigh almost three-quarters of a ton; they are mechanically released from the rack on which they are hung, and when the machine is flying level, at a known pace and height, good practice can be made, by the aid of an adjustable instrument, on any target. Even more desolating in its effect is the work done by low-flying aeroplanes, armed with machine-guns, against enemy troops on the march. Raids on the enemy communications, for the destruction of supplies and the cutting off of reinforcements, played a great part in the later phases of the war; and long-distance raids over enemy centres served to bring the civil population into sympathy with the sufferings of the army.

All these activities belong to war on the land, and the aeroplanes of the Royal Naval Air Service bore a part in them. Members of the naval squadrons at Antwerp carried out the earliest bombing raids into Germany. The kite balloons, which rose like a palisade behind our lines and kept the enemy under observation, were, in the early time of the war, supplied by the navy. Moreover, the navy had work of its own to do in the air. The business of coast defence and patrol, the convoy of vessels—in short, all the office-work that would fall to an Inspector-General of the Seven Seas had to be done by the navy. The seaplane and the flying boat can come to rest on the surface of the sea, but it is no secret that they are not always comfortable there, and there were attached to the Naval Air Service certain special vessels, constructed or adapted to be seaplane-carriers. The credit of defeating Germany's submarine campaign belongs, in part at least, to the air service, working in co-operation with the destroyers and a swarm of smaller craft. In favourable weather submarines below the surface of the water can sometimes be seen from the air, and the depth-charge, another invention of the war, dropped by surface craft, is the means of their destruction.

An occasional duty of aircraft may fitly be mentioned here. It is sometimes desirable that a missionary should be deposited at a quiet spot behind the enemy lines, and when he wishes to communicate with those who sent him out it sometimes becomes necessary to supply him with a basket of pigeons. When communication is interrupted on the troubled surface of the earth, it can often be renewed in the air.

As the uses of aircraft multiplied, so did their designs, and where many various tasks were performed, in the beginning of the war, by a single type of machine, good in its day, there are now many types of machine, each with special fitness for its own purpose. How far these developments may yet go, no man can tell, and prophecy is idle; what is certain is that many operations of war and peace which have never yet been performed are within the reach of the aircraft that are now at our disposal. A beleaguered city could be victualled. A force of a thousand men, with rations and ammunition, could be landed, in a few hours, to operate in the rear of an invading army. But the world is tired of war, and the advances of the immediate future will rather be made in the direction of peaceful traffic and peaceful communication.

The history of the war in the air is the history of the rapid progress of an art and the great achievements of a service. In the nature of things the progress of the art must claim a share in the record. If the battle of Trafalgar had been fought only some ten short years after the first adventurer trusted himself to the sea on a crazy raft, the ships, rather than the men, would be the heroes of that battle, and Nelson himself would be overshadowed by the Victory. The men who fought the war in the air have overcome more than their enemies; they, and those who worked for them on the ground, have successfully grappled with problem after problem in the perfecting of the art of flight. A whole world of scientific devices, from the Pitot tube, which indicates the speed of the machine through the air, to the Dreyer automatic oxygen apparatus, which enables the pilot to breathe in the rarefied upper reaches of the atmosphere and to travel far above the summit of high mountain ranges, has become a part of daily usage. A machine is the embodiment of human thought, and if it sometimes seems to be almost alive, that is because it springs of live parents. The men of science, who worked for humanity, must have an honour only less than the honour paid to the men of action, who died for their country. These last, the pilots and observers who are dead and gone, would not ask to be exalted above other branches of the fighting services. Their pride was to serve the army on the land and the navy on the sea. The men who march often admire and extol the courage of the men who fly, and they are right; but the men who fly, unless they are very thoughtless, know that the heaviest burden of war, its squalor and its tediousness, is borne on the devoted shoulders of the infantryman. All other arms, even ships of war themselves, in many of their uses, are subservient to the infantry. Man must live, and walk, and sleep on the surface of the earth, and there, in the few feet of soil that have been fertilized by contact with the air, he must grow his food. These are the permanent conditions, and they give the infantry its supremacy in war. A country that is conquered must be controlled and administered; a city that surrenders must be occupied. Battles can be won in the air or on the sea, and the mark of victory is this, that the patient infantry, military and civil, can then advance, to organize peace. An immense sympathy for the sufferings of the infantry, an immense admiration for their dogged perseverance in their never-ending task, is felt by all those whose business it is to assist them from the air. It would be an ill service to the men of the air force, and a foolish ambition, to try to raise them in consideration above the heads of the men whose servants and helpers they are.

There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon. The air service has its own advantages, its own trials, and its own marks of distinction. Life in the service was lived at high pressure, and was commonly short. Throughout the war our machines were continually at work over enemy territory, but the pilots of the beginning of the war were not crossing the lines at its close. A few were acting in administrative posts; some had returned, disabled, to civil life; the rest have passed, and their work has been carried on by generation after generation of their successors. The air service still flourishes; its health depends on a secret elixir of immortality, which enables a body to repair its severest losses. The name of this elixir is tradition, and the greatest of all the achievements of the air service is that in a very few years, under the hammer of war, it has fashioned and welded its tradition, and has made it sure. Critics who speak of what they have not felt and do not know have sometimes blamed the air service because, being young, it has not the decorum of age. The Latin poet said that it is decorous to die for one's country; in that decorum the service is perfectly instructed. But those who meet the members of a squadron in their hours of ease, among gramophones and pictorial works of art suggestive of luxury, forget that an actor in a tragedy, though he play his part nobly on the stage, is not commonly tragic in the green-room. If they desire intensity and gravity, let them follow the pilot out on to the aerodrome, and watch his face in its hood, when the chocks are pulled away, and he opens the throttle of the engine. No Greek sculpture is finer in its rendering of life and purpose. To see him at his best they would have to accompany him, through the storm of the anti-aircraft guns, into those fields of air where every moment brings some new trial of the quickness of his brain and the steadiness of his nerve. He is now in the workshop where tradition is made, to be handed down as an heirloom to the coming generations. It will not fail to reach them. The Royal Air Force is strong in the kind of virtue that propagates itself and attains to a life beyond a life. The tradition is safe.

CHAPTER I

THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR

We know next to nothing of man's greatest achievements. His written history is the history of yesterday, and leaves him very much the same being as it finds him, with the same habits, the same prejudices, and only slightly enhanced powers. The greatest and most significant advances were prehistoric. What invention, of which any record remains, can compare in importance with the invention of speech; and what day in the world's history is more worthy of celebration than that day, the birthday of thought and truth, when a sound, uttered by the breath, from being the expression of a feeling became the mark of a thing? The man who first embarked on the sea has been praised for the triple armour of his courage; but he must be content with praise; his biography will never be written. The North American Indians are reckoned a primitive people, but when first they come under the notice of history they bring with them one of the most perfect of human inventions—the birch-bark canoe. What centuries of dreams and struggles and rash adventures went to the inventing and perfecting of that frail boat? What forgotten names deserve honour for the invention of the paddle and the sail? The whole story is beyond recovery in the rapidly closing backward perspective of time. Man's eyes are set in his head so that he may go forward, and while he is healthy and alert he does not trouble to look behind him. If the beginnings of European civilization are rightly traced to certain tribes of amphibious dwellers on the coast of the Mediterranean, who reared the piles of their houses in the water, and so escaped the greater perils of the land, then some sort of rudimentary navigation was the first condition of human progress, and sea-power, which defies the devastators of continents, had earlier prophets than Admiral Mahan. But the memory of these thousands of years has passed like a watch in the night.

The conquest of the sea can never be recorded in history; even the conquest of the air, which was achieved within the lifetime of all but the very youngest of those who are now alive, admits of no sure or perfect record. The men who bore a part in it, and still survive, are preoccupied with the future, and are most of them impatient of their own past. Where knowledge begins, there begin also conflicting testimonies and competing claims. It is no part of the business of this history of the war in the air to compare these testimonies or to resolve these claims. To narrate how man learned to fly would demand a whole treatise, and the part of the history which ends in December 1903 is the most difficult and uncertain part of all. Yet the broad outlines of the process can be sketched and determined. It is a long story of legends and dreams, theories and fancies, all suddenly transformed into facts; a tale of the hopes of madmen suddenly recognized as reasonable ambitions. When in the light of the present we look back on the past our eyes are opened, and we see many things that were invisible to contemporaries. We are able, for the first time, to pay homage to the pioneers, who saw the promised kingdom, but did not enter it. No place has hitherto been found for their names in serious history. The Dictionary of National Biography, with its supplement, includes the lives of all the famous men of this nation who died before King George the Fifth was king. Yet it contains no mention of Sir George Cayley, the Father of British Aeronautics; nor of John Stringfellow, who, in 1848, constructed the first engine-driven aeroplane that ever flew through the air; nor of Francis Herbert Wenham, whose classic treatise on Aerial Locomotion, read at the first meeting of the Aeronautical Society, in 1866, expounds almost every principle on which modern aviation is founded; nor of James Glaisher, who, in 1862; made the highest recorded balloon ascent; nor of Percy Sinclair Pilcher, who lost his life in experimenting with one of his own gliders in 1899. These men attracted little enough notice in their own day, and were regarded as amiable eccentrics; but they all thought long and hard on aerial navigation, and step by step, at their own costs, they brought it nearer to accomplishment.

Now that the thing has been done, it seems strange that it was not done earlier. At no time was it possible for man to forget his disabilities; the birds were always above him, in easy possession. If he attributed their special powers wholly to the lightness of their structure and the strength of their muscles, the variety of flying creatures might have taught him better. The fact is that there is no unique design for flight; given the power and its right use, almost anything can fly. If the sea-gull can fly, so can the duck, with a much heavier body and a much less proportion of wing. The moth can fly; but so can the beetle. The flying-fish can fly, or rather, can leap into the air and glide for a distance of many yards. With the requisite engine-power a portmanteau or a tea-tray could support itself in the air. The muscular power of man, it is now generally accepted, is not sufficient to support his weight in level flight on still air, but if the principles of flight had been understood, there was no need to wait for the invention of the powerful internal-combustion engine; a steam-engine in a well-designed aeroplane might have performed very useful flights. It was knowledge that lingered. Newton, when he saw an apple fall in his garden at Woolsthorpe, 'began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the moon'. If he had been in the habit of skimming flat stones on calm water, he might have bent his mind to the problem of flight, and might even have anticipated some of the discoveries in aerodynamics which were reserved for the last century—in particular, the relations of speed and angle of incidence to the reactions of air resistance on a moving plane. The fact which is the basis of all aeroplane flight is that a perfectly horizontal plane, free to fall through the air, has its time of falling much retarded if it is in rapid horizontal motion. This is what makes gliding possible. Now let the plane which is being propelled in a horizontal direction be slightly tilted up, so that its front, or leading edge, is higher than its back, or trailing edge. The reaction of the air can then be resolved into two components, technically called 'lift' and 'drag'; lift, which tends to raise the plane, and drag, which retards it in its forward motion. When the angle of incidence of the plane is small, that is, when it is only slightly tilted from its direction of motion, the greater part of the air reaction is converted into lift. This is what makes flying possible. A moderate speed through the air will enable the plane to lift much more than its own weight.

This is not a technical treatise, but some further facts of signal importance in the theory and practice of flight are better explained at once, in so far as the beautiful exactitude of mathematical demonstration can be expressed in the crudities of popular speech. The lift produced by the reaction of the air acts on the whole plane, but not equally on all parts of it. At a flying angle, that is, when the angle of incidence of the plane is small, the upward force is greatest on those parts of the plane which are immediately behind the leading edge. The wings of any soaring bird are long and narrow, and thus are perfectly designed for their work. A square-winged bird would be a poor soarer; a bird the breadth of whose wings should be greater than their length could hardly fly at all. The wings of a flying machine are called planes, or aerofoils; the length of the wing is called the span of the plane; the breadth of the wing is called the chord of the plane. The proportion of the span to the chord, that is, the proportion of the length of the wing to its breadth, is called the 'aspect ratio' of the plane; and a plane, or wing, that is long and narrow is said to have a high aspect ratio. A higher aspect ratio than is found in any bird or any flying machine would theoretically improve its powers of flight, but the practicable span of the plane, or length of the wing, is limited by the need for rigidity and strength. The albatross, nevertheless, the king of soaring birds, has enormously long and narrow wings; and the planes of some flying machines have an aspect ratio almost as high as the slats of a Venetian blind.

The wings of a flying machine, it has been said, are called planes, but they are not true planes. Like the wings of a bird, they are 'cambered', that is to say, they curve upward from the leading edge and downward again to the trailing edge. Some of the most valuable work contributed by the laboratory to the science of flight has had for its object the determination of the best form of camber, or curve of the plane. In the result, that form of camber has been found to be best which attains its maximum depth a little way only behind the leading edge, and gradually becomes shallower towards the trailing edge. Such a form of curve produces a comparatively smooth and untroubled partial vacuum above the plane, just behind its leading edge, and this vacuum is the factor of chief importance in the lift of the plane.

The above is a brief and rough statement of some principles of aviation which have been ascertained by long experiment and the labour of many minds. It is by experiment that flight has been achieved. The Newton who shall reduce all the observed phenomena to a few broad and simple laws is yet to come. A bird is simpler than an aeroplane in that its wings both support it and drive it forward, whereas all aerial machines, both those that are heavier than air and those that are lighter than air, are at present driven forward by the thrust of an airscrew, revolving at the rate of some twenty to thirty times a second.

There are only two kinds of flying machine, the lighter than air and the heavier than air, of which two kinds the simplest types are the soap-bubble and the arrow. These two kinds have often been in competition with each other; and their rivalry, which has sometimes delayed progress, still continues. The chief practical objection to machines lighter than air is that they are buoyed up by vulnerable receptacles containing hydrogen or some other highly inflammable gas. As soon as helium, which is a light non-inflammable gas, shall be produced in quantity at a reasonable expense, this objection will be lessened. The advantage of the lighter-than-air, or floating, machine over the heavier-than-air, or soaring, machine is that it can remain stationary in the air without loss of height, and that its great size and lifting power enable it to supply comfortable quarters for its staff, who not only travel in it, but, if need be, can inhabit it for days. The airship has a promising future, but it can never wholly supersede the soaring machine, which is heavier than air, and flies as birds fly.

A fascinating story, part legend, part fiction, might be told of the earliest reputed inventors. The fable of Daedalus perhaps grew up round the memory of a man of mechanical genius, for Daedalus was the author of many inventions before he flew from Crete to Italy. Aulus Gellius, in his entertaining book of anecdotes called the Attic Nights, tells how the philosopher Archytas of Tarentum invented a mechanical pigeon, which was filled with some kind of light air, and flew. The two schools of aeronautics were here reconciled. Other mechanists were Roger Bacon, who is reported to have designed a flying chariot; and Regiomontanus, astronomer and mathematician, who made a mechanical eagle which flew to meet the Emperor Charles the Fifth, on his solemn entry into the city of Nuremberg. It is not necessary to inquire whether these stories are true or false; what is certain is that the inventors did not leave their inventions as a legacy to their fellows. For a like reason Leonardo da Vinci, who busied himself with a mechanism which should enable man to operate wings with his legs, and who left a short treatise on the art of flight, has no place in the history. His mechanism is merely a drawing; his treatise remained in manuscript. The adventurers who risked their lives on wings of their own making are truer ancestors of the flying man. In 1507 John Damian, who was held in esteem as an alchemist and physician at the court of King James IV of Scotland, 'took in hand to fly with wings, and to that effect he caused make a pair of wings of feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of Stirling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brake his thigh-bone'.[1] The poet Dunbar attacked him in a satirical poem, and the reputation of a charlatan has stuck to him, but he deserves credit for his courageous attempt. So does the Marquis de Bacqueville, who, in 1742, attached to his arms and legs planes of his own design, and launched himself from an upper story of his house in Paris, in the attempt to fly across the river Seine to the Tuileries, about two hundred yards away. He glided some distance, and then fell on a washerwoman's barge in the stream, breaking his leg in the fall. These and other disastrous attempts might be defended in the words of Wilbur Wright, written in 1901, while he was experimenting with his own gliders. 'There are two ways', he says, 'of learning how to ride a fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest; but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.'[2] This pronouncement, by the highest authority, may serve as an apology for some of those whose attempts were reckoned madness or quackery, and whose misfortunes, during many long centuries, are the only material available for the history of human flight.

Two periods of modern European history are notable for a quickening of human interest in the problem of aerial navigation. They are the age of Louis XIV of France, and the age of the French Revolution. Both were times of great progress in science, and of illimitable hopes; but the earlier period, which in England witnessed the foundation of the Royal Society, was notable chiefly for advance in the physical and mathematical sciences; while the later period was more addicted to chemistry, and was the age of Lavoisier, Priestley, Cavendish, and Black. The former age, though it attained to nothing practical, made some progress in the theory of flight; the latter age invented the balloon.

The Royal Society took its origin in the meetings in London, during the troublous times of the Civil War, of 'divers worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy'. One of these worthy persons was John Wilkins, mathematician, philosopher, and divine, who, being parliamentarian in his sympathies, was, on the expulsion of the Royalists from Oxford, made Warden of Wadham College in that University. At Wadham, in the Warden's lodgings, the 'Experimental philosophical Club', as Aubrey calls it, renewed its meetings. Sprat, the early historian of the Royal Society, explains that religion and politics were forbidden topics. 'To have been always tossing about some theological question would have been to make that their private diversion of which they had had more than enough in public; to have been musing on the Civil Wars would have made them melancholy; therefore Nature alone could entertain them.' After the Restoration a meeting was held at Gresham College in London, and a committee was appointed, with Wilkins as chairman, to draw up a scheme for the Royal Society. The King approved of the scheme submitted to him, and the society received its charter in 1662.

Wilkins was a famous man in his day; he married a sister of Oliver Cromwell, and in his later years was Bishop of Chester. But his great work was the founding of the Royal Society; and his philosophical (or, as they would now be called, scientific) writings, which belong to his earlier years in London, show very clearly with what high expectations the society started on its labours. The first of these writings, published in 1638, is a discourse to prove that there may be another habitable World in the Moon. The second considers the possibility of a passage thither. The third maintains that it is probable that our Earth is one of the planets. The fourth, which is entitled Mercury; or, the Secret Messenger, discusses how thoughts may be communicated from a distance. The fifth and last, published in 1648, is called Mathematical Magic, and is divided into two books, under the titles Archimedes; or, Mechanical Powers, and Daedalus; or, Mechanical Motions. In this latter book Wilkins treats of mills, clocks, and the contrivance of motion by rarefied air; of the construction of an ark for submarine navigation, and of its uses in war; of a sailing chariot, to be driven on the land as ships are on the sea; of the possibility of perpetual motion; and, in chapters vii and viii, of the art of flying. There are four ways, according to Wilkins, whereby flying in the air may be attempted. The first is by spirits or angels; but this branch of the subject does not belong to natural philosophy. The next is by the help of fowls, which the learned Francis Bacon thought deserving of further experiment. Two ways remain of flying by our own strength; we may use wings fastened immediately to the body, or we may devise a flying chariot. If we are to use wings, he says, we must be brought up in the constant practice of them from youth, first 'running on the ground, as an ostrich or tame goose will do ... and so by degrees learn to rise higher.... I have heard it from credible testimony, that one of our own nation hath proceeded so far in this experiment, that he was able by the help of wings, in such a running pace, to step constantly ten yards at a time.' The arms of a man extended are weak, and easily wearied, so he thinks it would be worth the inquiry whether the wings might not be worked by the legs being thrust out and drawn in again one after the other, so as each leg should move both wings. But the best way of flying would be by a flying chariot, big enough to carry several persons, who might take turns to work it. Wilkins is quite honest in recognizing the difficulties of this scheme. He deals fully with the chief of them—whether so large and heavy a machine can be supported by so thin and light a body as the air; and whether the strength of the persons in it can be sufficient for the motion of it. In his attempt to show that these objections are not insuperable, he makes some true remarks. He had watched soaring birds, and had seen how they could swim up and down in the air without any sensible motion of the wings. When the right proportions of the machine are found out, and men by long practice have attained to skill and experience, we may perhaps, he thinks, be able to imitate the birds. If, after all, it be found that some greater motive power is required, we must not despair of the invention of such a power. The main difficulty will be not so much in maintaining the machine in flight as in raising it from the ground. 'When once it is aloft in the air, the motion of it will be easy, as it is in the flight of all kind of birds, which being at any great distance from the earth, are able to continue their motion for a long time and way, with little labour and weariness.' The right proportion of the wings, both for length and breadth; the special contrivances necessary for ascent, descent, or a turning motion—these and many more such questions can only be resolved, he maintains, by particular experiments. The sails of ships have been perfected by degrees, and the attempt to fly must meet with many difficulties and inconveniences for which only long experience and frequent trial can suggest a remedy.

So far Wilkins went; and he went no farther. His speculations, however, made a deep impression on his own age, gave a bias to the researches of his fellows, and, incidentally, aroused a storm of ridicule. When Joseph Glanvill, in his vigorous little treatise called Scepsis Scientifica (1665), wrote a forecast of the possible achievements of the Royal Society, he borrowed his hopes from Wilkins. 'Should these heroes go on', he says, 'as they have happily begun, they will fill the world with wonders, and posterity will find many things that are now but rumours, verified into practical realities. It may be, some ages hence, a voyage to the southern unknown tracts, yea, possibly the Moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance of the Indies, by sympathetic conveyances, may be as usual to future times, as to us in a literary correspondence. The restoration of grey hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning the now comparative desert world into a paradise, may not improbably be expected from late agriculture.' Again, when Sir William Temple, some thirty years later, cast contempt upon the Moderns in his Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning, it was the speculations of Wilkins that provoked his keenest satire. 'I have indeed heard of wondrous Pretensions and Visions of Men, possess'd with Notions of the strange Advancement of Learning and Sciences, on foot in this Age, and the Progress they are like to make in the next; as, the Universal Medicine, which will certainly cure all that have it; the Philosopher's Stone, which will be found out by Men that care not for Riches: the transfusion of young Blood into old Men's Veins, which will make them as gamesome as the Lambs, from which 'tis to be derived; an Universal Language, which may serve all Men's Turn, when they have forgot their own: the Knowledge of one another's Thoughts, without the grievous Trouble of Speaking: the Art of Flying, till a Man happens to fall down and break his Neck: Double-bottom'd Ships, whereof none can ever be cast away, besides the first that was made: the admirable Virtues of that noble and necessary Juice called Spittle, which will come to be sold, and very cheap, in the Apothecaries' Shops: Discoveries of new Worlds in the Planets, and Voyages between this and that in the Moon, to be made as frequently as between York and London: which such poor Mortals as I am think as wild as those of Ariosto, but without half so much Wit, or so much Instruction; for there, these modern Sages may know where they may hope in Time to find their lost Senses, preserved in Vials, with those of Orlando.'

Both Sir William Temple and Joseph Glanvill were men of acute intelligence and complete sanity; the one an aged statesman deeply versed in the deceits and follies of men; the other a young cleric, educated in the Oxford of the Commonwealth, and stirred to enthusiasm by what he had there heard of the progress of natural philosophy. In this perennial debate the man of the world commonly triumphs; he plays for the stakes that are on the table, and does not put faith in deferred gains. For something like two hundred years Sir William Temple's triumph was almost complete. Now things have changed, and Glanvill's rhapsody comes nearer to the truth. Wireless telegraphy, radium, the discoveries of bacteriology, and not least the conquest of the air, have taken the edge off the sallies of the wit, and have verified the dreams of the prophet.

What most delayed the science and art of flight, which made no progress during the whole of the eighteenth century, was an imperfect understanding of the flight of birds. The right way to achieve flight, as events were to prove, was by the study and practice of gliding. But birds were believed to support, as well as to raise, themselves in the air chiefly by what in the jargon of science is called orthogonal flight, that is, by direct downward flapping of the wings. This view received authoritative support from a famous treatise written in the seventeenth century by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, an Italian professor of mathematical and natural philosophy. Borelli, who held professorships at the Universities of Florence and Pisa, and corresponded with many members of the Royal Society, was an older man than Wilkins, but his book on the movements of animals (De Motu Animalium), which included a section on the flight of birds (De Volatu), was not published till 1680, when both he and Wilkins were dead. It was long held in high esteem for its anatomical exposition of the action of flying, and some of its main contentions cast a damp upon the hopes of man. The bones of a bird, says Borelli, are thin tubes of exceeding hardness, much lighter, and at the same time stronger, than the bones of a man. The pectoral muscles, which move the wings, are massive and strong—more than four times stronger, in proportion to the weight they have to move, than the legs of a man. And he states his conclusion roundly—it is impossible that man should ever achieve artificial flight by his own strength. This view, dogmatically stated by one who was a good mathematician and a good anatomist, became the orthodox view, and had an enduring influence. All imitation of the birds by man, and further, all schemes of navigating the air in a machine dynamically supported, seemed, by Borelli's argument, to have been thrust back into the limbo of vanities.

There remained only the hope that some means might be found of buoying man up in the air, thereby leaving him free to apply his muscular and mechanical powers to the business of driving himself forward. Another celebrated treatise of the seventeenth century pointed the way to such a means. Francesco Lana, a member of the Society of Jesus in Rome, spent the greater part of his life in scientific research. He planned a large encyclopaedia, embodying all existing science, in so far as it was based on experiment and proof. Of this work only two volumes appeared during his lifetime; he died at Brescia in the year 1687. But long before he died, he had produced, in 1670, a preliminary sketch of his great work; and it is this earlier and shorter treatise which contains the two famous chapters on the Aerial Ship. The aerial ship is to be buoyed up in the air by being suspended from four globes, made of thin copper sheeting, each of them about twenty-five feet in diameter. From these globes the air is to be exhausted, so that each of them, being lighter than air, will support the weight of two or three men. The ship being thus floated can be propelled by oars and sails.

Any modern reader, without asking for further specifications, can pronounce this design absurd. Lana was prevented by his vow of poverty from spending any money on experiment, so that he had to meet only argumentative objections, not those much more formidable obstacles, the ordeal of the inventor, which present themselves when a machine is theoretically perfect and will not work. The difficulties which he foresaw are real enough. The process of exhausting the air from the globes might, he thought, prove troublesome. The pressure of the atmosphere on the outer surface, it might be held, would crush or break the globes, to which he replied that that pressure would be equal on all sides, and would therefore rather strengthen the globes than break them. The ship, some might object, could not be propelled by oars; Lana thinks it could, but suggests, to comfort the objectors, that oars will rarely be necessary, for there will always be a wind. The weight of the machine and of the persons in it will fortunately prevent it from rising to heights where breathing becomes impossible. 'I do not foresee', says Lana, 'any other difficulties that could prevail against this invention, save one only, which to me seems the greatest of them all, and that is that God would never surely allow such a machine to be successful, since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind. Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would be proof against surprise, when the ship could at any time be steered over its squares, or even over the courtyards of dwelling-houses, and brought to earth for the landing of its crew?... Iron weights could be hurled to wreck ships at sea, or they could be set on fire by fireballs and bombs; nor ships alone, but houses, fortresses, and cities could be thus destroyed, with the certainty that the airship could come to no harm as the missiles could be hurled from a vast height.'

The extravagance of Lana's design must not be allowed to rob him of the credit of being, in some sense, the inventor of the balloon. A balloon filled with gas, and lighter than air, was in his day inconceivable; the composition of the atmosphere was unknown, and the chemistry of gases was not understood. But he had followed the physical investigations of the seventeenth century, and was well acquainted with Torricelli's demonstration of the weight of the atmosphere. The only practical way for him to make a vessel lighter than air was to empty it of the air within it, and Torricelli's invention of the barometer seemed to bring such a device within reach. The common pump begat the barometer; the barometer begat the balloon. But the enormous pressure of the atmosphere on a vessel encasing a vacuum, though Lana had triumphed over it in argument, could not be so easily dealt with in practice. The success of the balloon was delayed until, by the discovery and production of a gas lighter than air, a frail and thin envelope could be supported against the pressure from without by an equal pressure from within.

For ballooning what was chiefly necessary was a thorough knowledge of gases and of the means of producing them. The older chemistry, or alchemy, devoted all its attention, for centuries, to the precious metals, and knew nothing of gas. Medical chemistry, which succeeded it, was concerned chiefly with the curative properties of various chemical preparations. When Robert Boyle, and the investigators who came after him, put aside this age-long preoccupation with wealth and healing, and set themselves to determine, by observation and experiment, the nature of common substances, and the possibility of resolving them into simpler elements, modern chemistry began. Four states of matter, namely, earth, air, fire, and water, were recognized by the older chemists, and were by them called elements; it was the work of the eighteenth century to investigate these, and especially to separate the constituents of air and of water. In 1774 Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen. In 1782 Henry Cavendish showed that hydrogen, when burnt, produces water. At a much earlier date hydrogen had been produced by the action of acid on metals, and had been found to be many times lighter than air. Dr. Joseph Black, professor of chemistry in the University of Edinburgh, was the first to suggest, in 1767, that a balloon inflated with hydrogen would rise in the air; and the experiment was successfully tried with soap-bubbles by Tiberius Cavallo, in the year 1782.

Nevertheless, the famous first balloon, which ascended in 1783, was not filled with hydrogen, and was invented by what may be called a happy accident. The brothers Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier were the sons of a wealthy paper-maker at Annonay, not very far from Lyons. The suggestion of their balloon came to them from observing that thick opaque clouds float high in the air. Linen material was readily accessible to them at the factory, and they resolved to try whether a large balloon, some thirty-three feet in diameter, filled with smoke vapours, would rise in the air. Their experiment was successful. On the 5th of June 1783 they filled their balloon with smoke (and therefore with hot air) over a fire of chips and shavings; it rose easily, and travelled to a distance of about a mile and a half before it cooled and sank. The fame of this experiment quickly reached Paris, the centre of science and fashion, and awakened rivalry. Under the direction of Professor Charles, a well-known physicist, two brothers whose surname was Robert made from varnished silk a balloon of about thirteen feet in diameter; it was filled with hydrogen, and on the 27th of August 1783, in the presence of a large and excited assembly, it rose from the Champ de Mars and travelled some fifteen miles into the country, where it fell, and produced a panic among the peasantry. On the 19th of September Joseph Montgolfier was brought to Versailles to give a demonstration of his new invention in the presence of the King and Queen. On this occasion his balloon rose 1,500 feet into the air, carrying with it a sheep, a cock, and a duck, the first living passengers, whom it deposited unhurt when it came to ground again after a short flight. Thereafter society went balloon-mad. Pilâtre de Rozier, a young native of Metz, determined to attempt an aerial voyage. During the month of October he experimented with a captive balloon of the Montgolfier type, from which he suspended a brazier, so that by a continued supply of heated air the balloon should maintain its buoyancy. On the 21st of November 1783, accompanied by the Marquis d'Arlandes, he rose in a free balloon from the Bois de Boulogne, and made a successful voyage of twenty minutes, during which time he travelled over Paris for a distance of about five miles. Ten days later, on behalf of the savants, M. Charles retorted with a voyage of twenty-seven miles, in a hydrogen balloon, from Paris to Nesle; he was accompanied by one of the brothers Robert, and when Robert left the car at Nesle the balloon, lightened of a part of its burden, rose rapidly with M. Charles to a height of two miles in the air. Most of the fittings of the modern hydrogen balloon, the hoop and netting, for instance, from which the car is suspended, and the valve at the top of the balloon for the release of the gas, were devised by Charles. The unfortunate Pilâtre de Rozier met his death on the 15th of June 1785, in an attempt to cross from Boulogne to England. In order to avoid a constant wastage of hydrogen in controlling the height of the balloon, he devised a double balloon; the larger one, above, was filled with hydrogen, the smaller one, below, was worked with hot air from a brazier, on the Montgolfier principle. At a height of some three thousand feet, while it was still over French territory, the double balloon caught fire and fell flaming to the earth.

The earliest balloon ascents in England followed close upon the French experiments. On the 25th of November 1783 Count Francesco Zambeccari sent up an oil-silk hydrogen balloon, ten feet in diameter, from the Artillery Ground in Moorfields; it travelled forty-eight miles, and fell at Petworth in Sussex. On the 22nd of February 1784 a balloon of five feet in diameter, liberated at Sandwich in Kent, travelled seventy-five miles, and after crossing the Channel, fell at Warneton in Flanders. To inflate a bag with gas and let it take its chance in the air is no great achievement, but these were flights of good promise. The first person in Great Britain to navigate the air was James Tytler, a Scot, who on the 27th of August 1784 ascended in a fire-balloon, that is, a balloon filled with hot air, from Comely Gardens, Edinburgh, and travelled about half a mile. Tytler had been employed by the booksellers to edit the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he wrote the greater part, at a salary of seventeen shillings a week; he passed his life in poverty, and his balloon adventure attracted little attention. The public mania for ballooning as a spectacle began with the ascents of Vincenzo Lunardi, secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador in England. Lunardi's first ascent, which was well advertised, was made from the Artillery Ground in Moorfields on the 15th of September 1784, in the presence of nearly two hundred thousand spectators. His hydrogen balloon, of about thirty-two feet in diameter, sailed high over London, and descended near Ware in Hertfordshire. His record of his sensations, written in imperfect English, and published in 1784 under the title of An Account of the First Aerial Voyage in England, deserves quotation:

'At five minutes after two, the last gun was fired, the cords divided, and the Balloon rose, the company returning my signals of adieu with the most unfeigned acclamations and applauses. The effect was that of a miracle on the multitudes which surrounded the place; and they passed from incredulity and menace into the most extravagant expressions of approbation and joy.

'At the height of twenty yards, the Balloon was a little depressed by the wind, which had a fine effect; it held me over the ground for a few seconds, and seemed to pause majestically before its departure.

'On discharging a part of the ballast, it ascended to the height of two hundred yards. As a multitude lay before me of a hundred and fifty thousand people, who had not seen my ascent from the ground, I had recourse to every stratagem to let them know I was in the gallery, and they literally rent the air with their acclamations and applause. In these stratagems I devoted my flag, and worked with my oars, one of which was immediately broken and fell from me. A pigeon too escaped, which, with a dog, and cat, were the only companions of my excursion.

'When the thermometer had fallen from 68° to 61° I perceived a great difference in the temperature of the air. I became very cold, and found it necessary to take a few glasses of wine. I likewise eat the leg of a chicken, but my bread and other provisions had been rendered useless by being mixed with the sand which I carried as ballast.

'When the thermometer was at fifty, the effect of the atmosphere, and the combination of circumstances around, produced a calm delight, which is inexpressible, and which no situation on earth could give. The stillness, extent, and magnificence of the scene rendered it highly awful. My horizon seemed a perfect circle; the terminating line several hundred miles in circumference. This I conjectured from the view of London; the extreme points of which, formed an angle of only a few degrees. It was so reduced on the great scale before me, that I can find no simile to convey an idea of it. I could distinguish Saint Paul's and other churches, from the houses. I saw the streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. It was an enormous beehive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself, and the transition from the suspicion, and perhaps contempt, of the preceding hour, to the affectionate transport, admiration and glory of the present moment, was not without its effect on my mind. I recollected the puns[3] on my name, and was glad to find myself calm. I had soared from the apprehensions and anxieties of the Artillery Ground, and felt as if I had left behind me all the cares and passions that molest mankind.

'Indeed, the whole scene before me filled the mind with a sublime pleasure, of which I never had a conception. The critics imagine, for they seldom speak from experience, that terror is an ingredient in every sublime sensation. It was not possible for me to be on earth in a situation so free from apprehension. I had not the slightest sense of motion from the Machine, I knew not whether it went swiftly or slowly, whether it ascended or descended, whether it was agitated or tranquil, but by the appearance or disappearance of objects on the earth. I moved to different parts of the gallery, I adjusted the furniture, and apparatus, I uncorked my bottle, eat, drank, and wrote, just as in my study. The height had not the effect, which a much lesser degree of it has near the earth, that of producing giddiness. The broomsticks of the witches, Ariosto's flying-horse, and even Milton's sunbeam, conveying the angel to the earth, have all an idea of effort, difficulty, and restraint, which do not affect a voyage in the Balloon.

'Thus tranquil, and thus situated, how shall I describe to you a view, such as the ancients supposed Jupiter to have of the earth, and to copy which there are no terms in any language. The gradual diminution of objects, and the masses of light and shade are intelligible in oblique and common prospects. But here every thing wore a new appearance, and had a new effect. The face of the country had a mild and permanent verdure, to which Italy is a stranger. The variety of cultivation, and the accuracy with which property is divided, give the idea ever present to a stranger in England, of good civil laws and an equitable administration; the rivers meandering; the sea glist'ning with the rays of the sun; the immense district beneath me spotted with cities, towns, villages, houses, pouring out their inhabitants to hail my appearance: you will allow me some merit at not having been exceedingly intoxicated with my situation.

'The interest which the spectators took in my voyage was so great, that the things I threw down were divided and preserved as our people would relicks of the most celebrated saints. And a gentlewoman, mistaking the oar for my person, was so affected with my supposed destruction, that she died in a few days.'

For many months after this the Flying Man was the chief topic of conversation in the town. Even in the previous year reports of the French ascents had produced a fever of excitement in London. 'Balloons', said Horace Walpole, writing in December 1783, 'occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody.' All other interests yielded precedence. Miss Burney's Cecilia was the novel of the season, but it had to give way. 'Next to the balloon,' said Mrs. Barbauld, in a letter written in January 1784, 'Miss Burney is the object of public curiosity.' A few weeks earlier, Dr. Johnson passed the day with three friends, and boasted to Mrs. Thrale that no mention had been made by any of them of the air balloon, 'which has taken full possession, with a very good claim, of every philosophical mind and mouth'. Some days after Lunardi's first ascent Johnson wrote to a friend, 'I had this day in three letters three histories of the flying man in the great Ballon. I am glad that we do as well as our neighbours.' Three letters were enough, and on the same day Johnson wrote to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Do not write about the balloon, whatever else you may think proper to say'. On the 29th of September 1784 Lunardi's balloon caught fire by accident, and was burnt on the ground. Johnson's quiet and sensible comment is conveyed in a letter to his friend Dr. Brocklesby, on the 6th of October: 'The fate of the balloon I do not much lament: to make new balloons is to repeat the jest again. We now know a method of mounting into the air, and, I think, are not likely to know more. The vehicles can serve no use till we can guide them; and they can gratify no curiosity till we mount with them to greater heights than we can reach without; till we rise above the tops of the highest mountains, which we have yet not done. We know the state of the air in all its regions, to the top of Teneriffe, and therefore, learn nothing from those who navigate a balloon below the clouds. The first experiment, however, was bold, and deserved applause and reward.'

Johnson died in December of that same year; the balloon had made its appearance just in time for his comments. Another critic, Horace Walpole, was in two minds about balloons. Sometimes they seemed to him 'philosophic playthings'. He was growing old, and did not care to spend his time in 'divining with what airy vehicles the atmosphere will be peopled hereafter, or how much more expeditiously the east, west, or south will be ravaged and butchered, than they have been by the old clumsy method of navigation'. Yet in spite of his elegant indifference, he could not help being interested; and some of his divinations come very near to the truth. He pictures Salisbury Plain, Newmarket Heath, and all downs, arising into dockyards for aerial vessels; and he professes himself willing to go to Paris by air, 'if there is no air sickness'. The best defence of the new invention was spoken by Benjamin Franklin, who when he was asked in Paris, 'What is the use of balloons?' replied by another question—'What is the use of a newborn infant?'

The infancy of the balloon lasted long; indeed, if lack of self-control be the mark of infancy, the balloon was an infant during the whole of the nineteenth century. In the early days, new achievements, in distance or height, kept public expectation alive. Jean Pierre Blanchard, a French aeronaut, and rival of Lunardi, succeeded, on the 7th of January 1785, in crossing the English Channel from Dover. Thereafter ascents became so numerous that it is impossible to keep count of them. Glaisher, writing about 1870, says that the most remarkable ascent of the century was that fitted out by Robert Hollond, Esq., M.P. The balloonist was Charles Green, and they were accompanied by Mr. Monck Mason, who published an account of the voyage. In Mr. Green's balloon, afterwards called the Great Nassau, they left Vauxhall Gardens on the afternoon of Monday, the 7th of November 1836, with provisions to last a fortnight. They were soon lost in the clouds, and after crossing the sea, had no very clear idea of what country they were over. After eighteen hours' journey, fearing that they had reached Poland or Russia, they came to earth, and found that they had travelled five hundred miles, to the neighbourhood of the town of Weilburg, in the duchy of Nassau. Charles Green was the most experienced aeronaut of his time; he was the first to use coal-gas in place of hydrogen, and he was the inventor of the guide-rope, which is dropped from a balloon to allow her to be secured by a landing party, or is trailed on the ground to reduce her speed and to assist in maintaining a steady height.

The dangers of the balloon were diminished by the labours of scientific men, but its disabilities remained. No one who travelled in a balloon could choose his destination. The view of the earth, and of the clouds, obtainable from a height, was beautiful and unfamiliar, but in the absence of any specific utility the thing became a popular toy. In public gardens a balloon could be counted on to attract a crowd, and the showman soon gave it its place, as a miracle of nature, by the side of the giant and the dwarf, the living skeleton, and the fat woman. A horse is not seen to advantage in the car of a balloon, but it is a marvel that a horse should be seen there at all, and equestrian ascents became one of the attractions of the Cremorne Gardens in 1821.

It was not until 1859 that an organized attempt was made to reclaim the balloon for the purposes of science. In that year a committee, appointed by the British Association to make observations on the higher strata of the atmosphere, met at Wolverhampton. Volunteers were lacking until, in 1862, James Glaisher, one of the members of the committee, declared his willingness to prepare the apparatus and to make the observations from a balloon. Glaisher had spent many years on meteorological observation, in Ireland, at Cambridge University, and at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. He proposed to investigate the effect of different elevations on the temperature of the dew-point; on the composition and electrical condition of the atmosphere, and on the rate and direction of the wind currents in it; on the earth's magnetism, and the solar spectrum; on sound, and on solar radiation. From 1862 to 1866 he made twenty-eight ascents, with Henry Coxwell as his balloonist. The most famous of these was from Wolverhampton on the 5th of September 1862, when Glaisher claimed to have reached a height of fully seven miles. After recording a height of 29,000 feet Glaisher swooned; Coxwell lost the use of his limbs, but succeeded in pulling the cord of the valve with his teeth. When Glaisher swooned the balloon was ascending rapidly; when he came to, thirteen minutes later, it was descending rapidly, and the height that he claimed was an inference, supported by the reading of a minimum thermometer. Critics have pointed out that his calculations made no allowance for the slackening of the upward pace of the balloon as it neared its limit, nor for the time it would take, with the valve feebly pulled, to change its direction and acquire speed in its descent. They are inclined to allow him a height of about six miles, which is a sufficiently remarkable achievement.

All these ascents, though they proved that the balloon had a certain utility for the exploration of the upper reaches of the atmosphere, did little or nothing for aerial navigation. The great vogue of the balloon distracted attention from the real problem of flight. That problem was not abandoned; a number of men, working independently, without any sort of public recognition, made steady advance during the whole course of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, three years before flight was achieved, those who were most deeply concerned in the attempt knew that success was near. The great difficulty of scientific research lies in choosing the right questions to ask of nature. Every lawyer knows that it is easy to put a question so full of false assumptions that no true answer to it is possible; and many a laborious man of science has spent his life in framing such questions, and in looking for an answer to them. The contribution of the nineteenth century to the science of flight was that it got hold of the right questions, and formulated them more or less exactly, so that the answers, when once they were supplied by continued observation and experiment, were things of value.

The earliest of these pioneers was Sir George Cayley, a country gentleman with estates in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, who devoted his life to scientific pursuits. He was born in 1773, and the balloons which excited the world during his boyhood directed his mind to the subject of aerial navigation. He invented many mechanical contrivances, and he laid great and just stress on the importance of motive power for successful flight. In 1809 he published, in Nicholson's Journal, a paper on Aerial Navigation, which has since become a classic, for although it stops short of a complete exposition, it is true so far as it goes, and contains no nonsense and no fantasy. He endeavoured, in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign, to establish an aeronautical society, but the ill repute of the balloon and the bad company it kept deprived him of influential support. He did his duty by his county, as a Whig magnate, and amused his leisure with science, till his death in 1857.

Cayley's work is difficult to assess. He had all the right ideas, though the means of putting them into practice did not lie ready to his hand. If he had been a poor man, he might have gone farther. He designed, so to say, both an airship and an aeroplane; there was no one to execute his designs, and the scheme fell through. He more than once anticipated later inventions, but he put nothing on the market. His mind was fertile in mechanical devices, so that if one proved troublesome, he could always turn his attention to another. He is content to enunciate a truth, and to call it probable. 'Probably', he says, in discussing engines of small weight and high power, 'a much cheaper engine of this sort might be produced by a gas-light apparatus and by firing the inflammable air generated with a due portion of common air under a piston.' This is an exact forecast of the engine used to-day in all flying machines. He has some good remarks on the shape that offers least resistance to the air in passing through it, that is, on the doctrine of the streamline. He knew that the shape of the hinder part of a solid body which travels through the air is of as much importance as the shape of the fore-part in diminishing resistance. He does not seem to have known that it is of more importance. He knew that the resistance of the air acting on concave wings, or planes, at a small angle of incidence was resolved chiefly into lift, and he suspected that the amount of the lift was greater than the mathematical theory of his day allowed. Above all, his treatise is stimulating, and suggests further inquiry and experiment along lines which have since proved to be the right lines.

Cayley's ideas were developed in practice by John Stringfellow, a manufacturer of lace machinery at Chard, in Somersetshire, and by his friend W. S. Henson, a young engineer. They constructed a light steam-engine, and designed an aeroplane, of which they entertained such high hopes that they took out a patent, and applied to Parliament for an Act to incorporate an Aerial Steam Transit Company. The reaction of public opinion on their proposals took the form of drag rather than lift, and they were thrown back on their own resources. In 1847 they made a model aeroplane, twenty feet in span, driven by two four-bladed airscrews, three feet in diameter, and they experimented with it on Bala Down, near Chard. It did not fly. Henson, completely discouraged, married and went to America; Stringfellow persisted, and in 1848 made a smaller model, ten feet in span, with airscrews sixteen inches in diameter. This machine, which had wings slightly cambered, with a rigid leading edge and a flexible trailing edge, made several successful flights, first in a long covered room at Chard, and later, before a number of witnesses, at Cremorne Gardens. After this success Stringfellow did no more for many years, until the foundation of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1866 roused him again to activity. At the society's exhibition of 1868, held in the Crystal Palace, he produced a model triplane, which ran along suspended from a wire, and, when its engine was in action, lifted itself as it ran.

The foundation of the Aeronautical Society, with the Duke of Argyll as president and with a council of men of science, attracted fresh minds to the study of flight, and gave the subject a respectable standing. Mr. Wenham's paper, read to the society on the 27th of June 1866, proved that the effective sustaining area of a wing is limited to a narrow portion behind the leading edge; that, in order to increase this area, the planes of a flying machine might advantageously be placed one above another—an idea which was borrowed and put into practice by Mr. Stringfellow in his triplane—and that a heavy body, supported on planes, requires less power to drive it through the air at a high speed than to maintain it in flight at a low speed. For some years the society flourished; then its energies declined, and it fell into a state of suspended animation. At its second exhibition, in 1885, there were only sixteen exhibits as against seventy-eight at the exhibition of 1868. The prospects of practical success seemed remoter than ever. At last, thirty years after its foundation, it sprang into renewed activity, and, with Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell as secretary, did an immense work, from 1897 onwards, in directing and furthering the study of aviation. The Aeronautical Journal, which was published quarterly by the revived society, is a record of the years of progress and triumph.

The cause of this sudden revival is to be sought in the extraordinary fermentation which had been going on under the surface, both in Europe and America. The public was careless and sceptical; inventors who were seeking practical success were shy of premature publicity; papers read to learned societies were more concerned with theory than with practice; but there was hope in the air, and hundreds of minds were independently at work on the problem of flight. Some idea of the variety of suggestions and devices may be gathered from Mr. Octave Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines, a reprint of a series of articles by him, which appeared, from 1891 onwards, in The Railroad and Engineering Journal of New York City. It was said in the ancient world that there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has believed it; there is no imaginable way of flight that has not engaged the time and effort of some inventor. Yet among the multitude of attempts it is not difficult to trace the ancestry of the modern flying machine. Wing-flapping machines left no issue. Machines supported in the air by helicopters, that is, by horizontal revolving blades, can be made to rise from the ground, but cannot easily be made to travel. The way to success was by imitation of soaring birds; and it is worthy of note that some of the best minds were, from the first, fascinated by this method of flight, and were never tired of observing it. Cayley remarks that the swift, though it is a powerful flyer, is not able to elevate itself from level ground. Wenham records how an eagle, sitting in solitary state in the midst of the Egyptian plain, was fired at with a shotgun, and had to run full twenty yards, digging its talons into the soil, before it could raise itself into the air. M. Mouillard, of Cairo, spent more than thirty years in watching the flight of soaring birds, and devoted the whole of his book, L'Empire de l'Air (1881), to the investigation of soaring flight. The pelican, the turkey-buzzard, the vulture, the condor, have all had their students and disciples. M. Mouillard, indeed, maintains that if there be a moderate wind, a bird can remain a whole day soaring in the air, with no expenditure of power whatever. To those who have watched seagulls this may perhaps seem credible; but air is invisible, and soaring birds are skilful to choose a place, in the wake of a ship or in the neighbourhood of a cliff, where there is an up-current of air, so that when they glide by their own weight, though they are losing height in relation to the air, they are losing none in relation to the surface of the earth.

The parents of the modern flying machine were the gliders, that is, the men who launched themselves into the air on wings or planes of their own devising. The scientific investigators, who experimented with machines embodying the same principle, did much to assist the gliders, but in justice they must take a second place. The men who staked their lives were the men who, after many losses, were rewarded with the conquest of the air. There are stories of a certain Captain Lebris, how in 1854, near Douarnenez in Brittany, he constructed an artificial albatross, and tying it by a slip rope to a cart which was driven against the wind, mounted in it to a height of three hundred feet. But the first glider of whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no money on such things—a piece of advice which, Lilienthal remarks, was unhappily quite superfluous. In 1889 he completed, with the help of his brother, a series of experiments on the carrying capacity of arched, or cambered, wings, and published the results in a book entitled Bird Flight as the Basis of Aviation. In his youth every crow that flew by presented him with a problem to solve in its slowly moving wings. Prolonged study led him to the conclusion that the slight fore-and-aft curvature of the wing was the secret of flying. But he knew too much to suppose that this conclusion solved the problem. A dozen other difficulties, including the difficulty of balance, remained to be mastered. When German societies for the advancement of aerial navigation began to be formed, he at first held aloof from them, for the balloon, which he regarded as the chief obstacle to the development of flight, monopolized their entire attention. His insistence on the cambered wing did not convince others, who went on experimenting with flat planes. German and Austrian aviators, it is true, were induced by his book to put aside flat surfaces and introduce arched wings. 'However,' he remarks, 'as this was done mainly on paper, in projects, and in aeronautical papers and discussions, I felt impelled myself to carry out my theory in practice.' So, in the summer of 1891, on a pair of bird-like wings, with eighty-six square feet of supporting surface, stabilized by a horizontal tail and a vertical fin aft, he began his gliding experiments. His whole apparatus, made of peeled willow sticks, covered with cotton shirting, weighed less than forty pounds. He was supported in it wholly on his forearms, which passed through padded tubes, while his hands grasped a cross-bar. He guided the machine and preserved its balance by shifting his weight, backwards or forwards or sideways. In this apparatus, altered and improved from time to time, Lilienthal, during the next five years, made more than two thousand successful glides. At first he used to jump off a spring-board; then he practised on some hills in the suburbs of Berlin; then, in the spring of 1894, he built a conical hill at Gross-Lichterfelde to serve him as a starting-ground. Later on, he moved to the Rhinow hills. His best glides were made against a light breeze at a gradient of about 1 in 10; and he could easily travel a hundred yards through the air. 'Regulating the centre of gravity', he says, 'becomes a second nature, like balancing on a bicycle; it is entirely a matter of practice and experience.' His most alarming experiences were from gusts of wind which would suddenly raise him many metres in the air and suspend him in a stationary position. But his skill was so great that he always succeeded in resuming his flight and alighting safely. He continued to improve and develop his machine. He made a double-surface glider, on the biplane principle, and flew on it. He experimented with engines, intended to flap the extremities of the wings—first a steam-engine of two horse-power, weighing forty-four pounds, then a simpler and lighter type, worked by compressed carbonic acid gas. But he explains that these can be safely introduced only if they do not impair the gliding efficiency of the machine, and he does not seem to have made much progress with them. His last improvement was a movable horizontal tail, or elevator, worked by a line attached to his head, to control the fore-and-aft balance of the machine. This fresh complexity was perhaps the cause of his death. On the 9th of August 1896 he started on a long glide from a hill about a hundred feet high; a sudden gust of wind caught him, and it is supposed that the involuntary movements of his head in the effort to regain his balance made matters worse; the machine plunged to the ground, and he was fatally injured.

Lilienthal was a good mathematician, a careful recorder of the results of his experiments, and a disinterested student of nature. Complete success was denied to him, but his work informed and stimulated others. The Wright brothers, when they first took up the problem of flight, had the advantage of acquaintance with Professor S. P. Langley's aeronautical researches, but their gliding experiments were shaped and inspired by what they had read of Lilienthal's achievements.

The other pioneer, who has earned a place beside Lilienthal, is Percy Pilcher. In 1893, at the age of twenty-seven, he became assistant lecturer in naval architecture and marine engineering at Glasgow University. He devoted all his spare time to aeronautics, and in 1895 built his first glider, which he named 'The Bat'. The machine was built, with the help of his sister, in the sitting-room of their lodging in Kersland street, Glasgow, and was tested on the banks of the Clyde, near Cardross. Some defects were revealed by the tests; when these were remedied, and the glider was towed by a rope, Pilcher rose to a height of twenty feet, and remained in the air for nearly one minute. Thereafter he built, in rapid succession, three new gliders, all of different design, which he called 'The Beetle', 'The Gull', and 'The Hawk'. The professor of naval architecture at Glasgow, Sir John Biles, says of him, 'He was one of the few men I have met who had no sense of fear.... I was deterred from helping him as much as I ought to have done by a fear of the risks that he ran. He at one time talked to Lord Kelvin about helping him: Lord Kelvin spoke to me about it, and said that on no account would he help him, nor should I, as he would certainly break his neck. This was unfortunately too true a prophecy.' The Hawk was the best of his gliders; at Eynsford in Kent, on the 19th of June 1897, he made a perfectly balanced glide of 250 yards across a deep valley, towed only by a thin fishing line, 'which one could break with one's hands'. After this, Pilcher began to make plans for fitting an engine to his glider. Since the first appearance of the Otto engine in 1876, and of the Daimler engine eight years later, the oil-engine had steadily developed in lightness and power, but no engine exactly suitable for his purpose was on the market, so he resolved to build one. An engine of four horse-power, weighing forty pounds, with a wooden airscrew five feet in diameter, was, by his calculations, amply sufficient to maintain his glider in horizontal flight. The light engine has now been so enormously improved, that it comes near to developing one horse-power for every pound of weight. The violent have taken the kingdom of the air by force: in Pilcher's day the problem was more delicate. He worked at his engine in his leisure time, and, leaving the firm of Maxim & Nordenfeldt, by whom he had been employed from 1896 onwards, made, in 1898, his own firm of Wilson & Pilcher. In the spring of 1899 he was much impressed by Mr. Laurence Hargrave's soaring kites, exhibited by the inventor at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, and it seems that he embodied some of Mr. Hargrave's ideas in his latest built machine, a triplane. He intended to fly this machine at Stanford Hall, Market Harborough, where he was staying with Lord Braye, but on the day appointed, the 30th of September 1899, the weather proved too wet. Nevertheless Pilcher consented to give some demonstrations on The Hawk, towed by a light line; during the second of these, while he was soaring at a height of thirty feet, one of the guy-wires of the tail broke, and the machine turned over and crashed. Pilcher never recovered consciousness, and died two days later. His name will always be remembered in the history of flight. If he had survived his risks for a year or two more, it seems not unlikely that he would have been the first man to navigate the air on a power-driven machine. He left behind him his gallant example, and some advances in design, for he improved the balance of the machine by raising its centre of gravity, and he provided it with wheels, fitted on shock-absorbers, for taking off and alighting.

Lilienthal and Pilcher are pre-eminent among the early gliders, for their efforts were scientific, continuous, and progressive. But there were others; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the comparative value of experiments carried on, many of them in private, by inventors of all countries. Professor J. J. Montgomery, of California, carried out some successful glides, on machines of his own devising, as early as 1884; and Mr. Octave Chanute, the best historian of all these early efforts, having secured the services of Mr. A. M. Herring, a much younger man who had already learned to use a Lilienthal machine, made a series of experiments, with gliders of old and new types, on the shores of Lake Michigan, during the summer of 1896. About the same time some power-driven machines, attached to prepared tracks, were successfully flown. In 1893 Horatio Phillips flew a model, with many planes arranged one above another like a Venetian blind, on a circular track at Harrow; and in the same year Sir Hiram Maxim's large machine, with four thousand feet of supporting surface, was built at Baldwin's Park in Kent, and, when it was tested, developed so great a lift that it broke the guide rails placed to restrain it. Clement Ader, a French electrical engineer, worked at the problem of flight for many years, and, having obtained the support of the French Government, constructed a large bat-like machine, driven by a steam-engine of forty horse-power. In 1897 this machine was secretly tried, at the military camp of Satory, near Paris, and was reported on by a Government commission; all that was known thereafter was that the Government had refused to advance further funds, and that Ader had abandoned his attempts. When the Wrights had made their successful flights, a legend of earlier flights by Ader grew up in France; a heated controversy ensued, and the friends of M. Santos Dumont, who claimed that he was the first to fly over French soil, at length induced the French Government to publish the report on the trial of Ader's machine. The report proved that the machine had not left the ground.

It is not in mortals to command success; but those who study the record of the ingenious, persevering, and helpful work done for a quarter of a century by Mr. Laurence Hargrave, of Sydney, New South Wales, will agree with Mr. Chanute that this man deserved success. His earliest important paper was read to the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1884. In the course of the next ten years he made with his own hands eighteen different flying machines, of increasing size, all of which flew. His earlier machines were not much larger than toys, and were supplied with power by the pull of stretched india-rubber. On this scale he was successful with a machine driven by an airscrew and with a machine driven by the flapping of wings. As his machines grew in size he turned his attention to engines. He was successful with compressed air; he made many experiments with explosion motors; and he succeeded in producing a steam-engine which weighed seven pounds and developed almost two-thirds of one horse-power. In 1893 he invented the box-kite, which is a true biplane, with the vertical sides of the kite doing the work of a stabilizing fin. This kite had a marked influence on the design of some early flying machines. He also invented the soaring kite. His hope that man would fly was more than hope; he refused to argue the question with objectors, for 'I know', he said, 'that success is dead sure to come'. Moreover he put all his researches at the disposal of others. He refused to take out any patents. He did all he could to induce workers to follow his example and communicate their ideas freely, so that progress might be quickened. His own ideas, his own inventions, and his own carefully recorded experiments were a solid step in that staircase of knowledge from which at last man launched himself into the air, and flew.

In America the pioneer who did most to further the science of human flight was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, of the Smithsonian Institute, in Washington. He was well known as an astronomer before ever he took up with aeronautics. From 1866 to 1887 he was professor of astronomy at the Western University of Pennsylvania, at Pittsburg. During his later years there he built a laboratory for aerial investigations, and carried out his famous experiments. His whirling table, with an arm about thirty feet long, which could be moved at all speeds up to seventy miles an hour, was devised to measure the lifting power of air resistance on brass plates suspended to the arm. In 1891 he published his Experiments in Aerodynamics, which embodied the definite mathematical results obtained by years of careful research. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this work. The law which governs the reaction of the air on planes travelling at various speeds and various angles of incidence had been guessed at, or seen in glimpses, by earlier investigators; but here were ascertained numerical values offered to students and inventors. The main result is best stated in Professor Langley's own words: 'When the arm was put in motion I found that the faster it went the less weight the plates registered on the scales, until at great speed they almost floated in the air.... I found that only one-twentieth of the force before supposed to be required to support bodies under such conditions was needed, and what before had seemed impossible began to look possible.... Some mathematicians, reasoning from false data, had concluded that if it took a certain amount of power to keep a thing from falling, it would take much additional power to make it advance. My experiment showed just the reverse ... that the faster the speed the less the force required to sustain the planes, and that it would cost less to transport such planes through the air at a high rate of speed than at a low one. I found further that one horse-power could carry brass plates weighing two hundred pounds at the rate of more than forty miles an hour in horizontal flight.'

When these researches were known and understood, their effect upon the practical handling of the problem of flight was immediate and decisive. The aeroplane, or gliding machine, had many rivals; they were all killed by Professor Langley's researches, which showed that the cheapest and best way to raise a plane in the air is to drive it forward at a small upward inclination; and that its weight can be best countered not by applying power to raise it vertically, but by driving it fast. In the statistical tables that he prepared he called the upward pressure of the air Lift; the pressure which retards horizontal motion he called Drift. The words make a happy pair, but the word Drift is badly needed to describe the leeway of an aeroplane in a cross-wind, so that in England another pair of words, Lift and Drag, has been authoritatively substituted.

From this time onward Langley devoted himself to those other problems, especially the problems of balance, of mechanical power, and of safety in taking off and alighting, which had to be solved if he was to make a machine that should fly. He was much influenced, he says, by a mechanical toy, produced as early as 1871 by an ingenious Frenchman called Penaud, and named by its inventor the 'planophore'. This toy, which weighed only a little over half an ounce, was supported on wings, and was driven forward by an airscrew made of two feathers. The motive power was supplied by twisted strands of rubber which, as they untwisted, turned the airscrew. The wings were set at a dihedral angle, that is, they were bent upwards at the tips; and fore-and-aft stability was secured by a smaller pair of wings just in front of the airscrew. 'Simple as this toy looked,' says Professor Langley, 'it was the father of a future flying machine, and France ought to have the credit of it.' His own steam-driven flying machine was produced and successfully flown in 1896. It had two wings and a tail, with a supporting surface in all of seventy square feet; its total weight was seventy-two pounds; the engine, constructed by himself, weighed only seven pounds and developed one horse-power, which served to drive two airscrews, revolving in opposite directions. The best flight of this machine was more than three-quarters of a mile, and was made over the Potomac river. When, on its first flight, it had flown for a minute, 'I felt', says Professor Langley, 'that something had been accomplished at last, for never in any part of the world or in any period had any machine of man's construction sustained itself in the air before for even half of this brief time'. His flying machines were called by Langley 'aerodromes', and the word 'aeroplane' was used by him, as it is used in the New English Dictionary of 1888, only in the sense of a single plane surface used for aerial experiments. But no usage, however authoritative, can withstand the tide of popular fashion; the machine is now an aeroplane, while aerodrome is the name given to the flying-ground from which it starts.

The success of his machine became widely known, and in 1898 the War Department of the United States, having ascertained that Langley was willing to devote all his spare time to the work, allotted fifty thousand dollars for the development, construction, and test of a large 'aerodrome', big enough to carry a man. The construction was long delayed by the difficulty of finding a suitable engine. This difficulty hampered all early attempts at flight. The internal-combustion engine was by this time pretty well understood, and, with the will to do it, might have been made light enough for the purpose. But it was almost an axiom with engineering firms that a very light engine could not wear well and was untrustworthy in other ways. One horse-power to the hundredweight was what they regarded as the standard of solid merit. Further, they were prejudiced against that extremely rapid movement of the parts which is necessary if the crank-shaft is to revolve more than a thousand times a minute. They were asked to depart from all their cherished canons and to risk failure and break-down in order that man should achieve what many of them regarded as an impossibility. It was with Langley as it was with Pilcher and the Wrights; he had to make his own engine. By 1901 he had completed with the aid of his assistants an engine of fifty-two horse-power, weighing, with all its appurtenances, less than five pounds to the horse-power. A year and a half more was spent in adapting and co-ordinating the frame and appliances, and in carrying out the shop tests. At last, on the 7th of October 1903, from a house-boat moored in the Potomac river, about forty miles below Washington, the first trial was made. The machine caught in the launching mechanism, and fell into the river, where it broke. It was repaired, and a second trial was made on the 8th of December 1903. Again the machine failed to clear the launching car, and plunged headlong into the river, where the frame was broken by zealous efforts to salve it in the dark. Nine days after this final failure the Wrights made their first successful power-driven flight, at Kitty Hawk, on the coast of North Carolina.

Langley was almost seventy years old when his last and most ambitious machine failed. He lived for two years more. If his contributions to the science of flight, which are his chief title to fame, were ruled out of the account, he would still be remembered as something more than a good astronomer—a man of many sciences, who cared little for his own advancement, and much for the advancement of knowledge.

From what has been said it is now possible to conceive how things stood when the brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, first attacked the problem of flying in the air. Men had flown, or rather had glided through the air, without engines to support and drive them. Machines had flown, without men to control and guide them. If the two achievements could be combined in one, the problem was solved; but the combination, besides bringing together both sets of difficulties and dangers, added new dangers and difficulties, greater than either. Plainly, there were two ways, and only two, of going about the business. Professor Langley held that in order to learn to fly, you must have a flying machine to begin with. Wilbur Wright, whose views on the point never varied from first to last, held that you must have a man to begin with. The brothers were impatient of 'the wasteful extravagance of mounting delicate and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage'. When they began their experiments they had already reached the conclusion that the problem of constructing wings to carry the machine, and the problem of constructing a motor to drive it, presented no serious difficulty; but that the problem of equilibrium had been the real stumbling-block, and that this problem of equilibrium was the problem of flight itself. 'It seemed to us', says Wilbur Wright, 'that the main reason why the problem had remained so long unsolved was that no one had been able to obtain any adequate practice. We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours' practice, spread out in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts. We thought that if some method could be found by which it would be possible to practise by the hour instead of by the second there would be hope of advancing the solution of a very difficult problem.'

When this was written, in 1901, it was a forecast; it is now the history of a triumph. By prolonged scientific practice, undertaken with every possible regard to safety, on soaring and gliding machines, the Wrights became master pilots and conquerors of the air. Their success had in it no element of luck; it was earned, as an acrobat earns his skill. So confident did they become that to the end their machines were all machines of an unstable equilibrium, dependent for their safety on the skill and quickness of the pilot. Their triumph was a triumph of mind and character. Other men had more than their advantages, and failed, where these men succeeded. Great things have sometimes been done by a happy chance; it was not so with the Wrights. They planned great things, and measured themselves against them, and were equal to them.

Wilbur and Orville Wright were the sons of Milton Wright, of Dayton, Ohio. They came of New England stock. One of their ancestors emigrated from Essex in 1636, and settled at Springfield, Massachusetts; a later ancestor moved west, to Dayton. Wilbur was born in 1867, and Orville in 1871. They had two elder brothers and one younger sister; but Wilbur and Orville were so closely united in their lives and in their thoughts, that it is not easy to speak of them apart. Mr. Griffith Brewer, who knew them both, was often asked which of the two was the originator, and would reply, 'I think it was mostly Wilbur'; but would add, 'The thing could not have been done without Orville'. Wilbur, being four years the elder, no doubt took the lead; but all their ideas and experiments were shared, so that their very thought became a duet. Wilbur, who died in 1912, was a man of a steady mind and of a dominant character, hard-knit, quiet, intense. He has left some writings which reflect his nature; they have a certain grim humour, and they mean business; they push aside all irrelevance, and go straight to the point. After adventures in printing and journalism the two brothers set up at Dayton as cycle manufacturers. The death of Lilienthal, reported in the newspapers in 1896, first called their attention to flight, and they began to read all available books on the subject. They found that an immense amount of time and money had been spent on the problem of human flight—all to no effect. Makers of machines had abandoned their efforts. As for gliders, after the death of Lilienthal, Mr. Chanute had discontinued his experiments, and, a little later, Mr. Pilcher fell and was killed. When knowledge of these things came to the brothers, it appealed to them like a challenge. From 1899 onwards they turned all their thoughts to the problem. They watched the flight of birds to see if they could surprise the secret of balance. They studied gliding machines, and resolved to construct a machine of their own, more or less on the model of Mr. Chanute's most successful glider, which was a biplane, or 'double-decker'. When their machine was partly built, they wrote to the weather bureau at Washington, and learned that the strongest and most constant winds were to be found on the coast of North Carolina. They then wrote to the postmaster of Kitty Hawk, who testified that the sand-hills of that place were round and soft, well fitted for boys playing with flying machines. They took the parts of their machine to Kitty Hawk, assembled and completed it in a tent, and forthwith began their long years of continuous and progressive experiment. Their chief helper was Mr. Chanute. 'In the summer of 1901', they said, 'we became personally acquainted with Mr. Chanute. When he learned that we were interested in flying as a sport and not with any expectation of recovering the money we were expending on it, he gave us much encouragement. At our invitation he spent several weeks with us at our camp at Kill Devil Hill, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, during our experiments of that and the two succeeding years.'

The first two summers, 1900 and 1901, brought them some familiarity in the handling of their first two gliders, which they navigated lying face downward on the lower plane. In all their gliding experiments they studied safety first. They knew that the business they had embarked on was of necessity a long and dangerous one; that they were bound to encounter many dangers, and that each of them had only one life. They took no avoidable risks. Gliding seemed to them, at first, to have been discredited by the deaths of Lilienthal and Pilcher, so they planned to try their machine by tethering it with a rope and letting it float a few feet from the ground, while they practised manipulation. The wind proved to be not strong enough to sustain the weighted machine, and they were compelled to take to gliding. All their early glides were made as near the ground as possible. The machine had no vertical rudder, but they fitted it, in front, with what they called a horizontal rudder, that is, an elevator. By the use of this they could bring it to the ground at once when the wind was tricky and their balance was threatened. The lateral balance they attempted to control by warping the wings, but with no satisfactory results. They made glides longer than any on record, but while the problem of stability was still unsolved, there could be no real progress. At the end of 1901, Wilbur Wright made the prediction that men would some time fly, but that it would not be in their lifetime.

They returned to Dayton, and spent the winter in experiment and research. They had taken up aeronautics partly as a sport; they were now drawn deeper and deeper into the scientific study of it. They made a wind-tunnel, sixteen inches square and about six feet long, and tested in it the lift and drag of model wings, made in various sizes and with various aspect ratios. The tables which they compiled from these experiments were continually used by them thereafter, and superseded the tables of Lilienthal and Langley, which took no account of the aspect ratio. When they returned to Kitty Hawk, in the autumn of 1902, they took with them a greatly improved glider. The aspect ratio of the planes was six to one, instead of about three to one, as in their second glider. Further, while preserving the horizontal vane, or elevator, at the front of the machine, they added a vertical vane, or rudder, at the rear. It was their failure to control the lateral balance in the experiments of 1901 that suggested this device to them. From the first they had discarded the method, practised by Lilienthal and Pilcher, of adjusting the lateral balance by shifting the weight of the operator's body. This method seemed to them 'incapable of expansion to meet large conditions, because the weight to be moved and the distance of possible motion were limited, while the disturbing forces steadily increased, both with wing area and with wing velocity'. Accordingly they invented a method of warping the wings, to present them to the wind at different angles on the right and left sides. Thus the force of the wind was used to restore the balance which the wind itself had disturbed. But in their early gliders this warping process acted in an unexpected way. The wing which, in order to raise that side of the machine, was presented to the wind at the greater angle of incidence often proved to be the wing which lagged and sank. The decrease in speed, due to the extra drag, more than counterbalanced the effect of the larger angle. When they attempted to remedy this by introducing a fixed vertical vane in the rear, 'it increased the trouble and made the machine 'absolutely dangerous'. Any side-slip became irrecoverable by causing the vertical fixed vane to strike the wind on the side toward the low wing, instead of on the side toward the high wing, as it should have done to correct the balance. 'It was some time', the brothers remark, 'before a remedy was discovered. This consisted of movable rudders working in conjunction with the twisting of the wings.' So that now three different parts of the machine had to be controlled by wires, worked swiftly and correctly by the operator, to preserve the balance. There were the wing tips which had to be warped. There was the horizontal vane in front which had to be adjusted, to keep the machine in level flight or to bring it to the ground. There was the vertical vane behind which had to be moved this way and that to secure the desired effect from the warping of the wings. 'For the sake of simplicity,' says Wilbur Wright, 'we decided to attach the wires controlling the vertical tail to the wires warping the wings, so that the operator, instead of having to control three things at once, would have to attend to only the forward horizontal rudder and the wing warping mechanism; and only the latter would be needed for controlling lateral balance.'

The thing was done. They had built an aeroplane that could fly; and the later introduction of an engine was as simple a matter as the harnessing of a horse to a carriage. 'With this apparatus', says Wilbur Wright, speaking of the glider of 1902, 'we made nearly seven hundred glides in the two or three weeks following. We flew it in calms and we flew it in winds as high as thirty-five miles an hour. We steered it to right and left, and performed all the evolutions necessary for flight. This was the first time in the history of the world that a movable vertical tail had been used in controlling the direction or the balance of a flying machine. It was also the first time that a movable vertical tail had been used, in combination with wings adjustable to different angles of incidence, in controlling the balance and direction of an aeroplane. We were the first to functionally employ a movable vertical tail in a flying aeroplane. We were the first to employ wings adjustable to respectively different angles of incidence in a flying aeroplane. We were the first to use the two in combination in a flying aeroplane.'

It is a large claim, and every word of it is true. New inventions are commonly the work of many minds, and it would be easy to name at least half a dozen men to whose work the Wrights were indebted. But these were tributaries; the main achievement belongs wholly to the Wrights. Their quiet perseverance, through long years, in the face of every kind of difficulty, is only a part of their distinction; the alertness and humility of mind which refused all traffic with fixed ideas, and made dangers and disappointments the material of education, is what stamps them with greatness. They put themselves to school to the winds. They knew that there is no cheap or easy way to master nature, and that only the human spirit, at its best and highest, can win through in that long struggle. Their patience never failed. 'Skill', says Wilbur Wright, 'comes by the constant repetition of familiar feats rather than by a few overbold attempts at feats for which the performer is yet hardly prepared.' Man must learn to fly as he learns to walk. 'Before trying to rise to any dangerous height a man ought to know that in an emergency his mind and muscles will work by instinct rather than by conscious effort. There is no time to think.'

The machine of 1902, which might be called the victory machine, deserves a full description. It was a double-decked machine, with two planes fixed by struts one above the other about five feet apart. The planes were thirty-two feet in span, and five feet in chord. The total area of their supporting surfaces was about three hundred and five square feet. The operator lay on his face in the middle of the lower plane. The horizontal rudder in front had a supporting surface of fifteen square feet. The vertical tail, as they called it, which was the true rudder, was reduced after trial to six square feet. The machine was supported on the ground by skids, and was very strongly built. It weighed a hundred and sixteen and a half pounds, to which must be added about a hundred and forty pounds for the weight of the operator. It performed about a thousand glides, with only one injury, though it made many hard landings at full speed on uneven ground. The longest glide was 622-1/2 feet, traversed in twenty-six seconds. The glides were made from the Kill Devil sand-hills, near Kitty Hawk—mounds of sand heaped up by the wind, the biggest having a height of a hundred feet.

The time had now come to invite an engine to bear a part in the proceedings. In the autumn of 1903 the brothers returned to Kitty Hawk for their fourth season of experiment. They had built in the winter a machine weighing six hundred pounds, including the operator and an eight horse-power motor. Finding that the motor gave more power than had been estimated, they added a hundred and fifty pounds of weight in strengthening the wings and other parts. The airscrews, built from their own calculations, gave in useful work two-thirds of the power expended. Before trying this machine, however, they continued their practice with the old glider, and made a number of flights in which they remained in the air for over a minute, often soaring for a considerable time in one spot, without any descent at all.

It was late in the season, the 17th of December 1903, when they first tried the power machine. A general invitation to be present at the trial had been given to the people living within five or six miles, but 'not many were willing to face the rigours of a cold December wind in order to see, as they no doubt thought, another flying machine not fly'. Five persons besides the brothers were present. Mr. Orville Wright's narrative, written for the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, must be given in his own words:

'On the morning of December 17th, between the hours of 10.30 o'clock and noon, four flights were made, two by Mr. Orville Wright, and two by Mr. Wilbur Wright. The starts were all made from a point on the levels, and about 200 feet west of our camp, which is located about a quarter of a mile north of the Kill Devil Sand Hill, in Dare County, North Carolina. The wind at the time of the flights had a velocity of twenty-seven miles an hour at 10 o'clock, and 24 miles an hour at noon, as recorded by the anemometer at the Kitty Hawk weather bureau station. This anemometer is 30 feet from the ground. Our own measurements, made with a hand-anemometer at a height of four feet from the ground, showed a velocity of about 22 miles when the first flight was made, and 20-1/2 miles at the time of the last one. The flights were directly against the wind. Each time the machine started from the level ground by its own power alone, with no assistance from gravity or any other sources whatever. After a run of about 40 feet along a mono-rail track, which held the machine eight inches from the ground, it rose from the track and, under the direction of the operator, climbed upward on an inclined course till a height of 8 or 10 feet from the ground was reached, after which the course was kept as near horizontal as the wind gusts and the limited skill of the operator would permit. Into the teeth of a December gale the Flyer made its way forward with a speed of 10 miles an hour over the ground, and 30 to 35 miles an hour through the air. It had previously been decided that, for reasons of personal safety, these first trials should be made as close to the ground as possible. The height chosen was scarcely sufficient for manœuvring in so gusty a wind and with no previous acquaintance with the conduct of the machine and its controlling mechanisms. Consequently the first flight was short. The succeeding flights rapidly increased in length and at the fourth trial a flight of 59 seconds was made, in which time the machine flew a little more than a half-mile through the air and a distance of 852 feet over the ground. The landing was due to a slight error of judgement on the part of the operator. After passing over a little hummock of sand, in attempting to bring the machine down to the desired height the operator turned the rudder too far, and the machine turned downward more quickly than had been expected. The reverse movement of the rudder was a fraction of a second too late to prevent the machine from touching the ground and thus ending the flight. The whole occurrence occupied little, if any, more than one second of time.

'Only those who are acquainted with practical aeronautics can appreciate the difficulties of attempting the first trials of a flying machine in a 25-mile gale. As winter was already well set in, we should have postponed our trials to a more favourable season, but for the fact that we were determined, before returning home, to know whether the machine possessed sufficient power to fly, sufficient strength to withstand the shock of landings, and sufficient capacity of control to make flight safe in boisterous winds, as well as in calm air. When these points had been definitely established, we at once packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.'

CHAPTER II

THE AEROPLANE AND THE AIRSHIP

The age of the flying machine had come at last. A power-driven aeroplane had been built, and had been flown under the control of its pilot. What remained to do was to practise with it and test it; to improve it, and perfect it, and put it on the market. The time allowed for all this was not long; in less than eleven years, if only the world had known it, the world would be at war, and would be calling for aeroplanes by the thousand.

Romance, for all that it is inspired by real events, is never quite like real life. It makes much of prominent dates and crises, and passes lightly and carelessly over the intervening shallows and flats. Yet these shallows and flats are the place where human endurance and purpose are most severely tested. The problem of flight had been solved; the people of the world, it might be expected, springing to attention, would salute the new invention, and welcome the new era. Nothing of the kind happened. America, which is more famous for journalistic activity than any other country on earth, remained profoundly inattentive. The Wrights returned to their home at Dayton, and there continued their experiments.

A legend has grown up that these experiments were conducted under a close-drawn veil of secrecy. On the contrary, the proceedings of the brothers were singularly public—indeed, for the preservation of their title to their own invention, almost dangerously public. 'In the spring of 1904,' says Wilbur Wright, through the kindness of Mr. Torrence Huffman, of Dayton, Ohio, we were permitted to erect a shed, and to continue experiments, on what is known as the Huffman Prairie, at Simms Station, eight miles east of Dayton. The new machine was heavier and stronger, but similar to the one flown at Kill Devil Hill. When it was ready for its first trial every newspaper in Dayton was notified, and about a dozen representatives of the Press were present. Our only request was that no pictures be taken, and that the reports be unsensational, so as not to attract crowds to our experiment grounds. There were probably fifty persons altogether on the ground. When preparations had been completed a wind of only three or four miles was blowing—insufficient for starting on so short a track—but since many had come a long way to see the machine in action, an attempt was made. To add to the other difficulty, the engine refused to work properly. The machine, after running the length of the track, slid off the end without rising into the air at all. Several of the newspaper men returned again the next day, but were again disappointed. The engine performed badly, and after a glide of only sixty feet the machine came to the ground. Further trial was postponed till the motor could be put in better running condition. The reporters had now, no doubt, lost confidence in the machine, though their reports, in kindness, concealed it. Later, when they heard that we were making flights of several minutes' duration, knowing that longer flights had been made with airships, and not knowing any essential difference between airships and flying machines, they were but little interested.'

The indifference and scepticism of the public and the press provided a very effective veil of secrecy, and the brothers prosecuted their researches undisturbed. In 1904 they made more than a hundred flights, practising turning movements and complete circles, and learning how to handle the machine so as to prevent it from 'stalling', that is, from losing flying speed and falling to earth out of control when the air resistance caused by its manœuvring reduced its speed. In 1905 they built another machine and resumed their experiments in the same field. They did not want to attract a crowd. The cars on the electric line adjoining the field ran every thirty minutes, and they timed their flights between the runs. The farmers living near by saw the flying, but their business was with the earth, not the air, and after looking on for two years they lost what little interest they had. On the 5th of October 1905 one of them, from a neighbouring field, saw the great white form rushing round on its circular course in the air. 'Well,' he remarked, 'the boys are at it again'; and he kept on cutting corn. The season's work is summarized by Mr. Orville Wright in a letter dated the 17th of November 1905, and communicated to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain:

'Up to September 6 we had the machine on but eight different days, testing a number of changes which we had made since 1904.... During the month of September we gradually improved in our practice, and on the 26th made a flight of a little over eleven miles. On the 30th we increased this to twelve and one-fifth miles, on October 3 to fifteen and one-third miles, on October 4 to twenty and three-fourth miles, and on the 5th to twenty-four and one-fourth miles. All of these flights were made at about thirty-eight miles an hour, the flight of the 5th occupying thirty minutes three seconds.... We had intended to place the record above the hour, but the attention these flights were beginning to attract compelled us suddenly to discontinue our experiments in order to prevent the construction of the machine from becoming public.

'The machine passed through all of these flights without the slightest damage. In each of these flights we returned frequently to the starting-point, passing high over the heads of the spectators.'

A young druggist called Foust, a friend of the Wrights, was present at the flight of the 5th of October. He was told not to divulge what he had seen, but his enthusiasm would not be restrained, and he talked to such effect that next day the field was crowded with sightseers and the fences were lined with photographers. Very reluctantly the brothers ended their work for the year. They took apart their flyer, and brought it back to the city.

From this time on, for a period of almost three years, the brothers disappear from view. The secrets which it had cost them so much time and effort to discover might, by a single photograph, be made into public property. They were bound to do what they could to assert their claim to their own invention. Their first task was to secure patent rights in their machine; and, after that, to negotiate with the American, French, and British Governments for its purchase. The bringer of so great a gift as flight is worthy of his reward; but the attitude of the brothers to their hard-won possession was not selfish or commercial. They thought more of their responsibilities than of their profits; and in attempting to dispose of their machine they handled the matter as if it were a public trust. These years were full of disappointment, much unlike the earlier years of progress and open-air holiday and happiness. No one, except a few intimates and disciples, believed in the Wrights' achievements. The American Government would not touch their invention. When it was thrice offered to the British Government, between the years 1906 and 1908, it was thrice refused, twice by the War Office and once by the Admiralty. At an earlier period the French Government, more active than the other two, sent Captain Ferber, who had made many gliding experiments of his own, to report after viewing the machine at Dayton. The Wrights refused to show it to him, but their account of what they had done impressed him by its truthfulness, and he reported in their favour, though he told them that there was not a man in all France who believed that they had done what they claimed. The French Government would not buy; and things were at a standstill, until Mr. Hart O. Berg, a good man of business who had helped the Wrights to secure their patents, urged on them the necessity of putting in an appearance in Europe and showing what they could do. By this time they had made various improvements, especially in their engine, and had supplied themselves with two machines. With one of these, in the summer of 1908, Wilbur Wright came to France; with the other Orville Wright was to attempt to secure the contract in America for an army aeroplane. A French syndicate had agreed to buy the Wright patents and a certain number of machines on condition that two flights of not less than fifty kilometres each should be made in a single week, the machines to carry a passenger or an equivalent weight, and the flights to be made in a wind of not less than eleven metres a second, that is, about twenty-five miles an hour. The conditions for the American army contract were no less severe. The machine was to remain in continuous flight for at least an hour; it was to be steered in all directions; and was to land, without damage, at its starting-point. The place chosen for the French tests was the Hunaudières racecourse, near Le Mans. There Wilbur Wright set up his shed, and, from the 8th of August onward, made many little flights, showing his complete control of his machine by the elaborate manœuvres which he performed in the air. On the 9th of September there came the news that Orville Wright had flown for over an hour at Fort Myer in America. This liberated Wilbur Wright, who had been holding back in order to give America the precedence, and on the 21st of September he flew for more than an hour and a half, covering a distance of over sixty miles. About three weeks later he fulfilled the conditions of his test by successive passenger-carrying flights. Encouraged by his example, two distinguished French pioneers, Henri Farman and Léon Delagrange, soon began to make long flights on French machines, and from this time onwards the progress of flying was rapid and immense. A great industry came into being, and, after a short time, ceased to pay any tribute whatever to the inventors. Merely to secure recognition of their priority, it became necessary for the Wrights to bring actions at law against the infringers of their patents. The tedious and distasteful business of these law-suits troubled and shortened the days of Wilbur Wright, who died at Dayton on the 30th of May 1912. In 1913, by arrangement between the parties, a test action was begun against the British Government. When the war broke out, and the trial of this action was still pending, the supporters of the Wrights hastily met, and offered to forgo all their claims for fifteen thousand pounds, a sum substantial enough to establish the Wrights' priority, yet merely nominal as a payment for the benefits conferred. So the matter was settled. The last thoughts of Wilbur Wright were given, not to financial profits, but to further developments of the art of flight. He was constantly meditating on the possibility of soaring flight, which should take advantage of the wind currents, and maintain the machine in the air with but little expenditure of power. In a letter written not many days before he died, and addressed to a German aviator at the Johannisthal flying camp, he says, 'There must be a method whereby human beings can remain in the air once they really find themselves aloft.... The birds can do it. Why shouldn't men?' The coming of the war, with its peremptory demand for power and yet more power, did much to develop strong flight, but postponed experiment on this delicate and fascinating problem.

The name of the Wrights is so much the greatest name in the history of flying that it is only fair to give their achievements a separate place. In 1905 they were in possession of a practical flying machine. In 1908 they proved their powers and established their claims in the sight of the world. During these three years events had not stood still; European inventors were busy with experiments. There were rumours of the American success, but the rumours were disbelieved, and the problem was attacked again from the beginning. Long after the Wrights had circled in the air, at their own free will, over the Huffman Prairie, European inventors were establishing records, as they believed, by hopping off the ground for a few yards in machines of their own construction.

The earliest of these European pioneers was Mr. I. C. H. Ellehammer, a Danish engineer, who had built motor-cycles and light cars. In 1904 he built a flying machine, and having prepared a ground in the small Danish island of Lindholm, suspended the machine by a wire attached to a central mast, and tested its lifting power. In the course of his experiments he increased his engine-power, and added to the first bird-like pair of wings a second pair placed above them. With this improved machine he claims to have made, on the 12th of September 1906, the first free flight in Europe, travelling in the air for forty-two metres at a height of a metre and a half. With later machines he had some successes, but the rapid progress of French aviation left him behind, and his latest invention was an application to the aeroplane of a helicopter, to raise it vertically in the air. The helicopter idea continues to fascinate some inventors, and it would be rash to condemn it, but the most it seems to promise is a flight like that of the lark—an almost vertical ascent and a glide to earth again. A machine of this kind might conceivably, at some future time, become a substitute, in war, for the kite balloon; it is not likely to supersede the aeroplane.

Of all European countries France was the most intelligent and the most alert in taking up the problem of flight. The enduring rivalry between the airship and the flying machine is well illustrated in the history of French effort. Long before the first true flying machine was built and flown balloons of a fish-like shape had been driven through the air by mechanical airscrews. A bird is much heavier than the air it displaces; a fish is about the same weight as the water it displaces; and the question which of the two examples is better for aircraft, whether flying or swimming is the better mode, remained an open question, dividing opinion and distracting effort. The debate is not yet concluded. It is now not very hazardous to say that both methods are good, and that the partisans of the one side and the other were right in their faith and wrong in their heresy-hunting. National rivalry certainly quickened the competition between the two modes; the early progress of aviation in France gave a great impulse to the development of the Zeppelin in Germany. But the two modes are so entirely distinct that they are better treated separately. None of the chief nations of the world has dared wholly to neglect either; from the very beginning the two have grown up side by side, and interest has been concentrated now on the one and now on the other. When, in 1912, Great Britain took in hand the creation of an air force, military and naval, France was already furnished with a very large number of aeroplanes, organized for service with the army, and Germany was provided with airships of unprecedented power and range. France also had some airships, and Germany, alarmed by the progress of French aviation, had begun to turn her attention to aeroplanes, but the pride of Germany was in her airships, and the pride of France was in her aeroplanes. These were the conditions with which Great Britain had to reckon; they had grown up rapidly in the course of a few years; and it will be convenient to speak first of the airship, which, invented by France, was adopted and improved by Germany; and then of the aeroplane, which was made by France into so formidable a military engine that Germany had no choice but to imitate again. Meantime Great Britain, during the earlier years of these developments, entrusted her aerial fortunes to a few balloons, which were operated by the Royal Engineers and were not very favourably regarded by the chiefs of the army. The unpreparedness of Great Britain in all national crises is a time-honoured theme. The Englishman, if he does not wholly distrust science, at least distrusts theory. Facts excite him, and rouse him to exertion. In an address delivered in 1910, Mr. R. B. Haldane, who consistently did all that he could to promote and encourage science, uttered a prophecy which deserves record. 'When a new invention,' he said, 'like the submarine or the motor, comes to light, the Englishman is usually behind. Give him a few years and he has not only taken care of himself in the meantime, but is generally leading. As it was with these inventions, so I suspect it will prove to be with aircraft.'

The airship, like the balloon, was a French invention. When the balloon first came into vogue many attempts were made to deflect or guide its course by the use of oars. Those who made these attempts were almost unanimous in declaring that the use of oars enabled them to alter the course of a balloon by several points of the compass. Another method of steering employed sails, held up to the wind by the drag of a guide-rope on the ground. The control to be obtained by means like these was pathetically small, and the real problem was soon seen to be the problem of a motor. The spherical balloon is obviously unsuited for power-navigation; in 1784, only a year after the invention of the balloon, General Meusnier, of the French army, made designs for an egg-shaped power-balloon to be driven by three airscrews, supported on the rigging between the car and the balloon. To keep the balloon fully inflated and stiff, in order to drive it against the wind, he planned a double envelope, the inner space to contain hydrogen, the outer space to be pumped full of air. He may thus be said to have invented the ballonet, or air-chamber of the balloon, and to be the father of later successful airships. His designs were mere descriptions; they could not be carried out; there was at that time no light engine in existence, and his own suggestion that the airscrews should be worked by manual labour may be called a design for an engine that weighs something over half a ton for every horse-power of energy exerted. In 1798 the French author Beaumarchais recommended the construction of airships in the long shape of a fish. As the years passed, models were made on this plan. In 1834 Mr. Monck Mason exhibited at the Lowther Arcade in London a model airship, thirteen and a half feet long, and six and a half feet in diameter; its airscrew was operated by a spring; it was fitted with horizontal planes for setting its course; and in its very short flights it attained a speed of something over five miles an hour. A larger model, with two airscrews driven by clockwork, was exhibited in 1850 by M. Jullien, a clockmaker of Paris, and flew successfully against a slight breeze. The first successful man-carrying airship was built in 1852 by Henry Giffard, the French engineer, and was flown at Paris on the 24th of September in that year. It was spindle-shaped, with a capacity of 87,000 cubic feet, and a length of 144 feet. The airscrew, ten feet in diameter, was driven by a steam-engine of three horse-power, and the speed attained was about six miles an hour. It would take long to record all the unsuccessful or partially successful experiments in the history of the airship—the elaborately constructed ships which never rose from the ground, the carefully thought out devices which did not work. Progress was very slow and gradual, a mere residue in a history of failures. The first use of the gas-engine was in an Austrian dirigible, which made a single captive ascent at Brunn in 1872, and developed a speed of three miles an hour. After 1870 the reconstituted French Government showed itself willing to encourage aeronautics, and in 1872, at the cost of the State, a large dirigible was built by Dupuy de Lôme, the inventor of the ironclad. This ship, with an airscrew driven by manpower, attained a speed of five and a half miles an hour. The first really successful power-driven airship, that is, the first airship to return to its starting-point at the end of a successful voyage, was built in 1884 for the French army by Captain Krebs and Captain Charles Renard, who subsequently became director of the French department of military aeronautics. This dirigible, named La France, was fish-shaped; its length was a hundred and sixty-five feet; its greatest diameter, near the bows, was twenty-seven and a half feet, or one-sixth of its length; it was fitted with an electric motor of eight and a half horse-power which operated an airscrew of twenty-three feet in diameter, situated in front of the car; it was steered by vertical and horizontal rudders, and made several ascents in the neighbourhood of Meudon. It was the progenitor and type of all later non-rigid dirigibles.

The success of La France brought Germany into the field. Towards the close of the century a German engineer called Wölfert constructed a dirigible rather smaller than the French airship, with a slightly more powerful engine, and two airscrews of twelve feet in diameter. This was in one respect a forerunner of the most famous of the German airships, for the car, instead of hanging loose, was rigidly connected to the envelope by means of struts. The trials took place in 1896 at Tempelhof, near Berlin; the airship was held captive by ropes; it answered well to its rudders, and attained a speed of about nine miles an hour. Encouraged by this experiment, Dr. Wölfert in the following year built a second smaller dirigible, fitted with a Daimler benzine motor, and made a free ascent in it on the 14th of June 1897, near Berlin. As soon as it was well in the air, the ship caught fire and fell flaming to the ground, killing Dr. Wölfert and his assistant. Later in the same year the first completely rigid dirigible was built by a German called David Schwarz; it was made of thin aluminium sheeting, internally braced by steel wires, and was driven by a twelve horse-power Daimler motor which worked twin airscrews, one on either side. It took the air near Berlin on the 3rd of November 1897, but something went wrong with the airscrew belts, and it was seriously damaged in its hasty descent. Thereupon the crowd of people who had assembled to applaud it fell upon it, and wrecked it. The behaviour of the crowd deserves a passing mention in any history of flight; it was not the least of the ordeals of the early aeronaut. The aeroplane or airship pilot who disappointed the expectations of his public found no better treatment than Christian and Faithful met with in Bunyan's Vanity Fair. There is here no question of national weaknesses; in France and Germany, in England and America, the thing has happened again and again. If an ascent was announced, and was put off because the weather was bad, the crowd jeered, and hooted, and threw stones. On more than one occasion a pilot has been driven by the taunts of the crowd to attempt an impossible ascent; and has met his death. If a damaged machine fell to earth, the crowd often wreaked their vengeance on it, as deer fall upon a wounded comrade. The men who made up the crowd were most of them kind and trustworthy in their private relations, and in matters that they understood were not unreasonable or inconsiderate. But aerial navigation was a new thing, and their attitude to it was wholly spectacular. They came to see it because they craved excitement, and under the influence of that cruel passion they were capable of the worst excesses of the Roman populace at a gladiatorial show.

In the years that joined the centuries, that is, from 1898 to 1903, aviation seemed a forlorn hope, but there was great activity in the construction of airships, and something like a race for supremacy between France and Germany. In 1898 the Brazilian, Alberto Santos Dumont, made his first gallant appearance in an airship of his own construction. Born in 1873, the son of a prosperous coffee-planter of San Paulo in Brazil, Santos Dumont was a young and wealthy amateur, gifted with mechanical genius, and insensible to danger. The accidents and perils that he survived in his many aerial adventures would have killed a cat. One of his airships collapsed and fell with him on to the roofs of Paris. Another collapsed and fell with him into the Mediterranean. A third caught fire in the air, and he beat out the flames with his Panama hat. He survived these and other mishaps, unhurt, and after making more than a hundred ascents in airships, turned his attention to aeroplanes, and was the first man to rise from French soil in a flying machine. From his boyhood mechanisms had attracted him; he was well acquainted with all the machines on his father's plantation, and he records an observation that he made there—the only bad machine on the plantation, he says, was an agitating sieve; the good machines all worked on the rotary principle. He became a champion of the wheel, and of the rotary principle. There was something of the fierceness of theological dispute in the controversies of these early days. The wheel, it was pointed out, is not in nature; it is a pedantic invention of man. Birds do not employ it to fly with, nor fish to swim with. The naturalist school of aeronauts declared against it. In 1892 M. A. le Compagnon made experiments, not very successfully, in Paris, with a captive dirigible balloon driven by a pair of oscillating wings. As late as 1904 Mr. Thomas Moy, in a paper read to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, maintained that the greatest hindrances to the solution of the problem of mechanical flight have always been the balloon and the airscrew. Mr. William Cochrane, in a paper read a few months earlier, laid it down that the airscrew must give place to a more efficient form of propulsion. Utterances like these help to explain the fervour with which Santos Dumont, in the book called My Airships (1904), defends the rotary principle, which is the life of machines. Like the Wrights, he believed in practice, and was a skilled and experienced balloonist before he attempted to navigate an airship. His first airship was almost absurdly small; it had little more than six thousand feet of cubic capacity, was cigar-shaped, and was driven by a three and a half horse-power petrol motor. The others followed in rapid succession. M. Deutsch de la Meurthe had offered a prize of a hundred thousand francs for the first airship that should rise from the Aero Club ground at St. Cloud and voyage round the Eiffel Tower, returning within half an hour to its starting-point. On the 19th of October 1901 the prize was won by Santos Dumont in the sixth of his airships. The ship had over twenty-two thousand feet of cubic capacity; its length was more than five times its diameter; and it was driven by a twelve horse-power petrol motor. It travelled six and three-quarter miles within the half-hour, part of the journey being accomplished against a wind of about twelve miles an hour. This achievement quickened interest in airships and gained a European fame for Santos Dumont. His later airships were modelled on the egg rather than the cigar; the smallest of these was so perfectly under control that he was able, he says, to navigate it by night through the streets of Paris.

The development of the airship continued for many years to pay toll in wreckage and loss of life. In 1902 three notable airships were built and flown in France; two of these were destroyed in the air above Paris, within a few minutes of their first ascent. Senhor Augusto Severo, a Brazilian, made a spindle-shaped airship, ninety-eight feet long, driven by two airscrews, placed one at each end of a framework which formed the longitudinal axis of the airship. It ascended on the 12th of May, and when it had reached a height of thirteen hundred feet, exploded in flames. Senhor Severo and his assistant perished in it. The other ship was designed by Baron Bradsky, secretary to the German Embassy in Paris; its total weight was made exactly equivalent to the weight of the air that it displaced, and it was to be raised by the operation of an airscrew rotating horizontally under the car. By the action of this screw the car itself began to rotate, and to drag the ship round with it; the resistance of the air on the body of the ship put too great a strain on the steel wires by which the car was suspended; they broke, and from a height of many hundred feet Baron Bradsky and his engineer, M. Morin, fell to earth with the car, and were killed. This second disaster happened on the 13th of October 1902, at Stains, near Paris. Twelve days later, on the 25th of October, a much more fortunate airship, the dirigible built for the brothers Lebaudy, made its first ascent at Moisson. This vessel was more successful than any of its predecessors, and became the model for airships of the semi-rigid type. It was fish-shaped, with a capacity of more than eighty thousand cubic feet, and was driven by a forty horse-power Daimler petrol motor, which worked two airscrews, eight feet in diameter, at a rate exceeding a thousand revolutions a minute. The lower part of the envelope was flat, and secured to a rigid metal framework; six steel tubes, attached to this framework, supported the car below, and, besides distributing the load, conveyed the thrust of the airscrew to the ship above. In the course of a year the ship made twenty-eight return journeys, covering distances up to twenty-two miles. In November 1903 it broke all records, first by making the longest voyage that had ever been made by a navigable balloon, that is, from Moisson to Paris, a distance of about forty miles, and next, a week later, by successfully combating a wind of more than twenty miles an hour. 'Aerial navigation', said Colonel Renard, who witnessed this trial, 'is no longer a Utopia.' After a time the ship was taken over by the French army, and its immediate Lebaudy successors, La Patrie of 1906 and La République of 1908, also became military airships. Both were wrecked after a short career, but the military airship had made good its promise, and three new airship-building firms were established in France. In 1902 the Astra Company, in 1909 and 1910 the Zodiac Company and the Clément-Bayard Company, began to build airships, some for the French army and some for foreign powers.

Meanwhile, at the time when Santos Dumont was gaining credit for the smallest airship ever known, the largest known airship had been designed and launched in Germany. On the 2nd of July 1900 the first Zeppelin made its trial trip from the floating shed at Manzell, near Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance. When the Great War shall be only a faded memory, when the sufferings of millions of men and women shall be condensed into matter for handbooks, and their sacrifices shall be expressed only in arithmetical figures, certain incidents and names, because they caught the popular imagination, will still be narrated and repeated. The names that will live are the names that symbolize the causes for which they stood. Edith Cavell will never be forgotten; when she persevered in her work of mercy, and calmly faced the ultimate cruelties of a monstrous system, all that was best in the war seemed to find expression in that lonely passion. She was brought home to England in a warship, and was carried to her grave on a gun-carriage, under the Union Jack, because her cause was her country's cause, and England claimed a title in her sacrifice. It is a far cry from Edith Cavell to the old soldier who gave Germany the giant airship, but the Zeppelin will also be remembered, because the popular imagination, which is often both just and fanciful, found a symbol of Germany's cause in this engine of terror, so carefully and admirably planned down to the minutest detail, so impressive by its bulk, so indiscriminate in its destructive action, and so frail. Its inventor was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a Lieutenant-General in the German army. His first balloon ascent had been made during the American Civil War, in one of the military balloons of the Federal army. Later on, in the Franco-Prussian War, he distinguished himself by his daring cavalry reconnaissances in Alsace. At about that time there was in Alsace a Frenchman named Spiess, who had drawn a design for a rigid airship not unlike the later Zeppelin, and had endeavoured, without success, to patent it. The suggestion has been made, but with no proof, that Count Zeppelin may have seen Spiess's plans, and borrowed from them. If so, the borrowed idea took long in maturing. It was not until 1898 that the Count went to work on a large scale, and formed a company with a capital of a million marks. It was not until 1908, after ten years of struggle and disaster, that the German Government made him a grant for the continuance of his experiments, and the German people, impressed by his pertinacity and courage in misfortune, raised for him a subscription of three hundred thousand pounds, to enable him to build the great airship works at Friedrichshafen. From this time the Zeppelin was a national ship. Sheds to harbour airships were built at strategic points on the western and eastern fronts, and plans were set on foot to house naval Zeppelins at Heligoland, Emden, and Kiel. With characteristic German thoroughness a network of weather stations on German soil, and, it is believed, of secret weather reports from other countries, was provided for the guidance of airship pilots. All this was a monument to the perseverance, which might almost be called obstinacy, of the indomitable Count. He built enormous and costly airships, one after another; one after another they were wrecked or burnt, and then he built more. The German people watched him as King Robert the Bruce watched the spider, with a scepticism that was gradually turned into wonder, till, in the end, when disaster after disaster found him willing patiently to begin again, they resolved to make him their teacher and to take a lesson from him.

Count Zeppelin was about sixty years old when he began to make airships; he had been long studying the problem and preparing his plans; so that his many airships do not much differ among themselves in general design, and a description of the first gives a fair enough idea of its successors. It was a pencil-shaped rigid structure, about four hundred and twenty feet long, with a diameter almost exactly one-eleventh part of its length. The framework, built of aluminium, consisted of sixteen hoops, connected by longitudinal pieces, and kept rigid by diagonal wire stays. Before it was covered it resembled a vast bird-cage, and looked as frail as a cobweb, but was stronger and stiffer than it looked. It was divided by aluminium bulkheads into seventeen compartments; of these all but the two end compartments contained separate balloons or gas-bags. Two or three of these might collapse without completely destroying the buoyancy of the ship. The whole structure was covered with a fabric of rubberized cotton. A triangular latticed aluminium keel ran along below, to give strength to the ship, and to furnish a passage-way from end to end. At points about a third of the way from either end of the ship spaces in the keel were made for the two cars, in each of which was a sixteen horse-power Daimler motor driving two small high velocity airscrews, one on each side of the ship. The lateral steering was done by a large vertical rudder, placed aft. The longitudinal balance was controlled in several ways. In the first ship a heavy sliding weight in the keel was moved at will, fore and aft. This was supplemented or superseded in later ships by four sets of elevating planes, two sets in the fore-part and two sets aft. An advantage of the rigid ship is that she can tilt herself without danger from the pressure of the gas on the higher end. Moreover, she can be driven at a very high speed, and the gas-bags, being housed in the compartments and protected from the outer air, are less liable to sudden contraction and expansion caused by variations of temperature.

The great disadvantage of the rigid type has hitherto been that in bad weather the airship cannot land. A non-rigid airship in a nasty wind can land and deflate itself at once by ripping the panel in the envelope, at no greater price than the loss of its gas, and probably some damage to its car. To land in a rigid ship is at best a ticklish business; indeed, the rigid airship is in exactly the same case as a large sea-going vessel; its chief dangers are from the land, which it cannot touch with impunity. Its troubles have been greatly diminished, since the war, by the development of the mooring-mast, which does away with the necessity of housing the ship after every flight. The prevailing type of weather in this country is unsettled, and the changes in the force and direction of the wind are rapid and numerous. The landing and housing of an airship demands hundreds of men for its performance, and is not safely to be undertaken in a wind that blows more than eighteen miles an hour. A staff of from eight to ten men is sufficient to anchor a large airship to a mooring-mast, where it has been proved by experiment that she can safely ride out a wind that blows fifty miles an hour. At Pulham, our largest airship station, which was taken over from the Royal Air Force by the Controller-General of Civil Aviation in December 1920, a number of valuable experiments have since been carried out with an improvised mooring-mast, and it has been shown that with a properly designed and constructed mast, fitted with adequate receiving gear and hauling apparatus, there will be no difficulty in landing the largest rigid airships in a wind of from thirty-five to forty miles an hour. This spells an immense advance. Sheds will still be necessary for overhauls and repairs, as a dry dock is necessary for sea-going vessels. But an airship on service may be moored to the mast, as a sea-going vessel is moored to a quay, and can take on board or discharge cargo, passengers, and fuel.

The trial trip of the first Zeppelin was short, because of accidents to the steering-gear, but on the whole was not unsuccessful. The ship was perfectly stable, and in its voyage of three and a half miles proved that it could make headway against a wind of sixteen miles an hour. A second ascent, lasting for an hour and twenty minutes, was made on the 17th of October 1900. These trials were of value in discovering the faults of the ship; in the following year it was broken up, and Count Zeppelin went to work again. In his second ship of 1905 the power of each engine was increased to eighty-five horse-power, and other improvements were made. This ship suffered many minor mishaps. At last, in January 1906, it ascended over Lake Constance to a height of 1,800 feet; then the motors failed, the helm jammed; when the ship attempted to descend the ground was frozen and the anchors would not hold, it was driven against some trees, and a high wind arising in the night made it a total wreck.

The following list shows the number of Zeppelin airships built up to the outbreak of the war, and the fate of each of them:

The list is full of wreckage; what it does not show is the immense progress made in a few years. As early as 1907 Count Zeppelin made a voyage of eight hours in his third airship, covering 211 miles. In 1909 he voyaged, in stages, from Friedrichshafen to Berlin, landing at Tegel in the presence of the Emperor on the 29th of August, and returning safely to Friedrichshafen by the 2nd of September. But the growing efficiency of the Zeppelin and the growing confidence of the German public are best seen in the records of passenger-carrying flights. The Zeppelin Company, being founded and supported by national enterprise, did not sell any ships to foreign powers. For passenger-carrying purposes it supplied ships to the subsidiary company usually called the Delag (that is, the Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien-Gesellschaft), which had its headquarters at Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Delag acquired six Zeppelin airships, which, unlike the military and naval ships, bore names. A record of the voyages made by the Viktoria Luise, the Hansa, and the Sachsen will show how rapidly the German people were familiarized with the Zeppelin, and how safe air-travel became, when safety was essential, as it is in all passenger-carrying enterprises. The Viktoria Luise made her first trip on the 4th of March 1912, with twenty-three passengers on board, from Friedrichshafen to Frankfort-on-the-Main—a distance of about two hundred miles, which she covered in seven and a half hours. She made her hundredth trip on the 23rd of June 1912; her two-hundredth on the 21st of October in the same year; in the following year her three-hundredth trip was made on the 30th of June, and her four-hundredth on the 26th of November. In these four hundred trips she carried 8,551 persons and travelled 29,430 miles. Some of them were made over the sea; on the 27th of June, for instance, she left Hamburg in the morning, and reached Cuxhaven in about two hours. There she picked up with a Hamburg-America liner starting for New York, and accompanied the steamer for some distance; then she steered for Heligoland, and flying round the island very low was greeted with cheers by the inhabitants. Part of her return journey was made against a head-wind of sixteen miles an hour, and she reached Hamburg after a voyage of eight hours, during which she had covered a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles. The Hansa, beginning in July 1912, by the end of 1913 had made two hundred and seventy-five trips, carrying 5,697 persons and travelling 22,319 miles. The Sachsen, beginning in May 1913, before the end of the year had made two hundred and six trips, carrying 4,857 persons and travelling about 13,700 miles. A wrecked Zeppelin is such a picture of destruction, such a vast display of twisted metal and rags lying wreathed across a landscape, that those who see it are apt to get an exaggerated idea of the dangers of airship travel. With all his misfortunes, it was Count Zeppelin's luck for many years that no life was lost among those who travelled in his ships.

In May 1906, before Count Zeppelin's enterprise had received the stamp of Imperial and national approval, there was formed, under the inspiration of the German Emperor, a society for airship development. The success of the Lebaudy airship in France prompted the construction in Germany of two types of semi-rigid airship—the Parseval and the Gross. Only four of the latter type were built, and all four suffered mishap; the last and best of them, built in 1911, is said to have shown a better performance than the best contemporary Zeppelin. The Parseval was designed in 1906 by Major August von Parseval, of the Third Bavarian Infantry Regiment, who retired from the German army in 1907 in order to devote himself entirely to scientific work. He was already famous for the kite balloon, which he had invented in collaboration with Hauptmann Bartsch von Sigsfeld, who died in 1906. The Parseval kite balloon was adopted or imitated by all other nations during the war. The Parseval airship was as good an airship, of the non-rigid type, as had ever been built; it was supplanted, later on, by the rigid type, because an airship's lift depends on its size, and very large airships could not be built without a rigid framework. The society for airship development bought up Major von Parseval's plans, and began to construct Parseval airships. The statutes of the society forbade it to sell ships for profit, so an allied company was formed, the Luftfahrzeugbau-Gesellschaft, with works at Bitterfeld, and a subsidiary company, the L.V.G., or Luftverkehrs-Gesellschaft, to exploit Parseval airships for passenger-carrying, with its headquarters at Berlin and sheds at Johannisthal. Two passenger-carrying ships were built, the Stollwerk in 1910, and the Charlotte in 1912. The Parseval ships, perhaps because, being non-rigid, they were held to be inferior to the Zeppelins, were freely sold to foreign powers—one to the Austrian army in 1909, one to the Russian and one to the Turkish army in 1910, one to the Japanese army in 1912, another to the Russian and two to the Italian army in 1913; last of all, in the same year, one to the British Admiralty. Some eighteen Parseval airships were built and launched between 1909 and 1913. The third great airship-building company in Germany was the Schütte-Lanz Company, with its factory in Mannheim. It was named from Heinrich Lanz, the founder of machine works near Mannheim, who supplied the money, and Professor Schütte, of the Technical University, Danzig, who supplied the skill. Its rigid airships were made of wood; they were built from 1912 onwards expressly for the uses of the army and navy, and they played a great part in the war.

Those who were responsible for the development of the airship in Germany took the people into partnership, and devoted themselves largely to passenger-carrying. The airship became popular; and the officers and men who worked it were practised in navigation all the year round. The people, for their part, regarded the Zeppelin with the enthusiasm of patriotic fervour. France had taken the lead and had shown the way with the dirigible, but Germany, by recruiting the people for the cause, soon out-distanced her. The passenger ships served as training-ships for crews, and, if occasion should arise, were readily convertible to warlike purposes. Yet things changed and moved so fast, that before the war broke out, although the German people still believed that the Zeppelin gave them the sovereignty of the air, the German Government had been troubled by doubts, had changed its policy, and was striving hard to overtake the French in the construction and manning of army aeroplanes. The consequence was that the war found Germany better provided with aeroplanes for use on the western front than with airships for operations oversea. The German Emperor, speaking to a wounded soldier, is reported to have said that he never willed this war. One proof that this war was not the war he willed may be found in the state of preparation of the German air force. If war with England had been any part of the German plan, German airships would have been more numerous, and would have been ready for immediate action, as the armies that invaded Belgium were ready. The German theory was that England was not prepared for war, which, with certain brilliant and crucial exceptions, was true, and that therefore England would not go to war, which proved to be false. The French were supplying themselves with a great force of aeroplanes, and for all that could be known, air operations on the western front might determine the fortunes of the campaign. So the German Government turned its attention to machines that are heavier than air.

What had brought about this situation was the rapid and surprising development of the aeroplane by France. Here it is necessary to go back and take up the story again at the beginning of those few and headlong years.

French aviation derives directly from Lilienthal and collaterally from the Wrights. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; but the martyrs, for the most part, die in faith, without assurance of the harvest that is to come. When Lilienthal was killed he can hardly have known that his example and his careful records would so soon bear fruit in other countries. He was regarded by his fellow-countrymen as a whimsical acrobat, who took mad risks and paid the price. But as soon as he was dead, the story of what he had done got abroad, and began to raise up for him disciples and successors, who carried on his experiments. The chief of these in France was Captain F. Ferber, an officer of artillery and a student of science, who from 1896 onwards was a teacher in the military school at Fontainebleau. It was in 1898 that he first came across an account of Lilienthal; the reading of it impressed him as deeply as it impressed the Wrights. Here was a man, he thought, who had discovered the right way of learning to fly; if only the way were followed, success was sure. Like the Wrights, Ferber lays stress chiefly on practice. It was he, not Lilienthal, who was the author of the saying, 'To design a flying machine is nothing; to build one is nothing much; to try it in the air is everything'. In the book on aviation which he wrote shortly before his death in 1909 he expounds his creed and narrates his experiences. His mathematical knowledge, he says, served him well, for it saved him from being condemned as an empiric by those dogmatic men of science, very numerous in France (and, he might have added, in the universities of all countries), who believe that science points the way to practice, whereas the most that science can do, says Ferber, is to follow in the wake of practice, and interpret it. So he set himself to work on a plan as old as the world—first to create the facts, and then to expound them in speech and writing.

He began to build gliders, but had no success with them until he found out for himself what he had not gathered from his reading of Lilienthal—that an up-current of wind is necessary for a prolonged glide. His first successful flight was made with his fourth glider on the 7th of December 1901. He got into touch with Mr. Chanute, another of Lilienthal's scattered disciples, and through him was supplied with papers and photographs concerning the gliding experiments of the Wrights. These were a revelation to him, and he used them in making his fifth glider, which was a great improvement on its predecessors. He lectured at Lyons to the Aero Club of the Rhone on the progress of aviation by means of gliding, and published his lecture in the Revue d'Artillerie of March 1904. About this time the air was full of rumours of flight. M. Ernest Archdeacon, of Paris, took up the subject with ardour, wrote many articles on it, and encouraged others to work at it. A young man, called Gabriel Voisin, who heard Captain Ferber lecture at Lyons, came on to the platform after the lecture and declared that he wished to devote his life to the cause of aviation. The next morning he started for Paris, and with the help of M. Archdeacon founded the earliest aeroplane factory in France—the firm of the brothers Voisin, which became the mainstay of early French aviation.

Ferber himself was carrying out a series of experiments at Nice with an aeroplane which he fitted with a six horse-power engine and suspended from a tall mast, when he was invited by Colonel Renard to help with the work of the official research laboratory at Chalais Meudon. He joined the staff, but found that the officials of a Government organization are as ill qualified as the theorists of a university for progress in practical invention. The lower members of the hierarchy are men under orders, who do what they are told to do; the higher members are hampered by having to work through subordinates, who often do not understand their aims and take no particular interest in the work in hand. Nevertheless, he improved his aeroplane, stabilizing it by means of a long tail, and fitting it with wheels for landing, in place of the skids which were used by the Wrights. Then, like those who had gone before him, he was held up by the question of the engine. Engineers are a conservative race of men, and perhaps the perfected aeroplane would still be waiting for a suitable engine if they had not been prompted to innovation by the fashion of motor-racing. There are strange links in the chain of cause and effect; the pneumatic tyre made the motor-bicycle possible; for motor-bicycle races a light engine was devised which later on was adapted to the needs of the aeroplane. Ferber made acquaintance with M. Levavasseur, who had invented an engine of eighty horse-power weighing less than five pounds per horse-power, and had won many races with it. This engine was named the Antoinette in honour of the daughter of M. Gastambide, a capitalist, who had supplied the inventor with funds. The most famous of early French aviators, Santos Dumont, Farman, Blériot, Delagrange, and others, owed much to this engine. Ferber might have had it before any of them, for M. Levavasseur offered to build it for him—twenty-four horse-power with a weight of about a hundred and twelve pounds—but public moneys could not be advanced for an engine that did not exist, so the other pioneers, who had followed Ferber in gliding experiments, preceded him in flying. In 1906 Ferber obtained Government permission to join the Antoinette firm for a period, and by 1908 he was flying in an aeroplane of his own design. He was killed in September 1909, on the aerodrome of Beuvrequen, near Boulogne, by capsizing on rough ground in the act of alighting. His own estimate of his work was modest; he had acted, he said, as a ferment and a popularizer, and had helped to put France on the right track; but it was his pride that he belonged to the great school, the school of Lilienthal, Pilcher, Chanute, and the Wrights, who went to work by a progressive method of practical experiment, who combined daring with patience, and found their way into the air.

Ferber, after his visit to America, had failed to induce the French authorities to purchase the Wright aeroplane, which he had never seen, but which, from descriptions and photographs, he was able to reconstruct, much as a geologist reconstructs an animal from fossil bones. The refusal of the French Government to purchase and the withdrawal of the Wrights from their public experiments gave France a period of respite for two years, during which time French aviation rapidly developed on lines of its own. At the back of this movement was M. Archdeacon, who as early as 1903 had established a fund and had offered a cup as a prize for the first officially recorded flight of more than twenty-five metres. The Voisin brothers, Gabriel and Charles, having set up their factory at Billancourt-sur-Seine, built machines for him, box-kites and aeroplanes. After a time the Voisin brothers went into business on their own account, and employed M. Colliex as their engineer. Their earliest customers, Léon Delagrange, who had been trained as a sculptor, and Henri Farman, who had combined the professions of cyclist, painter, and motor-racer, were distinguished early French flyers. That both these men had been artists seems to bear out the favourite contention of Wilbur Wright and of Captain Ferber. To be an artist a man must create or initiate; the accumulation of knowledge will do little for him. A politician or a lawyer can reach to high distinction in his profession without the power of initiating anything. It is enough for him to handle other men's ideas, to combine them and balance them, to study and conciliate other men, and to suggest a compromise. But the artist, like the scientific discoverer, must act on his own ideas, and do battle, single-handed, with the nature of things.

The earliest experiments of M. Archdeacon and the Voisins were made with man-carrying Hargrave box-kites, or with gliders made on the same principle, which were towed in the air behind a fast motor-boat travelling down the Seine. The next step was to fit an aeroplane with an engine and wheels so that it might attempt to rise from the ground. The Voisins collaborated with most of the early French aviators, with Louis Blériot and Robert Esnault-Pelterie, as well as with Farman and Delagrange. At one time they were closely associated with Blériot, at another time with Farman. Their first machines depended for lateral stability on the vertical panels of the box-kite structure. This was insufficient, and the French designers had to grapple, one by one, with all the difficulties that had been met and conquered by the Wrights. They had this advantage, that the design of the Wrights' machine was, though not exactly, yet in its main features known to them. All the early aeroplanes which mounted their elevators in front of the machine may, without much doubt, be affiliated to the Wrights. The elevator is not best placed in front; its action in that position is too quick and violent, but it is under the eye of the operator, and with cool nerves he can learn to work it.

While the group of enthusiasts who gathered round the Voisins were designing and experimenting, Santos Dumont, having turned his attention to machines heavier than air, suddenly appeared among them, made the first successful flight over French soil, and carried off the Archdeacon prize. His machine was a biplane, built on the box-kite principle, with three vertical panels on each side between the planes, and a box-kite elevator projecting far in front. The wings were fixed at a considerable dihedral angle, and the engine was a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette. In his first trial, which took place at Bagatelle on the 23rd of July 1906, Santos Dumont attached a spindle-shaped balloon to the upper surface of the machine, to help it into the air. The combination of the two modes he soon found to be impossible; with the balloon attached to it the machine could not develop speed enough to support itself in the air. His next step was to practise the machine by running it down an inclined cable; then he discarded as much weight as he could, doubled the horse-power of the motor, and began to taxi freely along the ground. On a day in September the machine raised itself for a very short space into the air. The first officially witnessed flight, of about eighty yards, took place on the 23rd of October 1906, and gained the Archdeacon Cup. About a month later he made a flight of more than a furlong. Thereafter he established himself at Saint-Cyr and developed a machine of the monoplane type, with a long tail. But he was too far from the resources of Paris, and when, on the 13th of January 1908, Henri Farman overtook his records and won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a flight of one kilometre in a closed circuit, Santos Dumont lost his leading position in the world of aviation, after a brief and meteoric career which has stamped his name on history.

During these early years the Voisin brothers had the foresight and wisdom to put themselves wholly at the service of others. The promise of flight had taken hold of many minds in France and there was no lack of inventors and would-be inventors who wished to test their own ideas and to have machines built to their own designs. If the Voisins had refused to gratify them, these clients would have disappeared; and the work done for them, though much of it was done in the old blind alleys of horizontal elevating airscrews and wing-flapping machines, yet had this advantage, that it kept the workshop active and made it self-supporting. Inventors are a difficult and jealous people; they received every indulgence from the Voisins. The machines built for them were named after them, though most of the skill and experience that went to the making came from the factory. In the same way M. Archdeacon gave up all practical experiment after 1905 and was content to play the part of the good genius of aviation, presiding at the Aero Club, offering prizes for new achievements, bringing inventors together and encouraging the exchange of ideas. The rapidity of French progress was not a little due to this self-effacing and social instinct, so characteristic of the French spirit, which kept the patron and the engineers in the background, and brought order and progress out of the chaos of personal rivalry.

Progress was slow at first. The experiments made in 1906 by Blériot in conjunction with the Voisins were made, for safety, on the water of the Lake of Enghien, but it proved impossible to get up sufficient speed on the water to rise into the air. In 1907 a greater success attended the experiments made at Vincennes, at Bagatelle, and at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where Henri Farman had obtained permission to use the army manœuvre ground and had built himself a hangar, or shed, for his aeroplane. On the 30th of March, at Bagatelle, the Delagrange aeroplane made a flight of sixty metres. A few months later, Farman, on a similar machine fitted with landing-wheels which worked on pivots, like castors, began to make short flights. On the 30th of September he flew for eighty metres. Seeing is believing, but many of those who saw Farman fly did not believe. The machine, they said, was only hopping into the air with the speed it had gathered on the ground; it would never fly. When, on the 26th of October, Farman made a flight of more than seven hundred metres the pessimists found another objection. The machine, they said, would never be able to turn; it could only continue in a straight line. They had hit on a real difficulty, but the Voisins and Farman himself, who, starting without any knowledge of aeroplanes or flying, had soon developed practical ideas of his own, were hard at work to meet it. The Wrights had simplified the handling of a machine by combining the control of the vertical rudder with the control of the wing-warping. In the early Voisin machines there was no wing-warping, and the pilots had to attempt to balance and turn the machine without it; but a rod with a wheel attached to it was used to control both the elevating plane in front and the vertical rudder behind. By turning the wheel the rudder was operated, by moving the rod the elevator was raised or lowered. It was on a machine of this kind that Farman began to practise gradual turning movements. The lateral inclination of the machine was feared and, as much as possible, avoided in these first experiments, though it is not only harmless in turning movements, but is necessary for their complete success, just as the banking of a motor race-track is necessary to keep the machines on the course. Farman made rapid progress; and, as has been said, by the beginning of 1908 he gained the two thousand pound Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a closed circuit of one kilometre in length. The wonderful skill of this achievement will be fully appreciated only by the best modern pilots, who would not like to be asked to repeat it on a machine unprovided with ailerons (that is to say, hinged flaps on the trailing edge of the planes), and controlled only by the elevator and the rudder. There is nothing very extravagant in dating the conquest of the air, as some French writers have dated it, from the circular flights of Farman. It is true that the Wrights had attained a much higher skill in manœuvring, but they had retired, like Achilles, to their tent, whereas Farman's flight showed the way to many others. In the spring of the same year Delagrange began to execute turning flights; on the 6th of July Farman gained the prize offered by M. Armengaud, the president of the society of aerial navigation, for a flight of a quarter of an hour's duration, and after the arrival of Wilbur Wright at Le Mans progress became so rapid that records were broken week by week and almost day by day. In January 1909 the Aero Club of France issued their first list of pilots' certificates. Eight names, all famous, made up the list—Léon Delagrange, Alberto Santos Dumont, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Henri Farman, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright, Captain Ferdinand Ferber, Louis Blériot. To make this a list of the chief French pioneers, the names of the Wrights would have to be omitted, and the names of some who were not famous pilots but who did much for flying, especially the names of M. Ernest Archdeacon and Gabriel Voisin, would have to be included.

These men, and those who worked for them, gave to France her own school of aviation. Louis Blériot and Robert Esnault-Pelterie broke away from what, since the days of Francis Wenham, had been accepted as the orthodox doctrine of the biplane, and, taking the bird for master, devised swift, light, and easily handled monoplanes. The Blériot monoplane, which first flew the Channel; the R.E.P. (or Robert Esnault-Pelterie) monoplane; the Antoinette monoplane, on which Hubert Latham performed his exploits; the small and swift Demoiselle monoplane, designed and flown by Santos Dumont; and the Tellier monoplane, which for a time held the record for cross-country flight—all these made history by their performances in the crowded years from 1908 to 1910. The monoplane is, without any doubt, the prettiest of machines in the air. When Captain Ferber gave this reason to Mr. Chanute for preferring it to the biplane, Mr. Chanute, he says, laughed a good deal at an argument so characteristically French. But there is sense and weight in the argument. No flying animal is half so ugly as the early Wright biplane. In the world of natural fliers beauty and efficiency are one. Purity of line and economy of parts are beautiful and efficient. A good illustration of this may be found in the question of the airscrew. The early French biplanes of the Voisin and Farman type were what would now be called 'pusher' machines; their airscrews operated behind the main planes, and their tails were supported by an open structure of wood or metal which left room for the play of the screw. In this ugly arrangement the loss of efficiency is easy to see. The screw works in a disturbed medium, and the complicated metal-work presents a large resistance to the passage of the machine through the air. The monoplane, from the first, was a 'tractor' machine; its airscrew was in front of the planes, and its body, or fuselage, was covered in and streamlined, so as to offer the least possible resistance to the air. A later difficulty caused by the forward position of the airscrew had nothing to do with flying. When the war came, and machine-guns were mounted on aeroplanes, a clear field was needed for forward firing. This difficulty was ultimately met by the invention of a synchronizing gear, which timed the bullets between the strokes of the airscrew-blades. In all but a few types of machine the airscrew is now retained in the forward position. The debate between monoplane and biplane is not yet concluded; the biplane holds its own because with the same area of supporting surface it is much stronger and more compact than the monoplane.

Instead of wing-warping, which puts a strain on the supporting surfaces and is liable to distort them, the French (to whom Blériot is believed to have shown the way) introduced ailerons, that is, small subsidiary hinged planes attached to the extremities of the wings. By controlling these, one up and the other down, in conjunction with the rudder, the pilot can preserve his lateral balance, and turn the machine to right or left. Later on, these ailerons, when they were borrowed by the Voisin and Farman biplanes, were not fitted to the extremities of the planes, but became hinged flaps forming the extreme section of the trailing edge; and this position they have kept in all modern aeroplanes. An even greater advance was made by the French school in its device for the control of the machine. The machine which Wilbur Wright flew in France was controlled by two upright levers, grasped by the pilot, one in either hand. The left-hand lever moved only backwards and forwards; it controlled the elevator and directed the machine upwards or downwards. The right-hand lever controlled the rudder and the warping of the wings. By moving it backwards or forwards the pilot turned the machine to right or left; by moving it sideways he warped the wings. There is nothing instinctive or natural in these correspondences; the backward and forward movement which in one lever spells up and down in the other spells right and left. It is a testimony to the extraordinary cool-headed skill of the Wrights, and to their endless practice and perseverance, that they were able to fly such a machine in safety, and to outfly their rivals. The French school centralized the control in a single lever with a universal joint attachment at the lower end. The movements of this lever in any direction produced the effects that would instinctively be expected; a backward or forward movement turned the machine upwards or downwards, a sideways movement raised one wing or the other so as to bank the machine or to bring it to a level position again. The vertical rudder was controlled either by a wheel attached to this central lever, or by the pressure of the pilot's feet on a horizontal bar. The French moreover improved the means of taking off and alighting. The early Wright machines were launched on rails, and alighted on skids attached to the machine like the skids of a sledge. To rise into the air again after a forced landing was impossible without special apparatus. By means of wheels elastically fixed to an undercarriage the French inventors made the aeroplane available for cross-country journeys. But the greatest difference between the two types of aeroplane, the American and the French, was their difference in stability. The Wright machine demanded everything of the pilot; it could not fly itself. If the pilot relaxed his attention for a moment, or took his hands from the levers, a crash was the certain result. The machine was a bird which flew with extended bill and without a tail; whereas the French machines had a horizontal tail-plane, which, being held rigidly at a distance from the main planes, gave to the machine a far greater measure of longitudinal stability.

All these advantages told in favour of French aviation, and secured for it progress and achievement.

A few dates and facts may serve to show its rapid progress at a time when it was making history week by week. On the 30th of September 1908 Henri Farman made the first cross-country flight, from Châlons to Rheims, a distance of twenty-seven kilometres, which he covered in twenty minutes. Three days later, at Châlons, he remained in the air for just under three-quarters of an hour, covering twenty-five miles, that is, about forty times the distance that had won him the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize in January. Between April and September of the same year Léon Delagrange had four times in succession raised the world's official records (which, of course, took no note of the Wrights) for duration of flight. On the 31st of October Louis Blériot made the first cross-country circuit flight, from Toury to Artenay and back, a distance of about seventeen miles, in the course of which flight he twice landed and rose again into the air. All these and many similar achievements were dwarfed by Wilbur Wright's performance at the Hunaudières racecourse near Le Mans. His first flight, on Saturday the 8th of August, lasted one minute and forty-seven seconds. Three days later, though he flew for only four minutes, the figures of eight and other manœuvres which he executed in the air caused M. Delagrange, who witnessed them, to remark, 'Eh bien. Nous n'existons pas. Nous sommes battus.' On the last day of the year he flew for two hours and twenty minutes, covering seventy-seven miles. In the intervening time he had beaten the French records for duration, distance, and height. Cross-country work he did not attempt; his machine at that time was ill-fitted for it. During the winter he went to Pau to instruct his first three pupils—the Count de Lambert and MM. Paul Tissandier and Alfred Leblanc.

At the beginning of the year 1909 the mystery and craft of flying was still known only to the few. In the two years that followed it was divulged to the many, and became a public spectacle. The age of the designers was followed by the age of the performers. Flying machines and men who could fly them rapidly increased in number. A man working in a laboratory on difficult and uncertain experiments cannot engage or retain the attention of the public; a flying man, who circles over a city or flies across great tracts of populated country, is visible to all, and, when he is first seen, excites a frenzy of popular enthusiasm. These years were the years of competition and adventure, of races, and of record-breaking in distance, speed, duration, and height. Flying was the newest sport; and the aviator, whose courage, coolness, and skill carried him through great dangers, was the hero of the day. The press, with its ready instinct for profitable publicity, offered magnificent encouragement to the new art. Large money prizes were won by gallant deeds that have made history. The Daily Mail, of London, offered a prize of a thousand pounds for the first flight across the English Channel. Hubert Latham, in his Antoinette monoplane, attempted this flight on the 19th of July from the neighbourhood of Calais, but the failure of his sparking plugs brought him down on to the water about six miles from the French coast, where he was picked up by his accompanying destroyer. He was preparing another attempt when Louis Blériot, suddenly arriving at Calais, anticipated him. At half-past four on the morning of Sunday, the 25th of July, Blériot rose into the air on his monoplane, furnished with an Anzani engine of twenty-five horse-power, and headed for Dover. He flew without map or compass, and soon out-distanced the French destroyer which had been appointed to escort him. For ten minutes he lost sight of all land, but he corrected his course by observing the steamers below him, and landed in the Northfall meadow behind Dover Castle after a flight of forty minutes. Two other newspaper prizes, one of ten thousand pounds offered by the London Daily Mail for a flight from London to Manchester, in three stages, the other of ten thousand dollars offered by the New York World for a flight from Albany to New York, were won in 1910. The first of these flights was attempted on the 24th of April by an Englishman, Claude Grahame-White, who flew a Farman biplane, but was compelled by engine trouble to descend near Lichfield, where his machine was damaged by wind in the night. Three days later Louis Paulhan, also mounted on a Farman biplane, covered the whole distance to Manchester in something over four hours, with only one landing. Paulhan had first learned to fly in July 1909; Grahame-White had obtained his pilot's certificate from the French Aero Club as late as December 1909. The flight of a hundred and twenty miles from Albany to New York, down the Hudson river, was achieved on the 29th of May in two hours and thirty-two minutes by Glenn H. Curtiss, one of the most distinguished of American pioneers. Later on in 1910 a prize of a hundred thousand francs was offered by the Paris newspaper, the Matin, for what was called the Circuit de l'Est, a voyage from Paris and back by way of Troyes, Nancy, Mézières, Douai, and Amiens, a distance of four hundred and eighty-eight miles, to be completed in six stages, on alternate days, from the 7th of August to the 17th of August. This competition was won by Wilbur Wright's pupil, Alfred Leblanc, on a Blériot monoplane. The eastern part of this circuit, a territory not much larger than Yorkshire, has since been made famous and sacred by the battles of the Marne and Verdun and a hundred other places.

Of more value for the furtherance of the art than any of these individual exploits were the series of meetings which brought aviators together in friendly rivalry, to see and to be seen. The most notable of these meetings was also the first, the Champagne Week of Rheims, which was organized by the Marquis de Polignac, and was held, during the last week of August 1909, on the Bétheny Plain, near Rheims. The number of spectators day by day was from forty to fifty thousand, and the gate-money taken during the week was about £35,000. Henri Farman, Hubert Latham, and Glenn Curtiss earned among them almost £6,000 in prizes. The Grand Prix de la Champagne for the flight of longest duration was won by Farman, who remained in the air, plodding steadily round the course, for more than three hours. He also won the passenger-carrying prize in a flight which carried two passengers round the ten-kilometre course in about ten minutes and a half. Latham gained the altitude prize by flying to a height of more than five hundred feet. The Gordon Bennett Cup, for the best speed over two rounds of the course, was won by Curtiss in fifteen minutes fifty and three-fifths seconds, with Blériot only some five seconds behind him. There were many other prizes distributed among the more fortunate of the competitors. Perhaps the greatest gain of the meeting was that it did away with the notion that the aeroplane is a fair-weather toy. There was rain and storm, and Paulhan flew in a wind of twenty-five miles an hour. The meeting witnessed the first public success of the most famous (and most revolutionary) of aeroplane engines—the rotary Gnome engine, in which the cylinders rotate bodily round a fixed crank-shaft. This engine was built by the brothers Louis and Laurent Séguin, who had a small motor factory in Paris. Most of the regular aviators looked askance at it, but Séguin offered to instal it in a Voisin biplane of the box-kite pattern which had just been won as a prize by Louis Paulhan. In the result the old box-kite flew as never box-kite flew before, and produced a great impression at the Rheims meeting. The Gnome engine was also mounted by Henri Farman on one of the machines that he flew at Rheims, and by the solitary English competitor, Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who, according to Mr. Holt Thomas, was the first to use this engine in the air.

Other meetings followed in rapid succession, gaining recruits for the new art and converting the nations to a belief in it. Two of these, held simultaneously at Blackpool and Doncaster, soon after the Rheims meeting, were spoilt by bad weather and high winds, but at Blackpool Hubert Latham gave a marvellous display on his Antoinette machine by flying in a wind of about forty miles an hour, when no one else ventured the attempt. During 1910 aviation weeks were held in February at Heliopolis, Egypt, and in April at Nice. In October of the same year an International Aviation Tournament was held in America at Belmont Park, Long Island, where the highest honour, the prize for the Gordon Bennett speed contest, was won by Claude Grahame-White on a Blériot machine. In Great Britain many meetings were held during the summer of 1910: one at Wolverhampton; another at Bournemouth, where the Hon. C. S. Rolls, who a month before had flown across the Channel and back without alighting, was killed; another at Lanark; and yet another at Blackpool, where George Chavez flew to a height of 5,887 feet. In the following month Chavez flew across the Alps, over the Simplon Pass, into Italy, but was fatally injured in alighting at Domodossola. These are specimen deeds only, taken from a story of adventure and progress, danger and disaster, which, if it were fully told, would fill volumes. Records, as they are called, were made and broken so fast that the heroic achievement of the spring became the daily average performance of the ensuing autumn. The movement was fairly under way, and nothing could stop it.

CHAPTER III

FLIGHT IN ENGLAND

In all these doings England bore but a small part. English aviators were few; and those who distinguished themselves in public competition had learned their flying in France. To speak of England's share in these amazing years of progress is to tell the history of a backward parish, and to describe its small contribution to a great world-wide movement. Yet the story, for that very reason, has an extraordinary interest. England never has been cosmopolitan. All her beginnings, even where she has led the way and set the fashion to the world, were parochial. If a change is in question, England makes trial of it, late and reluctantly, on a small scale, in her own garden. All the noisy exhortations of a thousand newspapers cannot touch her apprehension or rouse her to excitement. Next year's fashions do not much preoccupy her mind; she knows that they will come to her, in due time, from France, to be taken or rejected. When a change is something more than a fashion, and vital conditions begin to be affected, her lethargy is broken in a moment and she is awake and alert. So it was with the fashion of air-travel. The first aviator's certificate granted by a British authority was issued by the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom to Mr. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon in March 1910, when already the exploits of flying men were the theme of all the world. By the 1st of November in the same year the Royal Aero Club had issued twenty-two certificates; that is to say, twenty-two pilots, some of them self-taught, and some trained in France, were licensed by the sole British authority as competent to handle a machine in the air. Eight years later, in November 1918, when the armistice put an end to the active operations of the war, the Royal Air Force was the largest and strongest of the air forces of the world. We were late in beginning, but once we had begun we were not slow. We were rich in engineering skill and in material for the struggle. Best of all, we had a body of youth fitted by temperament for the work of the air, and educated, as if by design, to take risks with a light heart—the boys of the Public Schools of England. As soon as the opportunity came they offered themselves in thousands for a work which can never be done well when it is done without zest, and which calls for some of the highest qualities of character—fearlessness, self-dependence, and swift decision. The Germans, before the war, used to speak with some contempt, perhaps with more than they felt, of the English love of sport, which they liked to think was frivolous and unworthy of a serious nation. Their forethought and organization, which was intensely, almost maniacally, serious, was defeated by what they despised; and the love of sport, or, to give it its noblest name, the chivalry, of their enemies, which they treated as a foolish relic of romance, proved itself to be the most practical thing in the world.

The English pioneers of flight, who had learned their flying abroad, brought back their knowledge, and did what they could to arouse their country to effort. What their success would have been if the peace of Europe had continued unbroken and unthreatened it is impossible to say, but progress would probably have been slow—an affair of sporadic attempts and scattered adventures. The two strongest motives, patriotic devotion and commercial gain, would have been lacking. The English have never been good at preparing for a merely possible war; they are apt, indeed, to regard such preparation as ill-omened and impious. This strenuous and self-dependent breed of men, being conscious that they do not desire war, and believing that he is thrice armed who has his quarrel just, have always been content, in the face of many warnings, to repose their main confidence in the virtue of their cause and the strength of their character. The risks that they run through this confidence have often been pointed out, but it should also be remembered that by their reluctance to act on theory they have often been saved from the elaborate futility and expense of acting on a false theory. The disaster which has befallen Germany cannot but strengthen them in their belief that it is dangerous to devote care and thought to preparing for all imaginable conflicts. So also in the activities of civil life, before they undertake a large outlay they ask to be assured of solid gains. They leave it to the adventurers, who have never failed them, to blaze the track for commerce. Where a new science is concerned, this mode of progress is slow. Private enterprise and personal rivalry too often bring with them the tactics of secrecy. Science is not an individual possession, and the man who tries to appropriate it to himself often sterilizes his work and forfeits his place in the history of progress. In his anxiety to assert his own claims he forgets that his work has been made possible only by what has come to him as a free gift from others, that his own contribution to human knowledge is a slight thing, that in protecting himself against imitators he is also depriving himself of helpers and pupils, and is bartering the dignity of science for the rewards of a patentee. The Wrights in America and Captain Ferber in France left behind them a full and frank record of all their doings, thereby conferring an enormous benefit on others, and securing for themselves an unassailable position in the history of flight. Much may be said in favour of the traditional English doctrine of free competition. Where knowledge is readily accessible, and the field is open to all, free competition stimulates and rewards industry and skill. On the other hand, where a new science is struggling into being, commercial competition often retards it by a network of restrictions and concealments, and converts knowledge, which ought to be a public trust, to the darker purposes of private gain. The coming of the war burst these bonds, and immensely quickened the progress of the science of flight. Inventors, who are usually poor men, so soon as their country called on them, put themselves at her disposal, and found their chief reward in helping to save her at her need.

The course of events during the early years of the twentieth century left England no time for developing the art of flight in her own tentative and permissive fashion. The coming of the new art coincided with the rapid gathering of the storm-cloud that was to burst in the Great War. In 1903 the Wrights first flew in a power-driven machine. In 1909 the achievements of the Rheims meeting marked the end of the infancy of the art. In 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was formed. During this same period of ten years armaments were being piled up by all the greater European countries, international tension was increasing, and ominous events, small in themselves, but impressive by the gravity and solemnity with which they were regarded by the chancelleries of Europe, recurred in a series of growing intensity and significance. Germany was not threatened in any part of the world, but Germany was known to believe in war, and many responsible observers were uneasily and reluctantly forced to the conviction that Germany intended war, and would make war for unlimited purposes on any small occasion created or chosen by herself. The Royal Flying Corps was formed not for far-sighted ulterior ends, as an instrument of progress and research, but for a very present need, as a weapon to be placed in the hands of the country on the day when battle should be joined. Two years before the corps was formed the aeronautical force at the disposal of the nation was centred in the balloon factory and balloon school at Aldershot. The naval and military officers who had interested themselves in aeronautics were few, but they were competent and enthusiastic; they believed in the air, and were quick to recognize inventions of promise. The consequence of this was that the aeroplane and the airship in England, from the very first, grew up more or less tended by the Government, and received as much encouragement as could possibly be given under the severe restrictions of parliamentary finance. Almost every airship that was built was built by the Government. Almost every pioneer of flight in England sooner or later came into touch with the Government, and did work for the nation. As early as 1904 Mr. S. F. Cody, who had been connected in early life with the theatrical profession in America, and had made many experiments in aeronautics, was supplying kites to the balloon factory. In 1906 he was appointed chief instructor in kiting, and in 1908 he built for himself an aeroplane, similar in type to the machine of Mr. Glenn H. Curtiss, and made many experimental flights over Laffan's Plain. He was a picturesque and hardy individualist of the old school; though he had had no technical training as an engineer, his wide practical knowledge, his courage, and his exuberant vitality made him a man of mark, and engaged the admiration of the public. Most of his work was official; he was killed by the breaking of his machine in the air while flying over Laffan's Plain, in August 1913. Another early inventor, Lieutenant J. W. Dunne, joined the balloon factory in 1906, and at once began to carry out systematic trials with gliders. Encouraged by Colonel J. E. Capper, who was in charge of the factory, and assisted by Sir Hiram Maxim, he devised a biplane glider with a box-kite tail, which when it was suspended from a kind of revolving gallows at the Crystal Palace attained a speed in the air of seventy miles an hour and rose to a height of seventy feet. Later on the experiments were transferred to Blair Atholl in Perthshire, where the power-driven Dunne aeroplane was produced and flown. It had backward sloping wings which performed the function of a stabilizing tail. Most aeroplanes are modelled more or less closely on flying animals; the Dunne aeroplane took hints from the zannonia leaf, which, being weighted in front by the seed-pod, and curved back on either side, becomes, as the tips of the leaf wither and curl, a perfectly stable aerofoil for conveying the seed to a distance. The gliding powers of the zannonia leaf were first noticed by Ahlborn of Berlin, and several foreign aeroplanes were modelled on it. The stability of the Dunne machine was surprising, and it performed many good flights before the war, but it sacrificed speed and lifting power to stability, so that its history in the war is a blank. Stability spells safety, and safety is not the first condition insisted on by war. An obstinately stable machine is good for trudging along in the air, but it is not easy to manœuvre in face of the enemy. The Dunne machine adjusted itself more readily to the gusts and currents of the air than to the demands of the pilot. Skilled war-pilots prefer to handle a machine which is as quick as a squirrel and responds at once to the pressure of a finger on the control. If the aeroplane had been developed wholly in peace, some of the stable machines of the early inventors would have come into their own, and would have had a numerous following.

The first flight ever made over English soil was made by Mr. A. V. Roe, in a machine of his own construction. Mr. Roe began life as an apprentice at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Locomotive Works, and very early distinguished himself in cycle racing. He then qualified as a fitter at Portsmouth Dockyard, studied naval engineering at King's College, London, and spent three years, from 1899 to 1902, in the merchant service as a marine engineer. The seagulls and the albatross of the southern seas set him thinking, and he began to make model gliders. Returned home again, he spent some time as a draughtsman in the motor industry. The news of the Wrights' achievements found in him a ready believer, and he wrote to The Times to combat the prevailing scepticism. His letter was printed, with a foot-note by the engineering editor to the effect that all attempts at artificial flight on such a basis as Mr. Roe described were not only dangerous to human life, but were foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint. From 1906 onwards Mr. Roe devoted all his time and all his savings to aviation. In 1907 he made a full-size flying machine and took it to the Brooklands motor track. He had no sufficient engine power, and while he was waiting many months for the arrival of a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette engine from France he induced sympathetic motorists to give him experimental towing flights. It was difficult, he says, to induce the motorists to let go at once when the machine began to swerve in the air; they often held on with inconvenient fidelity, and many of the experiments ended in a dive and a crash. In the spring of 1908 his Antoinette engine arrived, and on the 8th of June he made the first flight ever made in England, covering some sixty yards at a height of two feet from the ground. Then he received notice to quit Brooklands. He had never been much favoured by the management, who perhaps thought that the wreckage of aeroplanes would not add to the popularity of a motor-racing track, and his experiments had been made under very difficult conditions, for he was not allowed to sleep in the shed where his machine was housed, nor to practise with the machine during the hours when the track was in use. He applied to the War Office for leave to erect his shed by the side of Mr. Cody's at Laffan's Plain, but was refused. He then consulted a map of London, and pitched upon Lea Marshes, where there were some large fields open to the public, and some railway arches, a couple of which he rented and boarded up. In the stable of a house at Putney belonging to one of his brothers he had already built a tractor triplane which he now removed to Lea Marshes. Under the stress of his misfortunes he had parted with his Antoinette engine, so he had nothing better for his triplane than a nine horse-power J.A.P. motor-cycle engine designed by John Alfred Prestwich. With this, the lowest-powered engine that has ever flown in England, he made, in June 1909, the first successful flight on an all-British aeroplane. Thereafter he made many flights; the earliest of these were short and low, earning him the name of 'Roe the Hopper', but before long he was making flights of three hundred yards in length at a height of from six to ten feet. One day in the summer of 1909 a young woman who had come down to commit suicide in the river Lea saw his machine skimming about and went home; then she wrote to Mr. Roe urging him to let her take his place as pilot and so save his life at the expense of hers. Mr. Roe very tactfully replied that he would gladly let her fly the machine when he had perfected it, thus offering her something to look forward to. But his chief troubles were with the local authorities, who employed a bailiff to watch him and prevent his flying. At Brooklands Mr. Roe had become accustomed to early rising, and it was some time before the bailiff caught him in the act of preparing to fly, but he was caught at last, and police-court proceedings were instituted. Just at that time Blériot flew the Channel, and the case was dropped, so that the authorities were not called upon to decide whether flying is legal or illegal. As for Mr. Roe, he moved on to Wembley Park, where he flew with steadily increasing success. In 1910 he made an aviation partnership with his brother, who had prospered as a manufacturer of webbing in Manchester. In the same year he had his revenge on Brooklands, for the new manager, Major Lindsay Lloyd, saw the possibilities of aviation, and converted the centre of the track into an aerodrome. There the Roes were welcomed, and there they produced and flew their thirty-five horse-power tractor triplane. After a visit to America they settled down to their work and had their revenge on the War Office by producing the famous Avro machine, so named after its inventor. In its original form it was a tractor biplane with a Gnome engine of fifty horse-power, shortly afterwards increased to eighty horse-power. It became, and has remained, the standard training machine for the Royal Air Force. It is sufficiently stable, and yet sensitive, and can fly safely at high or low speeds. It set the fashion to the world in tractor biplanes. Mr. Roe had never believed in the front elevators of the early American and French aeroplanes, with the pilot sitting on the front edge of the plane, exposed to the air; nor in the tail held out by booms, as it is in the pusher machines, with the airscrews revolving between the body of the machine and the tail. For his perfected machine of 1913 he had the advice of experts and mathematicians, but the general design of the machine was his own, worked out by pure air-sense, or, in his own words, by 'eye and experience'. Early in 1914 the German Government bought an Avro seaplane, which soon after was the first heavier-than-air machine to make the voyage from the mainland to Heligoland. No machine designed in the early days of flying can compare with the Avro. As it was in 1913, so, but for improvements in detail not easy to detect, it remained throughout the war. Its achievements in the field belong to the beginnings of the war; it raided the airship sheds at Friedrichshafen, and, handled by Commander A. W. Bigsworth, it was the first of our machines to attack and damage a Zeppelin in the air. For fighting purposes it has had to give way to newer types, but as a training machine it has never been superseded, and even those aeroplanes which surpass it in fighting quality are most of them its own children.

The early history of Mr. A. V. Roe has been here narrated, not to praise him, though he deserves praise, nor to blame the Government, though it is always easy to blame the Government, but to show how things are done in England. His career, though distinguished, is typical; many other pioneers and inventors, whose story will never be written, faced difficulties as he did, and helped to lay the foundations of their country's excellence in the newly-discovered art. It has become almost usual, among those who do nothing but write, to insist that the duty of officials, and other persons publicly appointed, is to save Englishmen the trouble of thinking and acting for themselves. If the nation were converted to this belief, the greatness of England would be nearing its term. But the nation stands in the old ways, and clings to the old adventurous instincts. As it took to the sea in the sixteenth century to defeat the Spanish tyranny, so it took to the air in the twentieth century to defeat the insolence of the Germans. The late Mr. Gladstone once explained, in the freedom of social conversation, that it is the duty of a progressive party leader to test the strength of his movement by leaning back, so that he may be sure that any advance he makes is adequately supported by the pressure of the forces behind him. It is not the most heroic view of the duties of a leader, but it has in it some of the wisdom of an old engineer, whose business compels him to measure forces accurately. Queen Elizabeth, if she never expounded the doctrine in relation to the leadership of a nation, at least acted on it. The English people have always proved themselves equal to the demand thus made upon them; if initiative be lacking in the leaders, there is plenty of it among the rank and file. The leaders themselves, once they are buoyed up and carried forward by the rising tide, often seize their opportunity, and surpass themselves.

The history of flight in England from 1908, when Mr. Roe and Mr. Cody first flew, to 1912, when flying became a part of the duty of the military and naval forces of the Crown, is the history of a ferment, and cannot be exhibited in any tight or ordered sequence of cause and effect. Before the Government took in hand the building up of an air service, there were many beginnings of private organization. A man cannot fly until he has a machine and a place for starting and alighting. These are expensive and elaborate requirements, not easily furnished without co-operation. The Aeronautical Society did much to make flight possible, but its labours were mainly scientific and theoretical. In 1901 Mr. F. Hedges Butler earned his place among the pioneers of the air by founding the Aero Club of the United Kingdom. This club has played a great and honourable part in the promotion of aerial navigation. When it was founded no power-driven aeroplane had as yet carried a man in the air, and the original interest of its members was in the airship, which had been brought into high credit by M. Santos Dumont; but they were quick to recognize the coming of the aeroplane, and the Hon. C. S. Rolls, who helped Mr. Butler to found the club, was one of the boldest and most skilful of early pilots. The club brought together inventors and sportsmen, and supplied them with a suitable ground for their experiments. It undertook the training of aviators, and from 1910 onwards, issued its certificates, which, when the Government began to build the Flying Corps, were officially recognized as a warrant of proficiency in the new art. An immense service was rendered in these early years by gentlemen adventurers, engineers and pilots, who, all for love and nothing for reward, built machines and flew them. Some of these, when the storm broke, became the mainstay of the national force. To take only two names out of the first hundred to whom the Aero Club granted its certificate—a list crowded with distinction and achievement—it is not easy to assess the national debt to Mr. T. O. M. Sopwith and Mr. Geoffrey de Havilland. It was in the latter part of 1911 that Mr. Sopwith, having flown with skill and distinction on the machines which he had bought, began to build an aeroplane from his own designs. At that time there were no aeroplane draughtsmen, and he had to stand by and instruct his mechanics point by point. He could not afford to rent a proper workshop; the machine was built in a rough wooden shed, unsupplied with water, and lighted after dark by paraffin lamps. Six men built the machine, and Mr. Sopwith flew it from the ground on which the shed stood. Its performance was better than had ever been obtained from a machine of equal horse-power. It was subsequently bought by the Admiralty, and Mr. Sopwith began to build another aeroplane of higher power, and a flying boat. In 1912 he took premises at Kingston, and there finished these two machines. The aeroplane was successful; the flying boat was smashed during its trial flight. Another was put in hand, and was bought by the Admiralty. Aeroplane designing was in its experimental stage, so that no large orders were obtainable, and even where three of a kind were ordered, numerous alterations, demanded during the process of construction, prevented three of a kind from being built. These were the beginnings of the famous Sopwith machines, and especially of the single-seater biplane scout type, with its many varieties. The Sopwith 'Tabloid', the Sopwith 'Pup', the Sopwith 'Camel', and, last and best of all, the Sopwith 'Snipe', which was new at the front when the war ended—all these were engines of victory. So were the equally famous machines designed for the Government by Mr. de Havilland, of which the D.H. 4 is perhaps the greatest in achievement. Mr. de Havilland built his first machine early in 1910, at his own cost. On its trial it travelled some forty yards down a slope under its own power, then it rose too steeply into the air, and when it was corrected by Mr. de Havilland, who piloted it, the strain proved too great for the struts, which were made of American whitewood; the left main plane doubled up, and the machine, falling heavily to the ground thirty-five yards from its starting-point, was totally wrecked. The great things of the air have most of them been done by survivors from wrecks. Mr. de Havilland went to work again on a much improved machine, designed to be an army biplane; in December 1910 he became a member of the staff of the balloon factory at Farnborough, and had a main hand, as shall be told hereafter, in the best of the Government aeroplane designs.

These are instances only; the story of progress is everywhere the same. The wonderful national air force was built by the skill and intelligence of a few men out of the mass of material offered to them by the private pioneers. The work of these pioneers can best be concisely described in connexion with the various centres, or aerodromes, where they gathered together to put their ideas to the test of practice. Not all the early experimenters were attracted to these communities; some preferred to work in secret; but the most fruitful work was done in open fellowship. Among those who, in the days before aerodromes, devoted time and effort to the problem of flight, Mr. José Weiss deserves more than a passing mention. After experimenting with models, he devised a man-carrying bird-like glider, twenty-four feet in span, and in the year 1905, while flight was still no more than a rumour, flew it successfully on the slopes of Amberley Mount, between Arundel and Pulborough. His pilots were Mr. Gordon England and Mr. Gerald Leake. The former of these, in a wind of about twenty-five miles an hour, rose some hundred feet above his starting-point and then glided safely to earth again. The machine, says Mr. Weiss, who, shortly before his death in 1919, kindly furnished this account, had no vertical rudder, and relied on ailerons only, so that it was difficult to steer. 'The combination of ailerons', he adds, 'with the vertical rudder introduced by the brothers Wright was the factor which determined the advent of the aeroplane.' The advent of the aeroplane and its development for war purposes has given an air of antiquity to the researches of Mr. Weiss. Yet many subtle and delicate problems connected with soaring and gliding flight are still unsolved; there was no time for them during the war. Mr. Weiss was firmly convinced that in moving currents of air flight without an engine is possible, though he did not under-estimate the difficulties to be surmounted. His glider was inherently stable, and had funds been available, might have been made into an efficient power-driven machine. The Etrich glider, which was invented at about the same time in Austria and closely resembles the Weiss machine, became the model and basis for the famous German Taube type of monoplane.

Once flying had begun in England it was not very long before home-built aeroplanes were obtainable. Most of the pioneers built their own machines. The first aeroplane factory for the supply of machines to customers was set up by Mr. T. Howard Wright in two of the arches of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway at Battersea, alongside of certain other arches occupied by the balloon factory of Messrs. Eustace and Oswald Short, who were at that time the official balloon constructors to the Aero Club. Like the Voisins in France Mr. Howard Wright put his skill at the service of others. During the winter of 1908-9 he was engaged in building experimental aeroplanes of strange design, chiefly for foreign customers. His own biplane, which resembled the Henri Farman machine, made its appearance in 1910. He also built a type of monoplane, known as the Avis, for the Scottish Aviation Company, a firm in which the Hon. Alan Boyle and Mr. J. Herbert Spottiswoode were interested. On this monoplane Mr. Boyle made the first cross-country trip in England; the trip lasted for five minutes, and was made over the ground just outside the Brooklands track. It was on this monoplane also that Mr. Sopwith, who understood motor racing, rapidly learned to fly, and a little later, before he became a designer and manufacturer, it was on a Howard Wright biplane that he flew from Eastchurch to a point in Belgium, thus winning Baron de Forest's prize for the longest flight into the continent of Europe. After a time Mr. Howard Wright joined the Coventry Ordnance Works, where he built a machine for the Military Trials of 1912, and he subsequently took charge of the aviation department of the torpedo-boat firm of Messrs. J. S. White and Co. of Cowes.

The Short brothers followed suit. After seeing Wilbur Wright fly at Le Mans, in 1908, Mr. Eustace Short engaged the help of his brother, Mr. Horace Short, who was an expert in steam-turbines, and they established a primitive aerodrome at Shellness, on the marshes of the Isle of Sheppey, near the terminus of the Sheppey Railway. Here the more enthusiastic of the members of the Aero Club set to work with aeroplanes. The leading pioneers were Mr. Frank McClean, Mr. Alec Ogilvie, Mr. Moore-Brabazon, and Mr. Percy Grace, all of whom at a later date held commissions in one or other of the national air services; and two more, who held no such commissions, because before the Flying Corps was in being they had given their lives to the cause—Mr. Cecil Grace and the Hon. Charles Rolls. None of these men was in the business for profit, they were sportsmen and something more than sportsmen; they loved the new adventure and they spent their own money freely, but pleasure was not their goal; they understood what flying meant for the welfare of their country, and they worked for the safety and progress of the British Empire. It was at Shellness in October 1909 that Mr. Moore-Brabazon, on a machine designed and built by Mr. Horace Short and fitted with a Green engine, flew the first circular mile ever flown on a British aeroplane. There were many other experiments and achievements at Shellness. These were the days, says Mr. C. G. Grey (to whose knowledge of early aviation this book is much indebted), when the watchers lay flat on the ground in order to be sure that the aeroplane had really left it. At the close of 1909, Mr. Frank McClean, who devoted his whole fortune to the cause of aviation, purchased a large tract of ground, level and free from ditches, in the middle of the Isle of Sheppey, close to the railway station at Eastchurch, and gave the use of it free to the Aero Club. To this ground the Short brothers, who, besides building their own machines, had taken over the Wright patents for Great Britain, removed their factory, and Eastchurch very quickly became the scientific centre of British aviation. Early in 1911 the Admiralty were persuaded to allow four naval officers to learn to fly. The machines on which they learned were supplied free of cost by Mr. McClean, and another member of the Aero Club, Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who was the solitary representative of Great Britain at the Rheims meeting of 1909, supplied the tuition, also free of cost. The instructor naturally marked out for this purpose, says Mr. Cockburn, was Mr. Cecil Grace, a fine pilot, a great sportsman, and a man quite untouched by the spirit of commercialism, but only a few weeks earlier he had been lost while flying over the Channel from France to England. So Mr. Cockburn undertook the task, and for about six weeks took up his residence at Eastchurch. The four naval officers were Lieutenants C. R. Samson, R. Gregory, and A. M. Longmore, of the Royal Navy; and Captain E. L. Gerrard, of the Royal Marine Light Infantry. They were keen and apt pupils, as they needs must have been to qualify for their certificates in six weeks of bad weather, which included one considerable snow-storm. Instruction in those days was no easy matter; the machines were pushers; the pilot sat in front with the control on his right hand, the pupil sat huddled up behind the instructor, catching hold of the control by stretching his arm over the instructor's shoulder, and getting occasional jabs in the forearm from the instructor's elbows as a hint to let go. Mr. Cockburn weighed over fourteen stone, and Captain Gerrard only a little less, so the old fifty horse-power Gnome engine had all it could do to get the machine off the ground. In a straight flight along the aerodrome the height attained was often no more than from twenty to thirty feet; then the machine had to make a turn at that dangerously small elevation, or fly into the trees at the end. Fortunately the aerodrome was clear except for a few week-end pilots who practised on Saturdays and Sundays; the instructor and his pupils were energetic, flying at dawn and at dusk to avoid the high winds; and the training was completed with only two crashes, neither of them very serious. The navy pupils were encouraged throughout by frequent visits from their senior officer at Sheerness, Captain Godfrey Paine, who befriended aviation from the first. Eastchurch soon became the recognized centre for the training of naval officers in the use of aeroplanes, and when, upon the death of Mr. Horace Short, in 1917, the Short brothers vacated Eastchurch, and concentrated at their Rochester works, Eastchurch passed wholly under naval control. No honour or reward that could be given to the members of the Royal Aero Club, and especially to Mr. McClean and Mr. Cockburn, can possibly equal this, that they were part founders of the Naval Air Service.

If Eastchurch was the earliest centre of scientific experiment and practical training in aviation, it was at the great Brooklands aerodrome that flying first became popular. Mr. Roe had been allowed to use a shed in the paddock for his first aeroplane, and had made his first flight there, at a very humble elevation, but the conversion of the centre of the track into an aerodrome was not effected till late in 1909. The motor-racing track, about three and a half miles in length, enclosed a piece of land which was partly farmland and partly wilderness, watered by the river Wey. On the west side of it there was the Weybridge sewage farm, which, when flying began, added new terrors to a forced descent. When Mr. Henri Farman visited England, in January 1908, he inspected Brooklands and expressed an unfavourable opinion of its fitness as a site for an aerodrome. So nothing was done until the visit of M. Louis Paulhan, late in 1909. The performances of M. Paulhan at the Rheims meeting, and later at the Blackpool meeting, excited much admiration, and Mr. G. Holt Thomas, who had long studied aviation, and never grew tired of advocating its claims, determined to engage popular interest and, if possible, official support by bringing Paulhan to London, there to display his powers. By arrangement with Mr. Locke King, the proprietor of Brooklands, and Major Lindsay Lloyd, the new manager, one of the fields of the farm was cleared of obstacles and was mowed and rolled, as a landing ground for Paulhan. There in the closing days of October 1909 Paulhan gave many exhibition flights on a Farman biplane. The longest of these, which lasted nearly three hours and covered ninety-six miles, was made on the 1st of November and was witnessed by Lord Roberts. The exhibition was not a financial success; thousands of spectators watched the flying from outside the ground, without contributing to the expenses; but it impressed the committee of the Brooklands Automobile Racing Club, and they resolved to turn the interior of their track into an aerodrome. Obstacles were removed, pits and ponds were filled in, the solider portions of the ground were furnished with a fairly good grass surface, rows of wooden sheds were erected, and the pioneers of the new art were invited by public advertisement to become their tenants. By the spring of 1910 many aeroplanes were at work on the Brooklands ground, most of them running about it in the earnest endeavour to get up sufficient speed to rise into the air.

There were no instructors. Among the earliest of the pioneers was the Hon. Alan Boyle, and an account which he has kindly supplied, telling how he learned to fly his little Avis machine, describes the usual method of the learners. 'I asked Mr. Howard Wright', he says, 'to build me this monoplane, which we placed upon the market as proprietors.... She was fitted with an Anzani engine of nominal twenty-five horse-power, but which really gave about eighteen to twenty horse-power.... She usually ran for about five minutes, and then got overheated and tired and struck work.... I took my little Avis to Brooklands about February 1910, after it had been exhibited at the Aero Show. I partitioned off a corner of my shed, and slept in a hammock, so that I was able to take advantage of the still hours in the early morning. It is amusing to look back now and remember how I used to watch anxiously a little flag which I flew above my shed, to see what strength of wind was blowing. At first I never used to go out until the flag was practically hanging from the mast, or was only flapping very gently in the light air, which occurred usually in the very early morning. At that time there were at Brooklands, I think, the following: Grahame-White, who was even then a comparatively experienced pilot; Charles Lane, who like me had brought out a monoplane, but with a curious tail, a fixed cambered surface with another elevating plane above and within eight inches or so of it. However, it flew very steadily indeed, when it was tested some months later.... A. V. Roe was also there experimenting with his triplanes. Later on he got them flying well. He did the most astonishing things with them. They were beautiful little machines and beautifully built, and it was a delight to watch them in the air. It was wonderful the way in which they answered to the helm. He used to go straight to a point, put his rudder over, and without any fuss or "bank" or anything, you would suddenly find the machine pointing in the exact opposite direction.... Then there were also there, with Blériot machines, Messrs. James Radley and Graham Gilmour. The latter was afterwards killed. Radley got his certificate on the same day as I. We were all learners at Brooklands in those days: I am the possessor of a silver cup kindly presented by the Brooklands Race Club authorities for making a circular flight, which shows we were not very advanced. In fact no one except Grahame-White and A. V. Roe knew anything about it at all, and they didn't know much.

'I started by simply rolling about the ground in the ordinary way, and then in a short time opened her out and made short hops in an endeavour to get off the ground. I remember quite well, after I had been out, walking along my wheel tracks and examining them, and being fearfully pleased when I saw them disappear for a yard or two. That showed that I had flown.

'After I had done this sort of thing for about a month, Mr. Manning came down and produced a larger jet for my engine, and warned me that if the machine would fly, she would do so now with the extra power the new jet would give the engine. He then sat down to pick up the pieces, and off I went! After making a few hops to get my hand in I opened her out and made a long steady flight of about a hundred yards, six feet up, and landed shouting. I had waited and worked for that for some time, so you can imagine my delight.

'I did "straights" for some weeks and then started to do curves, and of course the banking of the machine terrified me. However, I grew used to that, and made my curves shorter and shorter until at last I thought I would try for a circle. I pointed the Avis to a part of the ground which had not yet been levelled, and of course once I was over that I jolly well had to get round somehow: so I made my first circuit. After I had been doing circuits for some time and had begun to have a little confidence in myself, I decided that it was necessary to do a volplane. I made inquiries and was told that immediately I shut off the engine it was necessary to put the nose of the machine down to approximately her gliding angle, otherwise she would "stall" and glide back on her tail. You will sympathize with me when I say that I preferred to avoid this latter alternative, although as a matter of fact, having a flat tail which carried no weight, she would no doubt have taken up her gliding angle naturally. Anyway, I didn't know this, and in April (I think) in some trepidation I got over that step in my progress. I confess that I went four times round Brooklands with my hand on the switch before I could make up my mind to do the deed, and of course when I did so, I found there was nothing in it, and realized the delight of coming down without the noise of the engine in my ears. So much for learning to fly.'

Brooklands was a well-known place; large crowds of people had often visited it to see the motor races; and it was near London; so that from the first it attracted sportsmen and aeroplane designers. It became the experimental ground of the British aircraft industry. Among its early tenants were the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company, founded by the late Sir George White of Bristol, and commonly known as the Bristol Company; Messrs. Martin and Handasyde, the makers of the Martinsyde machines; Mr. A. V. Roe; the Scottish Aviation Company, with their Avis monoplanes; Mr. J. V. Neal, who, in the endeavour to avoid the Wrights' patents, produced a curious biplane with a new system of control, and many others. Sheds were occupied by Mr. Douglas Graham Gilmour, one of the finest pilots in his day that this country had produced, who was killed in an accident at Richmond, and by Mr. F. P. Raynham, who became notable as a test-pilot. Many sportsmen rented sheds and tried their hands at building machines. Mrs. Hewlett, the wife of the novelist, having learned to fly, started a school at Brooklands in partnership with M. Blondeau, a French engineer and pilot. Her son, like the swallows, was taught to fly by his mother. By the middle of 1911 a whole village of sheds had grown up. Most of the tenants were men of means, but they spent so much money on their experiments that they had very little left for the amenities of life. Mr. C. G. Grey remembers men, the possessors of comfortable incomes, who lived for years on thirty or forty shillings a week, and spent the rest on their aeroplanes. It was a society like the early Christians; it practised fellowship and community of goods. To the eyes of a casual visitor there was no apparent difference between the owner of an aeroplane and his mechanics; all alike lived in overalls, except in hot weather, when overalls gave place to pyjamas. If any one lacked tools or materials he borrowed them from another shed; they were lent with goodwill, though the owner knew that his only chance of seeing them again was to borrow them back. The social centre of the place was a shed in the middle of the front row, which was let by Major Lindsay Lloyd as a restaurant, and was called 'The Blue Bird'. This restaurant was run by the wife of one of the community; it united in itself all the utilities of a public-house, a club, a parliament, and a town-hall. Living as they did for ends of their own and apart from the great world, the brotherhood naturally took pride in themselves as a chosen people, dedicated to high purposes, and they scorned the Philistines who came in crowds to see the motor racing. On race days the Philistines were permitted, for reasons connected with the balance sheet, to have tea at 'The Blue Bird'; some of them would wander over the aerodrome, and even into the sheds, to ask the sort of question that is often asked by those who will not undertake the liabilities but think it graceful to assume the airs of a patron.

After a few years, when aeroplane construction and design settled down into a regular industry, the glory of this primitive Arcadian community passed away, and its members were scattered far and wide. Brooklands became a place of business; in one row of sheds the Bristol Company, in another Messrs. Vickers, established schools where many distinguished pilots who served their country in the war learned to make their first flights. Before the war broke out the British branch of the Blériot Company had also taken a number of sheds, and had transformed them into a regular aircraft factory; the Martin and Handasyde firm had adapted three or four sheds, and were building a couple of monoplanes for a transatlantic attempt by that brilliant flyer, the late Mr. Gustav Hamel. In June of 1914 he was drowned in flying the English Channel, and the firm suffered a severe set-back. Lastly, when the war came, the Brooklands aerodrome, with all its flyable machines, was taken over by the military authorities, and the days of ease and innocence were ended. A large Vickers factory was built, and turned out many machines for the Flying Corps; the Blériot and the Martinsyde firms also continued their activities for a couple of years, and then moved, the one to Addlestone, the other to Woking. During the war Brooklands was used as a training station, a wireless experimental depot, and an acceptance park by the Royal Flying Corps, which permitted the use of it, for experimental flying, to the Vickers, Martinsyde, and Blériot firms.

Other early aerodromes, almost contemporary with Brooklands, were Hendon, in the northern suburbs of London, and Larkhill, on Salisbury Plain, a few miles from Amesbury. The Hendon aerodrome, like Brooklands, owed its first fame to the initiative of Mr. Holt Thomas. After the Brooklands adventure he kept in touch with M. Louis Paulhan, and in April 1910 persuaded him to make an attempt to win the £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail for a flight from London to Manchester. During the previous winter M. Paulhan had been flying with success in America, while his rival, Mr. Grahame-White, had been busy with his flying school at Pau, in the south of France. Mr. Grahame-White brought a Farman biplane to London, and obtained permission to use Wormwood Scrubbs for his starting-place. Mr. Holt Thomas, looking for a starting-place for Paulhan, heard of a field at Hendon which was being used by a firm of electrical engineers for experiments with a small monoplane, and got leave to start Paulhan thence. After Paulhan's success, Mr. Grahame-White and his business partner, the late Mr. Richard T. Gates, visited Hendon, and finding that the field was one of a number bordering the Midland Railway without any roads cutting across them, fixed on the place as the site of what was afterwards called the London aerodrome. Here the Grahame-White Aviation Company made it their business, from 1911 onwards, to familiarize Londoners with the spectacle of flying and with its practice. They built a number of sheds and let them to manufacturing firms. One of these was the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, formed in 1911 by Mr. Holt Thomas, who at that time was working the British rights for the French Farman Company. Another was the W. H. Ewen Aviation Company, which subsequently became the British Caudron Company. A third was the British Deperdussin Company; the wonderful little Deperdussin monoplane, in the 1912 Gordon Bennett Trials at Rheims, carried its pilot, M. Vedrines, at a speed of nearly two miles a minute for a flight of over an hour. Hendon, moreover, laid itself out to attract spectators. There were stands and enclosures, with prices of admission to suit all purses. Aeroplane racing was a regular feature of the meetings. As early as 1911 about a hundred and twenty members of the two Houses of Parliament paid a visit to the place by invitation and were some of them taken into the air. In July 1911 two great races, modelled on the Circuit de l'Est of 1910, made Hendon one of their stages. The earlier of these, somewhat magniloquently called the 'Circuit of Europe', was organized by a syndicate of newspapers. The appointed course was from Paris to Paris by way of Liège, Utrecht, Brussels, and London—a distance of about a thousand miles. The second, not many days later, organized by the Daily Mail newspaper, and called the 'Circuit of Britain', laid its course from Brooklands to Brooklands, by way of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Exeter and Brighton, with Hendon as the first stopping-place on the outward journey. Both competitions were won by Lieutenant Conneau of the French navy, who flew under the name of 'Beaumont'. Whether because only one Englishman (Mr. James Valentine) took part in the earlier competition, or because the second was better advertised and first awoke the public to the significance of aviation, it was to witness the second that enthusiastic crowds first flocked to Hendon. Mr. Holt Thomas, who helped to organize the 'Circuit of Europe', found a stolid indifference in the English public. As he drove to Hendon along the Edgware road he noticed that the people on their way to the aerodrome were mostly French. Indeed, he adds, at the aerodrome itself there were almost more police than public to witness what was a great event in the history of flight. For the 'Circuit of Britain', on the other hand, an enormous crowd gathered at Hendon. The fields on Hendon Hill were black with spectators. One farmer, remembering to make hay while the sun shone, erected a canvas screen all along the upper part of his field, and by charging threepence for admission to the other side reaped a good harvest. The competitors arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and left again for the north early on the Monday morning. Thousands of spectators spent Sunday night in the fields, gathering round bonfires or singing to keep themselves warm. In this competition the French monoplane pilots carried off the honours; Beaumont was first, and Vedrines second. The only competitor who completed the full course on a British-built machine was the stalwart and persevering Mr. Cody on his own biplane.

The man who makes a machine and the man who flies one are the heroes of the epic of flight. Next to them, all credit must be given to the public-spirited financiers and patrons who encouraged flight, especially to those of them who were not deceived, and knew that they are the servants, not the masters, of the conquerors of the air. As a promoter of flight Mr. Holt Thomas deserves more than a passing mention. He worked early and late for the progress of the art and for its recognition by the Government. He was fond of calling attention to comparative figures, pointing out, for instance, in April 1909, that the sum already spent by Germany on military aeronautics was about £400,000; by France about £47,000; and by Great Britain about £5,000. He befriended and rewarded distinguished aviators. In September 1910 he attended the military manœuvres in France, the first in which aeroplanes were used for reconnaissance, and there, among the experts of many nations, came across no other Englishman. He also attended the British manœuvres of the same year, where Captain Bertram Dickson made some reconnaissance flights. In 1911 he founded the Aircraft Manufacturing Company. He foresaw a great future for military aviation and constantly did battle with the argument, fashionable among some soldiers, that the British army, being a small army, required only a small air force. He held, from the first, that a national air force had many tasks to fulfil other than reconnaissance, and that it should be a separate organization, distinct from both army and navy. Men like Mr. Thomas, who, though they had no official standing, devoted study and effort to the problems of military aviation, were not a little serviceable to the country; they agitated the question, and kept it alive in the public mind. When the Royal Flying Corps at last was formed they might justly claim that they had helped it into existence.

The only other aerodrome which need here be mentioned is the Larkhill aerodrome, often called the Salisbury Plain aerodrome, or the Bristol Flying School. Eastchurch saw the beginnings of naval flying; Larkhill was the earliest centre of military flying. In 1909 Captain J. D. B. Fulton, of the Royal Field Artillery, was stationed at Bulford camp. M. Blériot's cross-Channel flight, in July of that year, excited his interest, and he set himself to build a monoplane of the Blériot type. This proved to be a slow business, so he bought from the Grahame-White firm a Blériot machine fitted with a twenty-eight horse-power Anzani engine, and began to experiment with it on the plain. Captain Fulton was a highly skilled mechanical engineer; some of his patents for improvements in field guns had been adopted by the War Office, and from the proceeds of these he was able to meet the costs of his experiments. His title to be called the founder of military aviation in Great Britain must be shared with others, especially with Captain Bertram Dickson, also of the Royal Field Artillery, who was the first British officer to fly. After seeing the flying at the Rheims meeting in August 1909, Captain Dickson procured a Henri Farman biplane, and learned, at Châlons, to fly it. He was a natural flyer, as Captain Fulton was a natural engineer. During 1910 he attended many aviation meetings in France; at Tours and elsewhere he held his own in competition with some of the most famous of French aviators. His ruling passion was not sport, but patriotism; he was chiefly concerned to put the aeroplane as a weapon into the hands of his country. In the summer of 1910 he made the acquaintance of Sir George White of Bristol, and joined the staff of the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company. At the army manœuvres of that autumn he appeared, a herald of the future, on a Bristol biplane, but found some difficulty in persuading the officers in command to make use of his services. The cavalry, in particular, were not friendly to the aeroplane, which, it was believed, would frighten the horses; and when a reconnaissance flight was arranged and had to be put off because the wind was high and gusty, aviation fell in esteem. Nevertheless, some of Captain Dickson's flights served to show how an aeroplane might help an army. It was natural enough that the cavalry should prefer to carry on the work of reconnaissance in the usual way. Men believe in the weapons they are skilled to handle. When the rapier was introduced into England in the sixteenth century, it found no friends among the masters of the broadsword; its vogue was gained among young gentlemen educated in France and Italy. To let an aeroplane attempt their work would have seemed to the cavalry like dropping the bone to catch at the shadow. But youth will be served, and in a very few years the shadow cast by Captain Dickson's aeroplane spread and multiplied and covered the field of battle. His own career came to an untimely end. A few weeks after the manœuvres he suffered a severe accident at the Milan aviation meeting, where he performed some of those admirable glides from a height, with the engine off, for which he had become famous. Just after one of these he had opened the throttle of his engine, and was rising again, when another aviator, called Thomas, who was rapidly planing down on an Antoinette, crashed into him from above. He lay between life and death for some weeks, and in his delirium talked incessantly of his work, and of the War Office, and of what he hoped to do for it. His health had been severely strained by the early work he had done in tropical countries, where he had been employed in exploration and the delimitation of boundaries; though he recovered from his accident and flew again, he grew steadily worse, and died in Scotland on the 28th of September 1913.

Along with Captain Fulton and Captain Dickson a third army aviator must be mentioned—Lieutenant Lancelot Gibbs, who also learned to fly at Châlons, and was present, on a Farman biplane, at the manœuvres of 1910. At the Wolverhampton meeting, earlier in the same year, he had had a slight accident which injured his spine, so that before very long he had to give up flying. He had flown at many early meetings, and had distinguished himself in duration flights. The dangers encountered by these pioneers may be illustrated from the experiences of Lieutenant Gibbs in Spain. He had arranged to give an exhibition of flying at Durango, near Bilbao, in April 1910. The delivery of his machine, which was sent from Paris by the Spanish railways, was delayed, and many hours of work had to be spent on it before it could fly, so that the thirty thousand people who had assembled were kept waiting for more than an hour. They grew impatient, and when the machine was wheeled out of its shed, so that they might see the work of preparing it, they crowded round it and handled it roughly. It had to be taken back into the shed again. Thereupon they began to throw stones, which disabled the mechanic and broke the shed. One of them advanced to Lieutenant Gibbs with a drawn knife and said that flying was an impossibility, there was no such thing as aviation, and therefore they were going to knife him. The crowd shouted 'Down with science, long live religion!' Lieutenant Gibbs saved himself by his courage and calm, and was taken away by an escort, under a heavy shower of stones, to the judge's house. Within half an hour the shed, with all it contained, was burned to the ground.

These three soldiers, Captain Fulton, Captain Dickson, and Lieutenant Gibbs, have earned their place in history as the first British military aviators. Of the three Captain Fulton had most to do with Salisbury Plain and the beginnings of the air force. Some civilians were also at work. During the manœuvres of 1910 Mr. Robert Loraine, in a Bristol machine fitted with transmitting apparatus, succeeded in sending wireless messages, from a distance of a quarter of a mile, to a temporary receiving station rigged up at Larkhill. The earliest permanent establishment at Larkhill seems to have been an aeroplane shed tenanted by Mr. H. Barber, who subsequently held a commission in the Air Force. Mr. Barber was a man of independent means, and being convinced that flying would play a great part in war, he spent his time in devising aeroplanes for naval and military purposes. He founded a firm of his own, called 'The Aeronautical Syndicate', and produced a type of monoplane with elevator in front, which, in its later development, was named the 'Valkyrie'. He taught a good many people to fly, but none of them, except himself, became expert pilots. The 'Valkyrie' was the last survivor of the earliest type of flying machine, often called the 'Canard' type, because the elevator is extended in front like the head of a duck in flight, and serves to balance the machine. When this type of machine was at last superseded by the more shapely modern design, Mr. Barber's syndicate died a natural death. At the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Flying Corps, and became one of its leading technical instructors, with the rank of captain.

The second shed erected at Larkhill was built by the War Office and was intended for the use of the Hon. C. S. Rolls, so that he might give instruction to army pilots. The death of Mr. Rolls at the Bournemouth meeting in July 19th (one of the heaviest losses that aviation has suffered in this country) put an end to that scheme, and the shed was assigned, later on, to Captain Fulton. The third shed was erected by Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who on his return from France applied to the War Office for leave to carry on at Larkhill. Mr. Cockburn was the first, he says, actually to fly over Salisbury Plain. He worked hand in hand with Captain Fulton, to whom he lent his Farman machine (the first machine built by Henri Farman after he left the Voisin firm) in order that Captain Fulton might pass the tests for the pilot's certificate in November 1910. The two together did much good work at Larkhill, and were successful in gaining a certain measure of recognition for the aeroplane among the army units on the plain.

From these beginnings Larkhill rapidly developed. Towards the end of 1910 the Bristol Company, having come to an agreement with the War Office, established themselves at Larkhill in a solidly built row of sheds. The Government were not as yet prepared to undertake any large expenditure upon aeroplanes; their attitude was tentative; they had been advised by the Committee of Imperial Defence that the experiments with aeroplanes, hitherto carried out at the balloon school, should be discontinued, but that advantage should be taken of private enterprise in this branch of aeronautics. Accordingly, the Bristol Company opened at Larkhill the Bristol School of Aviation, which remained in existence until the outbreak of the war. The chief instructor was M. Henry Jullerot, one of the best pilots in France; he was assisted by Mr. Gordon England, who had shown so much skill in handling the gliders of Mr. Weiss, and by Mr. Harry Busteed, the first notable Australian pilot. Salisbury Plain is perhaps the best stretch of country in England for the training of aviators; the school grew and prospered; the Bristol machine proved to be excellently well fitted for the purposes of instruction, and the pupils, being relieved from the dangers that attend a forced landing in populous country, distinguished themselves by their bold flying. There were many camps of soldiers in the neighbourhood, so that the work done at Larkhill did much to convert the army to a belief in aviation. The tokens of the conversion were soon visible. On the 28th of February 1911 an Army Order was issued, creating the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers. It ran as follows: 'With a view to meeting Army requirements consequent on recent developments in aerial science it has been decided to organize an Air Battalion, to which will be entrusted the duty of creating a body of expert airmen.... The training and instruction of men in handling kites, balloons and aeroplanes, and other forms of aircraft, will also devolve upon this battalion. The establishment of this battalion will be organized into (i) headquarters and (ii) two companies.... The officers will be selected from any regular arm or branch of the Service on the active list.... A selected candidate will, on joining the Air Battalion, go through a six months' probationary course.... An officer who satisfactorily completes the probationary period will be appointed to the Air Battalion for a period of four years.... The Warrant officers, non-commissioned officers, and men will be selected from the Corps of Royal Engineers. The existing Balloon School will be superseded by the Air Battalion, and the new organization will be regarded as taking effect from April 1st, 1911.'

The formation of the Air Battalion was a great step in advance. Up to this time flying had been a hobby or fancy of individual men; it was now organized and provided for as a part of the duty of the army. The battalion was duly formed under the command of Sir Alexander Bannerman, with Captain P. W. L. Broke-Smith, of the Royal Engineers, as adjutant. Airships were assigned to No. 1 Company and aeroplanes to No. 2 Company. This latter company, commanded by Captain Fulton, went into camp at Larkhill about the end of April. When Mr. Cockburn, after completing the course of instruction that he gave at Eastchurch, returned to Larkhill, he found the battalion in process of formation. Its history, and its development, a year later, into the Royal Flying Corps, must be narrated in the next chapter, and the steps traced by which a small balloon factory at Chatham, started in the year 1882, was transformed into the Air Force of to-day. A few words may here be added concerning Captain Fulton and Mr. Cockburn, who bore so large a part in the creation of an air force. While he held his command in the Air Battalion, Captain Fulton did all he could to get it recognized as a separate branch of the army, distinct from the Royal Engineers. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed he was appointed to the Central Flying School as instructor, and was put in charge of the workshops there. Thence he passed to the aeronautical inspection department, which was placed entirely under his control and became, what it has remained, one of the foundations of the strength and efficiency of the air force. He could not be spared from this work for combatant service, so he saw little of the war at the front; but more flying officers than ever heard his name owe him a debt of gratitude for his faithful work in providing for their safety. He died of an affection of the throat in November 1915. Mr. Cockburn, who was continuously at work on Salisbury Plain for a period of something like four years, continued, as a civilian, to give his help, first in the aeronautical inspection department, and, later on, in the investigation of aeroplane accidents.

The account which has now been given of the early years of flying in England may serve to show what a wealth of private enterprise lay ready to the hand of the Government when the building of the air force began. The Royal Air Force, like the tree of the Gospel parable, grew from a small seed, but it was nourished in a rich soil. The great experiment of flying attracted a multitude of adventurous minds, and prepared recruits for the nation long before the nation asked for them. This early predominance of private enterprise, it is worth remarking, told in favour of military rather than naval flying, and, when the Flying Corps was formed, started the Military Wing at an advantage. Little has been said as yet, because in truth there is little to say, of pioneer work in the air done by sailors. Yet no one would dare to assert that the average sailor is less resourceful, less inventive, less open to new ideas, than the average soldier. No doubt there were many senior officers in the navy, as there were many in the army, who in the early days regarded aviation with professional impatience and scorn. Further, the higher command of the navy were not quick, when aircraft became practically efficient, to divine or devise a use for them. The difficulty of employing them over the sea was formidable, and none of their uses was quite so obvious as their use (questioned by more than one distinguished army general) for reconnaissance in a land campaign. But the real difference which told in favour of military aviation lay in the nature of the services. A sailor is attached to his ship, and flying is an art which of necessity must be practised and developed, in its beginnings, over wide level tracts of land. The value of the airship for distant reconnaissance at sea is now fully recognized, but airship building is not a possible hobby for a young naval officer. Those naval officers who believed in the future of the new weapon were reduced to attempting to influence the Government, so that it might undertake the necessary work. While the army officer could attend aviation meetings and demonstrate his opinions in practice, his less fortunate brother in the navy had no resource but to engage in a melancholy course of politics, with small prospects of public result, and smaller prospects of private advancement.

The consequence of all this is that the history of the work done by the navy with aeroplanes and airships is essentially a history of official decisions and official acts. Great credit must be given to individual navy men for their insight and persistence in advocating the claims of the air, but the history of the work done can be fully narrated, without further preamble, in an account of the origin and growth of the national air force.

CHAPTER IV

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE AIR FORCE

Those who fear, or pretend to fear, that England may witness a revolution like the French Revolution of the eighteenth century or the Russian Revolution of the twentieth century would be well advised to compose their minds by the study of English history. That history, in all its parts, shows the passion of the English people for continuity of development. The first care of the practical Englishman who desires change is to find some precedent, which may serve to give to change the authority of ancient usage. Our laws have always been administered in this spirit; we are willing to accept, and even to hasten, change, if we can show that the change is no real change, but is only a reversion to an older practice, or a development of an established law. It was a saying of King Alphonso of Aragon that among the many things which in this life men possess or desire all the rest are baubles compared with old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read. The English people are of a like mind; what they most care for is old customs to cherish. The very rebels of England are careful to find an honourable pedigree for their rebellion, and to invoke the support of their forefathers. A revolution based only on theory, a system warranted only by thought, will never come home to Englishmen.

The national love for continuity of development is well seen in the history of the genesis of the national air force. The whole of that force, aeroplanes, airships, kite balloons, and the rest, must be affiliated to a certain small balloon detachment of the Royal Engineers at Chatham. Little by little, very slowly and gradually at first, while only the balloon was in question, with amazing rapidity later, when the aeroplane and the airship came into being and were needed for the war, that single experimental unit of the Royal Engineers grew and transformed itself into a vast independent organization. Names and uniforms, constitutions and regulations, were altered so often that the whole change might seem to be an orgy of official frivolity if it were not remembered that the powers brought within reach of man by the new science were increasing at an even greater speed. But there was no breach of continuity; the process was a process of growth; the new was added, and the old was not abolished.

From the days of the Montgolfiers for more than a century the value of the balloon in war was a matter of debate and question and experiment. At the battle of Fleurus, in 1794, the triumphant French republican army used a captive balloon, chiefly, perhaps, as a symbol and token of the new era of science and liberty. Balloons were used in the Peninsular Campaign, but Napoleon's greatest achievements owed nothing to observation from the air. Even in the American Civil War, where the Federals certainly derived some advantage from their use, balloons were criticized and ridiculed more than they were feared. In Great Britain military experiments with balloons began at Woolwich Arsenal in 1878. In the following year Captain R. P. Lee, of the Royal Engineers, reporting on the work done at the arsenal, stated that they had a thoroughly sound and reliable fleet of five balloons, and a few trained officers and men, competent to undertake their management. One of these balloons accompanied the troops on manœuvre at the Easter Volunteer Review at Brighton. Captain H. Elsdale, of the Royal Engineers, who was in charge of the party, took part in the final march past; he was in the car of the balloon at a height of two hundred and fifty feet, while Captain J. L. B. Templer, a militia officer, managed the transport on the ground. A balloon section was present at the Aldershot manœuvres both in 1880 and in 1882; it was judged a success, and instructions were issued in the autumn of 1882 that the Balloon Equipment Store, as the establishment at Woolwich was called, should be removed to the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, where a small balloon factory, depot, and school of instruction was established in 1883. The practice with the balloons was under the charge of Major Lee, and in that year Major Templer came to Chatham to carry out certain experiments in the manufacture of balloons. He brought with him a family of the name of Weinling, to construct balloons on a system devised by himself. The fabric of the balloons was the internal membrane of the lower intestine of the ox, sometimes called gold-beater's skin. The Weinling family had a secret, or what they believed to be a secret, for the secure joining together of the pieces of this skin. As they held for some time an unchallenged monopoly in the manufacture of aircraft for the British Empire, they have earned the right to a niche in the temple of Fame. They were five in number—Mrs. Weinling and her elder son Fred, who were the first to arrive at Chatham, her two daughters, Mary Anne and Eugene, and a younger son Willie, who was about eighteen years old and was subject to fits. Their work was carried on not without interruption. In November 1883 Major Templer wrote a letter to the president of the Royal Engineer Committee, stating that he was delayed in the completion of the skin balloon by the principal workman having been sentenced to three months' imprisonment for an assault on the police. As the Weinling family were the only persons who had ever worked in skin-balloon manufacture, and as he himself was the only other person acquainted with the art, Major Templer asked and obtained leave to have two sappers trained to the work. But this new departure led before long to further troubles. The family were very jealous of their secret, and when the balloon factory began to be enlarged it was only with the greatest difficulty that the members of the family could be induced to give instruction to other workers.

Nevertheless, in the course of a year, several balloons were made, of three sizes, the largest size having ten thousand cubic feet of capacity, and the smaller sizes seven thousand and four thousand five hundred cubic feet. When, in the autumn of 1884, an expedition was sent to Bechuanaland under Sir Charles Warren, to expel the filibusters who had raided the territory, to pacificate the country, and to reinstate the natives, a balloon detachment under Major Elsdale and Captain F. C. Trollope, of the Grenadier Guards, attached to the Royal Engineers, was included in the expedition. They took with them in the detachment three balloons, and a staff consisting of fifteen non-commissioned officers and men. There was no fighting. At Mafeking, which was then a native village, it was found that owing to the elevation above sea-level neither of the two smaller balloons had lift enough to raise a man into the air, and that the largest balloon could take up only one observer. A native chief, Montsiou by name, went up a short distance in the balloon. The remark that he made serves to show the value of aircraft in impressing primitive peoples. 'If the first white men', he said, 'who came into this country had brought a thing like that, and having gone up in it before our eyes, had then come down and demanded that we should worship and serve them, we would have done so. The English have indeed great power.' The chief was right. For any nation to which is entrusted the policing and administration of large tracts of uncivilized country, an air force, civil and military, is an instrument of great power.

Balloons were used again on active service in the following year, 1885, in the Soudan. A small detachment, under Major Templer with Lieutenant R. J. H. L. MacKenzie, of the Royal Engineers, and nine non-commissioned officers and sappers, accompanied the expeditionary force. The best of the material had been sent to Bechuanaland, so the equipment was very imperfect, but ascents made in a balloon of one of the smaller types, at El Teb and Tamai, and elsewhere, proved useful for reconnaissance.

On the return of these two expeditions no attempt was made to keep up a regular balloon section. What was done must for the most part be credited to the energy of those few officers who believed in the future of balloons. Majors Elsdale and Templer ran the factory for building balloons and making hydrogen, and a few non-commissioned officers, trained in balloon work, were held on the strength of depot companies. Most of the practice, in observation of gunfire and the like, was carried out with captive balloons; the few trips adventured in free balloons were undertaken only when the gas had so deteriorated that the balloon had not lift enough for captive work. Major Elsdale did what he could to improve equipment, and urged that two or three officers should be appointed to give their whole time to balloons and to form the nucleus of a balloon corps. He is himself remembered for his pioneer experiments in aerial photography; he sent up cameras attached to small free balloons, with a clockwork apparatus which exposed the plates at regular intervals and which finally ripped the balloon to bring it to earth again. Major Templer, for his part, took a house at Lidsing, about four miles from Chatham and the same distance from Maidstone, and, in 1887, started a small summer training camp for balloon work in one of the fields adjoining his house. Lieutenants G. E. Phillips and C. F. Close, of the Royal Engineers, attended this camp, which was held again in the following years. In 1889 Lieutenants B. R. Ward and H. B. Jones, also of the Royal Engineers, joined it, and the authorities were soon faced with the necessity of coming to a decision whether balloons should be introduced as a definite part of the service. In that year Lieutenant-General Sir Evelyn Wood was in command of the Aldershot Division; he arranged for a balloon detachment, consisting of Lieutenants Ward and Jones, Sergeant-Major Wise, and some thirty non-commissioned officers and men, to be sent to Aldershot early in the summer to take part in the annual manœuvres. The experiment was a success. The balloons operated with a force which marched out from Aldershot against a flying column of the enemy encamped near the Frensham ponds. A fortunate piece of observation work is believed to have won Sir Evelyn Wood's favour for the new arm. The balloons were asked to answer the question, 'Has the enemy any outposts in rear of his camp?' Lieutenant Ward made an ascent, and though it was getting dusk and the country was not very open, he was able to see the enemy placing pickets round his camp on the nearer side, but could detect no movement beyond the camp. He reported that there were no outposts in rear of the camp; and a night attack sent out from Aldershot was a complete success.

The German Emperor was present at these same manœuvres, and a march past on the Fox Hills was organized for his benefit. The balloon detachment was ordered to take part in it. Balloons, being an unrecognized part of the army, were not hampered by any of those regulations which prescribe the etiquette to be observed on formal occasions. Lieutenant Ward, who was in command of the detachment, resolved that he would march past in the air, at an altitude of about three hundred feet, in a balloon attached to the balloon wagon. The weather was fine and calm, and the balloon sailed by in state, with the result that the spectators all gazed upwards and had not a glance to spare for the horse artillery, the cavalry, or any other arm of the service.

Sir Evelyn Wood reported favourably on the use of balloons, and in 1890 a balloon section was introduced into the British army as a unit of the Royal Engineers. The question of a site for the depot caused some delay. Opinion favoured Aldershot, but the General Officer Commanding objected that Aldershot should be reserved for military training. Major Templer was in favour of Lidsing, where for several years he had carried on at his own costs. In the result the depot moved to Aldershot, and having taken over a piece of very soft ground at South Farnborough, near the canal, began to erect sheds. The contractor for a balloon shed was nearly ruined by the expense of making foundations. So things fluctuated; the factory remained at Chatham, and the depot and section, after a summer spent at Aldershot, collected at Chatham again for the winter of 1890-1. In 1892 a definite move was made to Aldershot, which continued thereafter to be the centre for balloon work. In 1894 the balloon factory, under the superintendence of Colonel Templer, was fully established at South Farnborough. Finally, in 1905, a new and better site was found for it in the same neighbourhood, and by successive additions to the sheds and workshops then erected the present Royal Aircraft Establishment came into being. Some difficulty is presented to the historian by the chameleon changes of official nomenclature, which disguise a real identity and continuity. The Balloon Equipment Store at Woolwich became the untitled factory at Chatham, which in its turn became the balloon factory at South Farnborough. In 1908 it was decorated, and became His Majesty's Balloon Factory; a little later it was named the Army Aircraft Factory; and, later again, in 1912, the Royal Aircraft Factory. So it continued until far through the war, when, its initials being required for the newly-welded Royal Air Force, it was renamed yet again, and was called the Royal Aircraft Establishment. These changes in nomenclature were, of course, office-made, and have none of the significance that attaches to the history of popular names. But the Royal Aircraft Establishment itself was a natural growth, and derives, without break, from the unofficial establishment of balloons at Woolwich.

In 1899 the South African War began. Four balloon sections took an active part in the campaign. The first section, commanded by Captain H. B. Jones, operated with the troops under Lord Methuen, and proved its value at the battle of Magersfontein. The second section, commanded by Major G. M. Heath, was with Sir George White throughout the siege of Ladysmith. An improvised section, commanded by Captain G. E. Phillips, was raised at Cape Town, and joined Sir Redvers Buller's force at Frere Camp, for the relief of Ladysmith. The regular third section, commanded by Lieutenant R. D. B. Blakeney, embarked for South Africa early in 1900, and joined the Tenth Division at Kimberley. It is not easy to make a just estimate of the value of the balloons in this war. Some commanding officers were prejudiced against them, and the difficulties and miscarriages which are inevitable in the use of a new instrument did nothing to remove the prejudice. The steel tubes in which the hydrogen was compressed were cumbrous and heavy to transport. The artillery were not trained to make the fullest use of the balloons; the system of signalling by flags was very imperfect; and the signallers in the air often failed to attract the attention of those with the guns. For all that, the balloons proved their value. The Ladysmith balloon did good service in directing fire during the battle of Lombard's Kop, and, more generally, in reporting on the Boer positions. Later on in the siege it was impossible to get gas, and the balloons fell out of use. At Magersfontein it was by observation from the air that the howitzer batteries got the range of the enemy's ponies concealed in a gully, and accounted for more than two hundred of them. On the 26th of February 1900 an officer in a balloon reported on General Cronje's main position at Paardeberg, and the report was of value in directing the attack on the position.

These operations put a heavy strain on the factory. Its normal output of one balloon a month was increased during the war to two balloons a month, and new buildings at a cost of more than four thousand pounds were proposed in 1900, and approved by the Aldershot Command. Even during the South African War there were other calls on the factory. In the summer of 1900 a balloon section, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Macdonald, was embarked for China; in the following year the factory supplied two balloons and stores for the Antarctic Expedition of Captain Scott. These demands interfered with experimental activities, which when the war was ended, and especially when the new factory was built in 1905, were renewed with great zest. As early as January 1902 Colonel Templer, having visited Paris to report on the doings of M. Santos Dumont, recommended that experiments with dirigible balloons should be carried out at once, but received from the War Office the reply that the estimates for the year, which, apart from these experiments, amounted to £12,000, must be cut down to half that sum. Nevertheless from time to time grants were obtained for the construction of elongated balloons, for a complete wireless telegraphy equipment, and, in 1903, for a dirigible balloon. The factory was a small place, but it was full of energy. In 1904 experiments were carried out with man-lifting kites, with photography from the air, with signalling devices, with mechanical apparatus for hauling down the balloons, and finally with petrol motors. It must always stand to the credit of those who were in charge of the factory that when the new era came, revolutionizing all the conditions, and when, not many years later, the Great War made its sudden and enormous demands, they rose to the occasion. Up to May 1906 Colonel Templer was superintendent of the balloon factory. He was succeeded by Colonel J. E. Capper, who held the position till October 1909. During these early years the balloon factory and balloon school, though nominally separate, were under the same control. The chief point of difference was that the factory employed some civilians, whereas the school was wholly in the hands of the military. Mr. Haldane decided to separate them, and in 1909 appointed Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman superintendent of the balloon factory, while Colonel Capper, who was succeeded within a year by Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, Bart., took over the command of the balloon school. Colonel Capper was a firm believer in the future of the aeroplane, and a true prophet. In a lecture on military ballooning, delivered at the Royal United Service Institution in 1906, just before he was appointed superintendent of the balloon factory, he concluded with a forecast. 'There is another and far more important phase of aerial locomotion,' he said, 'which in the near future may probably have to be reckoned with.... In a few years we may expect to see men moving swiftly through the air on simple surfaces, just as a gliding bird moves.... Such machines will move very rapidly, probably never less than twenty and up to a hundred miles per hour; nothing but the heaviest storms will stop them. They will be small and difficult to hit, and very difficult to damage, and their range of operations will be very large.' Colonel Capper acted on this belief, and during his time at the factory did what he could with meagre funds to encourage aviation. The policy which, in the spring of 1908, he recommended to the War Office was to buy any practicable machines that offered themselves in the market, and at the same time not to relax effort at the factory. The attempts of Lieutenant Dunne and Mr. Cody to construct an efficient aeroplane seemed hopeful, and the factory took them under its wing. Lieutenant Dunne worked at Blair Atholl from 1907 onward, and Mr. Cody, in the winter of 1907-8, began to construct his machine at Farnborough. In the autumn of 1908 the Hon. C. S. Rolls offered to bring to Farnborough a biplane of the Farman-Delagrange type, and to experiment with it on behalf of the Government, in return for the necessary shed accommodation. The acceptance of this proposal had been authorized when an accident to Mr. Cody, caused by want of space, discredited the fitness of the factory ground for aeroplane work, and the arrangement with Mr. Rolls was deferred. He renewed his proposal in the spring of 1909, this time with the offer of a Wright machine, and he had established himself at Farnborough, when his death, at the Bournemouth meeting of 1910, cut short a career of brilliant promise, for Mr. Rolls was not only one of the best of practical aviators, but was alert in all that concerned the science of his craft. At the factory the experiments of Mr. Cody and Lieutenant Dunne were supported and continued, but progress was slow and uncertain, and when, early in 1909, the two machines between them had involved an expense of something like £2,500, further experiments with them were abandoned for a time. Their performance did not seem to warrant a large national outlay, and the bulk of Colonel Capper's work was devoted to what seemed the more promising task of supplying airships for the army. The earliest of these had been designed by Colonel Templer, and two envelopes of gold-beater's skin were ready by 1904, but the cost of making them had been so great that further progress on the ship was arrested until 1907. In September of that year the first British army airship, the Nulli Secundus, sausage-shaped, about a hundred and twenty feet long and less than thirty feet in diameter, took the air and passed successfully through its trials. It was driven by an Antoinette engine of from forty to fifty horse-power, and attained a speed of about sixteen miles an hour.

On the 5th of October the ship flew from Farnborough to London, circled round St. Paul's Cathedral, manœuvred over the grounds at Buckingham Palace, and, on her return journey, as she could make no headway against the wind, descended in the centre of the cycle-track at the Crystal Palace, having been in the air for three and a half hours. Five days later, to avoid damage by a squall, the ship was deflated, packed up, and returned to Farnborough by road. Colonel Capper, influenced doubtless by the success of the Lebaudy airship in France, decided to rebuild Nulli Secundus as a semi-rigid, but funds were short, and work could not be commenced on her until the following year. In the reconstruction every possible portion of the original ship was ingeniously utilized. The reconstructed ship was taken out for her first trial in the air on the 24th of July 1908. During this flight of four miles, lasting eighteen minutes, she suffered various mishaps. After two more short flights she was deflated at the end of August, and the career of the Nulli Secundus was ended. Another smaller and fish-shaped airship, nicknamed the Baby, was put in hand during the autumn of 1908, but was not completed until the following spring. To enable her to carry a more powerful engine the Baby was enlarged by cutting the envelope in half and introducing a wide belt of gold-beater's skin in the middle. Rechristened the Beta, she was ready for flight at the end of May, and on the 3rd of June 1910 made a successful night-flight from Farnborough to London and back, covering a distance of about seventy miles in just over four hours.

The output of the factory was small, almost insignificant, compared with the efforts being made by foreign nations. Colonel Capper preferred not to attempt the construction of rigid airships till more was known of them. The Zeppelins were the only reputed success, and no Zeppelin, at that time, had succeeded in making a forced landing without damage to the ship. But the output of the factory is no true measure of the progress made. The officers in charge worked with an eye to the future. Early in 1906 a proposal was put forward by Brevet Colonel J. D. Fullerton, Royal Engineers, and was warmly supported by Colonel Templer, for the appointment of a committee consisting of military officers, aeronauts, mechanical engineers, and naval representatives, to investigate the whole question of aeronautics. A modified form of this proposal was put forward three years later, in 1909, by Mr. Haldane, then Secretary of State for War. He invited Lord Rayleigh and Dr. Richard Glazebrook, the chairman and the director of the National Physical Laboratory, to confer with him, and asked them to prepare for his consideration a scheme which should secure the co-operation of the laboratory with the services, thus providing scientific inquiry with opportunities for full-scale experiment. A scheme was drafted; it was discussed and approved at a conference held in the room of the First Lord of the Admiralty, and was submitted to the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, who took action on it, and appointed 'The Advisory Committee for 'Aeronautics', under the presidency of Lord Rayleigh. Seven of its ten members were Fellows of the Royal Society. The chairman was Dr. Glazebrook. The Army was represented by Major-General Sir Charles Hadden, the Navy by Captain R. H. S. Bacon, the Meteorological Office by Dr. W. N. Shaw. The other members were Mr. Horace Darwin, Sir George Greenhill, Mr. F. W. Lanchester, Mr. H. R. A. Mallock, and Professor J. E. Petavel. To these, soon after, were added Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, when he took over the charge of the balloon factory, and Captain Murray F. Sueter, R.N., who deserves not a little credit for his early and persistent efforts to foster aeronautics in the navy. The great value of this committee was that it brought together the various bodies concerned with aeronautics, and combined their efforts. In particular, it gave to the new science the highly skilled services of the National Physical Laboratory, which organized at Teddington a new department, with elaborate plant, for the investigation of aeronautical questions. From this time onward the National Physical Laboratory worked in the closest co-operation with the balloon factory. Mathematical and physical investigations were continuously carried on at the laboratory, and improvements suggested by these researches were put to the practical test at the factory. Questions of air resistance, of the stresses and strains on materials, of the best shape for the wing of an aeroplane and the best fabric for the envelope of an airship—these and scores of other problems were systematically and patiently attacked. There were no theatrically quick results, but the work done laid a firm and broad base for all subsequent success. Hasty popular criticism is apt to measure the value of scientific advice by the tale of things done, and to overlook the credit that belongs to it for things prevented. The science of aeronautics in the year 1909 was in a very difficult and uncertain stage of its early development; any mistakes in laying the foundations of a national air force would not only have involved the nation in much useless expense, but would have imperilled the whole structure. Delay and caution are seldom popular, but they are often wise. Those who are stung by the accusation of sloth are likely to do something foolish in a hurry. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of our aeronautical development than its comparative freedom from costly mistakes. This freedom was attained by a happy conjunction of theory and practice, of the laboratory and the factory. The speculative conclusions of the merely theoretical man had to undergo the test of action in the rain and the wind. The notions and fancies of the merely practical man were subjected to the criticism of those who could tell him why he was wrong. The rapid growth in power and efficiency of the British air force owed much to the labours of those who befriended it before it was born, and who, when it was confronted with the organized science of all the German universities, endowed it with the means of rising to a position of vantage.

The same sort of credit belongs to the conduct of the balloon factory under Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, who had charge of it during that very crucial period from the autumn of 1909 to the summer of 1916. When he took over the factory he found at Farnborough one small machine shop, one shed for making balloons, and one airship shed. The workers were about a hundred in number, fifty men and fifty women. Seven years later, when Lieutenant-Colonel O'Gorman was appointed to the Air Board as consulting engineer to the Director-General of Military Aeronautics, the hundred had swollen to four thousand six hundred, and the buildings situated on the forest land of Farnborough had increased and multiplied out of all recognition. This development was made necessary by the war, but it would have been impossible but for the foresight which directed the operations of the period before the war. The factory, working in close co-operation with the Advisory Committee and the National Physical Laboratory, very early became the chief centre for experimental aviation with full-sized machines. Systematic and rapid advance was hardly to be hoped for from unaided private initiative. Many private makers of machines were zealous and public-spirited, but there was no considerable private demand for aeroplanes, and a firm of manufacturers cannot carry on at a loss. Poor though it was in resources, and very meagrely supported by Government grants, the factory was what the country had to depend on; and it rose to its opportunities.

Aviation, in its early stages, was cramped and harassed by engine failure. The improvement of the light engine, in design and construction, was the most pressing of needs; but no sufficiently rapid improvement could be hoped for except by the encouragement of private enterprise. For some years the factory refrained from producing any official engine design, and the superintendent attempted to encourage the efforts of private firms. In order to specify the conditions which makers must observe, and to apply proper tests to the engines supplied, it was thought desirable to build an engine laboratory. Accordingly an engine test plant was devised and installed. It was set in a wind-tunnel, where by steeply tilting the engine both sideways and lengthways, in varying currents of air, the actual flying conditions could be imitated, and the performance of the engine measured. This plant for the testing of engines might have been used with valuable results, but for one hindrance—the makers of engines were unwilling to send them to the factory to be tested, and the plant remained idle. There was a misunderstanding, which after a time became acute, between the factory and the private makers of aircraft. The factory, zealous for the public interest, believed that it could best serve their interest by encouraging, supervising, and co-ordinating the efforts of the makers. The makers, jealous of supervision and control, did not accept that view. A wise judgement will be slow to blame either. The officials of the factory were strong in the knowledge that their work was disinterested and aimed only at the public good. The makers, remembering that progress in aviation had come chiefly by way of private enterprise, feared the paralysing effect of official control, and the habitual tendency of officials, especially of competent officials, to extend their ambitions and their powers. The makers, in short, dreaded a Government monopoly. A difference of this kind, even when it is gently and considerately handled, always furnishes a happy hunting-ground for the political agitator and the grievance-monger. The thing came to a head during the war, when the success of the Fokkers, which reached its height during the early months of 1916, made the public uneasy. The Fokkers late in 1915 had been fitted with guns which fired through the airscrew. This was the secret of their success, which was short-lived, but was made the occasion, in Parliament and elsewhere, for a long array of charges against the administration and command of the Royal Flying Corps. A parliamentary committee, under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Bailhache, was appointed to investigate these charges. Their report vindicated the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Aircraft Factory, and expressed admiration for the work done by both under the stress and strain of war. The charges, it should be added, were not supported by the private makers, or 'the trade', as they are called; none of them made any complaint, and some of them went out of their way to record their gratitude for the help they had received from the factory.

Nevertheless, the uncertainty of its relations with the trade caused the factory, in its early days, to undertake a great diversity of business. The designing of aircraft was plainly a matter of the first importance, and for this designing it was necessary to collect a trained staff. The difficulty here was that there were no professional designers; the aeronautical world was a strange ferment of inventors, amateurs, enthusiasts, heretics of all sorts, wedded to their own notions, and mutually hostile. The factory decided to employ only those designers who had had a solid course of training in engineering shops. By degrees engineers trained in shipyards and officers skilled in motor-car design were added to the staff of the drawing office until, by 1916, it had increased from some half-dozen to two hundred and seventy-five.

When the war came this drawing office proved its value. An immense number of aeroplanes was required, and many firms had to be employed to make them. Some of these firms were well staffed, others not so well. The factory made elaborate detailed dimensioned drawings, marked with every permitted kind and degree of variation—as many as four hundred drawings to a single aeroplane. With the help of these drawings all kinds of firms—organ-builders, makers of furniture, or pianos, or gramophones, or motor-cars—could be turned on to aeroplane manufacture. In the course of two years half a million drawings were issued to various firms; and those firms to whom the whole business of engineering was strange were successfully initiated in one of its most delicate and difficult branches. Here, too, the outcry was raised, in the newspapers and in Parliament, that the factory was attempting to make a Government monopoly of aircraft design and air-engine design. The accusation was disproved; it would probably never have been made but for the admirable efficiency of the factory in rising to meet a national crisis. National defence, it is agreed, cannot safely be left wholly to private enterprise, even in England. The factory carried out an immense number of experiments in connexion with aeroplanes and airships. The quest for stability, longitudinal and lateral, in aeroplanes was the chief preoccupation of these early years. Powerful engines are useless in a ship which cannot be trusted to keep afloat. It was this quest, as much as anything, which drew the factory into designing aeroplanes. The various types of aeroplane designed at the factory bear names which consist of a pair of initial letters, with a number affixed. The letters indicate the type of the machine; the number indicates its place in the series of continually improving variants of the same type. Three of these types were gradually being evolved at the factory in the course of the year 1911. The earliest to attain to practical success was the B.E. type of machine. Every pilot who had his training in the early days of the war was familiar with this machine, though not every pilot knew that the initials are a monument to Louis Blériot, who first flew the Channel. His achievement gave a great vogue to his monoplane, which was imitated by many designers; and when the factory produced a biplane fitted, like all monoplanes, with a tractor airscrew, in front of the machine, the biplane was called the Blériot Experimental. The F.E. type is the Farman Experimental, a pusher biplane, which for a long time held its own by virtue of two advantages. The observer, being seated in the very prow of the machine, could fire a gun forward without being obstructed by the airscrew. This advantage disappeared after 1915, when, by the invention of synchronizing gears, which timed the bullets to pass between the revolving blades of the screw, tractor machines were enabled to fire directly ahead. But another advantage persisted. In night-flying, when the eyes are strained to pick up dim shapes in the dark, a clear field of vision is all-important, and the F.E. type of machine continued to be used in night raids throughout the war. The third type was the S.E., or Scouting Experimental. The fifth variant of this type, the S.E. 5, gained an enormous reputation in the war as a fighting machine, and indeed was preferred by some pilots to the best scout machines of private makers.

A fourth factory machine, produced just before the war, and no less famous than the other three, was called the R.E., or Reconnaissance Experimental. It was the first almost completely stable machine. Stability is not of the first importance to a fighting scout, whose attention is concentrated on his own manœuvres, but where a machine is used for observation, and the pilot must needs pay heed to all that is visible on the earth beneath, stability is essential. A perfectly stable machine maintains an even keel in varying gusts of wind. If it is tilted, it rights itself. If it is nose-dived, the pilot has only to let go of the control, and after a descent of some hundreds of feet it comes out of the dive and resumes its horizontal flight. The perfecting of this type of machine was achieved at the factory, and was the work of many minds. On the mathematical side the theory of stability was investigated by Mr. F. W. Lanchester, an authority on the theory of flight, and by Professor G. H. Bryan, a great pioneer, who in 1911 produced his book on Stability in Aviation. He had long been interested in the subject; his work, which is recognized as epoch-making, laid a sound mathematical basis for the theory of flight, and directed the work of others along the lines of fruitful experiment. The theoretical conclusions of Professor Bryan were reduced to a practical form by Mr. Leonard Bairstow and the members of the staff of the National Physical Laboratory, who put the doctrine to the proof of experiment, at first with models, and then with full-scale machines. The dangerous work of trying conclusions with the air fell to the young men of the factory. A brilliant young Cambridge man, Mr. E. T. Busk, of King's College, who had been trained in the laboratory of Professor Bertram Hopkinson, joined the staff of the factory in the summer of 1912, having previously spent a month at the National Physical Laboratory, to acquaint himself with the work there. He understood the theoretical basis of aeroplane design, and he was a daring and skilful pilot. The R.E. machine was designed by the staff of the factory; Mr. Busk, in collaboration with Mr. Bairstow, worked at the problem of giving it stability. He cheerfully took all risks in trying the full-sized machines in the air. When the R.E. 1 had been theoretically warranted, by experiments with models, to right herself after a nose-dive, he tested the theory by flying the machine to a great height, turning her nose down and letting go the controls. As he expected, she righted. To test the machine he flew her in all weathers, hurling her against the wind storms. For the purposes of these practical tests he invented an instrument of his own called the Ripograph, which recorded on a single strip all the pilot's movements in warping and steering, as well as the speed, inclination, and roll of the machine. This machine, when the rudder was turned right or left, automatically banked itself; and when the engine was cut off, took the angle of gliding flight. It was a later variant of the same machine, an R.E. 8 belonging to the Australian Flying Corps, of which it is told that, when the pilot and observer had both been shot dead, in December 1917, the machine continued to fly in wide left-hand circles, and ultimately, when the fuel was exhausted and the engine stopped, fell near St.-Pol, some thirty miles from the scene of combat, without completely wrecking itself. When the war broke out Mr. Busk was more than ever needed at the factory. On the 5th of November 1914 he mounted in an experimental B.E. 2c machine to a height of about eight hundred feet. Exactly what happened will never be known; the petrol vapour must have been ignited by a spark; the machine burst into flames, and after drifting aimlessly for a time, fell on Laffan's Plain. The death of such men as Charles Rolls and Edward Busk was a part of the heavy price that had to be paid for victory; before victory was in sight. There was no other way; the work that they did could not be spared, and could never have been even attempted except by the quiet of absolute courage.

The business undertaken by the factory, apart from its main business of research and experiment, was almost bewildering in its diversity. From the first the officials of the factory insisted on maintaining a high standard of workmanship, which spells safety in the air. This question of workmanship became doubly important during the war, when, in order to improve the performance of machines, all avoidable weight had to be sacrificed, and the factor of safety, as it is called, reduced to the lowest permissible limit. The breaking of a spar or a wire, the failure of a bolt or a nut, may mean a fatal accident. Further, the factory did what it could to standardize the component parts of an aeroplane, so as to facilitate repair; and this, before the war came, had been largely achieved. It designed and fitted up the instruments necessary for the pilot's use, which record for him his speed through the air, the consumption of his fuel, the rate of revolutions of his airscrew, the height attained, and other essentials. The average pilot, it is well known, is supplied with more instruments than he uses, but it is true nevertheless that familiarity with the use of instruments has often staved off disasters. At first the factory had refrained from initiating engine designs, but when competition and trial had shown that there was no immediate prospect of obtaining a thoroughly satisfactory engine from English makers, it asked permission of the War Office, and in 1913 designed its own engine. Among its notable devices one or two may be mentioned. The mooring-mast for airships, to which they can be tethered in the open, was invented at the factory, and developed independently for naval work, by the Admiralty. The fair-shaped wires and struts, to decrease air resistance, were a great improvement. These parts of an aeroplane offer so considerable a resistance to its passage through the air, that when their transverse section, instead of being round, is streamlined, the speed of the machine is increased by several miles an hour. In short, during those early years the factory, which directly or indirectly had to supply most of the requirements of the balloon school, the Air Battalion, and the Royal Flying Corps, combined in itself all the functions of what later on were highly organized separate Government departments—inspection, stores, repairs, the testing of inventions, and the like.

From what has been said it will be seen that the factory continued, as it began, in close relations with the army. It had been founded, under army auspices, at an important inland military centre, and it was not so well adapted, by its history or situation, to serve the navy. The results obtained by research at the National Physical Laboratory, and by experiment at the factory, furthered the science of aviation, and were open to all. But when flight began, a united national air force was not thought of by any one, or was thought of only in dreams. Meantime the new invention offered to the navy, no less than to the army, new opportunities of increasing the power of its own weapon. The problems of the navy were not the problems of the army, and a certain self-protective jealousy made the two forces keep apart, so that each might develop unhampered by alien control. The navy trusted more to private firms, and less to the factory. It was a difference of tendency rather than a clean-cut difference of policy. Both army and navy made use of the results obtained at the laboratory and the factory. The army employed many private makers for the supply of machines and engines, and the navy, in the course of the war, ordered a very large number of that most famous of factory machines—the B.E. 2c. But the navy stood as far aloof from the factory as possible, and looked mainly to private firms not only for the supply of machines and engines, but for much of its experimental work. Several of the firms who devoted themselves to the needs of naval aviation did excellent service as pioneers. The most distinguished of these was the firm of the Short brothers—that is, of Messrs. Oswald, Eustace, and Horace Short. The impulse of their work was scientific, not commercial. As early as 1897 Mr. Eustace Short was an amateur balloonist, and his younger brother Oswald, at the age of fifteen, began to accompany him on his voyages. In a public library they came across that celebrated record of balloon voyages, Travels in the Air, by James Glaisher, and made up their minds to construct a balloon of their own. Success led them on step by step; in 1905 they contracted to supply captive war balloons for the Government of India, and in 1906 they became the club engineers of the newly formed Royal Aero Club. The reported successes of the Wright brothers in America shifted the interest of the club, and of the club engineers, from balloons to flying machines; in 1908 they built their first glider—a complete miniature Wright machine, without the power plant—for the Hon. C. S. Rolls. At about this time they were joined by the eldest of the three brothers, Mr. Horace Short, an accomplished man of science and a lover of adventure; from this time onward the firm of the Short brothers never looked back. From sketches made by Mr. Horace Short, they built six biplanes to the order of the Wrights. They constructed, in 1909, the aeroplane on which Mr. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon won the prize offered by the Daily Mail for the first all-British machine which should fly a circular mile. They made the outer cover, gas-bags, valves, pressure-gauges, and controlling rudders for the first rigid airship constructed to the order of the Admiralty. Their early work was done at Shellness, the flying centre for members of the Royal Aero Club, but in 1909 they moved their sheds to Eastchurch in the Isle of Sheppey, which thereafter became the flying centre of the navy. It was here that the first four naval aviators were taught to fly. The tale of the successes of the various Short machines would make something not unlike a complete history of early naval aviation. The first landing on the water by an aeroplane fitted with airbags, the first flight from the deck of a ship, the first flight up the Thames, not to mention many other incidents in the progress of record-making, must all be credited to the Short factory. The brothers held that the right way to advance aviation was to strengthen the resources of the aeroplane-designing firms, so that they might carry out their ideas without being dependent on Government demands, and the extraordinary success of the Short designs for aeroplanes and seaplanes did much to promote that creed.

At the factory the work with airships was continued, though it languished somewhat as interest in aviation grew. England had shown the way in the use of gold-beater's skin, which is greatly superior in endurance and impermeability to any other fabric, but the knowledge leaked through to Germany, and when the price of the skin, always high, suddenly rose higher from heavy German buying, England fell back on rubbered cotton. The Baby, altered and enlarged, was rechristened the Beta, and a new ship, called the Gamma, made of rubbered fabric, was added in 1910. The Gamma, though twice reconstructed and altered, was never satisfactory. In 1912 Beta No. 2, built in streamline shape, about a hundred feet long, stiffened at the nose with ribs like umbrella-ribs, and driven by a forty-five horse-power Clerget engine, was more of a success. Other airships, the Delta and Epsilon, of increased size and engine-power, were designed between 1911 and 1913. In this latter year the Air Committee, a body appointed in 1912 by the Committee of Imperial Defence, advised that the navy, that is to say, the Naval Wing of the newly-formed Royal Flying Corps, should take over the development of all lighter-than-air craft. This advice, which was carried into effect by the end of the year, put an end to military experiments with airships, and supplied the navy with the nucleus of that airship force which during the war did so much good service, in convoy, in scouting for submarines, and in patrolling the coast and the English Channel.

The earliest experiments undertaken by the Admiralty with craft lighter than air had been ambitious and unfortunate. It was always recognized by those who gave thought to aeronautics that for naval purposes the airship has some advantages over the aeroplane. It can remain longer in the air, so that its range of action is greater; it can easily carry wireless apparatus both for transmitting and for receiving; it can take up a stationary point of vantage where the aeroplane must needs keep moving; it can lift a greater weight; and (not least important) it can enormously add to the efficiency of the observer by supplying him with comfortable and habitable quarters. These things did not escape the attention of the small and enthusiastic band of naval officers who from the first were believers in the air. Their ideas took shape in proposals which were submitted by the Director of Naval Ordnance (Captain Bacon) to the First Sea Lord (Lord Fisher) on the 21st of July 1908. What was proposed, in effect, was that Messrs. Vickers, Son & Maxim, who had been so successful in the design and manufacture of submarines, should be asked to undertake the construction of a large rigid airship of the Zeppelin type. After many meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence, at which Captain Bacon propounded his views with great vigour, the committee recommended that the sum of £35,000 should be placed in the Navy Estimates for 1909-10, for the construction of an airship to be designed and built under Admiralty supervision. The Treasury agreed, and Messrs. Vickers's tender for the airship was accepted on the 7th of May 1909. The huge Cavendish Dock at Barrow-in-Furness was appropriated to the work, and the greatest possible secrecy was observed in all the preparations. A special section was formed to assist in the construction of the ship—Captain Murray F. Sueter, R.N., and, with him, Lieutenant Neville Usborne, Lieutenant C. P. Talbot, and Chief Artificer Engineer A. Sharpe. For two years public curiosity was kept alive on a diet of conjecture. A good part of this time was taken up in improvements and modifications of the design of the ship. When at last in May 1911 the shed was opened and the huge airship was brought out to her mooring-mast in the dock, those who had expected a larger and better Zeppelin seemed justified in their belief. The ship was 512 feet long and 48 feet in diameter, with a blunt bow and a pointed stern. Her capacity was approximately 700,000 cubic feet. The framework was made of a new alloy called 'duralumin', nearly as strong in tension as mild steel and not much heavier than aluminium. It was covered with 46,000 square yards of water-tight silk fabric, so treated with aluminium dust and rubber that the upper surface of the hull, which had to resist the rays of the sun, showed the silver sheen of a fish, while the lower surface, which had to resist the damp vapours of the water, was of a dull yellowish colour. The hydrogen was contained in seventeen gas-bags of rubbered fabric. The ship was fitted with two Wolseley motors of one hundred and eighty horse-power each, and with a whole series of vertical and horizontal rudders. She was popularly called the Mayfly—a name which, both in and out of Parliament, suggested to bright wits an ill-omened pun.

She never flew. For four days she remained tethered to the mooring-mast in the centre of the Cavendish Dock, and successfully completed her mooring trials. During this time the wind was rough, reaching in gusts a velocity of forty-five miles an hour. This wind, being a severer test than any previous airship had successfully encountered when moored in the open, proved the strength of the ship. But her very strength, and the completeness of her fittings, told against her in another way; the lift of an airship, consisting as it does of a small excess of buoyancy over weight, is always a matter of the most delicate and difficult calculation, and her lift proved to be insufficient. She was taken back into her shed, without mishap, and alterations were at once put in hand. On the 24th of September 1911 she was again drawn out of her shed to be transferred to the mooring-post; in the process she broke her back, and became a total wreck. The ensuing court of inquiry pronounced that the accident was due to structural weakness; the naval officers and men were exonerated from all blame.

This accident had a far-reaching effect. It disappointed public hopes and strengthened the case of objectors. There are always critics who take a certain mild pleasure in failure, not because they prefer it to success, but because they have predicted it. The pioneers of aeronautics could not afford to lose friends; they had none too many. The men in high authority at the Admiralty were not convinced that airships were a desirable and practicable addition to naval resources. They would all have died to save England, but they held that she was to be saved in the old way, on the sea. One gallant and distinguished admiral, when he first saw the Mayfly, said, 'It is the work of a lunatic'. The consequences of the failure were soon apparent. The president of the court of inquiry recommended to the First Sea Lord (Sir A. K. Wilson) that the policy of naval airship construction should, for the time, be abandoned. At a conference held on the 25th of January 1912, in the First Sea Lord's room at the Admiralty, it was decided, in accordance with this recommendation, that the airship experiments should be discontinued. Moreover, the special section, the nucleus of a naval air service, was, by the decision of the Admiralty, broken up, and Captain Sueter and his officers were returned to general service. When the construction of rigid airships was at last taken up again early in 1914, they were too late for the market; the heavy demands of the war delayed their completion, and no British rigid airship was in use at the time of the battle of Jutland.

It is to the credit of the pioneers of the Naval Air Service that when they were faced with this disaster, after years of fruitless effort, they did not lose heart or hope, but held on their course. Time was on their side. In the later autumn of 1911 the Committee of Imperial Defence, as shall be explained in the next chapter, appointed a technical sub-committee to give advice on the measures which should be taken to secure for the country an efficient aerial service. On the 5th of February 1912 Captain Sueter gave evidence to this body of experts, and sketched in broad outline his ideas for the development of a naval air service. Airships and aeroplanes, he said, were both required, and neither of them should be developed at the expense of the other. An airship had the great advantage that she could carry long-distance wireless apparatus, and could send or receive a message over a space of three hundred miles. She could stop her engines and drift over suspected places, for the detection of submarines and mines. The seaplane, he maintained, should also be developed, and he saw no insuperable difficulties in devising a machine that should be able to alight on either water or land and to rise again into the air from either. 'I think you have got a certain amount of intellect', he said, 'in the Navy to do it, and I think you have got a certain amount of intellect in the Army to do it. The two together, with the Advisory Committee—there are talented people there—and the manufacturers in the country; between us all we could devise something. We did not have great difficulty with the submarine boats; and that was all new at first.' The problem of the air, he held, was vital for the Navy; and when he was asked whether we must try to command the air as well as the sea, he replied, 'I think it will come to that. I do not say that we wish to do so, but I think we will be forced to do so.' In a memorandum submitted to the same sub-committee by Captain Bertram Dickson the meaning of the command of the air is more fully explained. 'In the case of a European war', he writes, between two countries, both sides would be equipped with large corps of aeroplanes, each trying to obtain information of the other, and to hide its own movements. The efforts which each would exert in order to hinder or prevent the enemy from obtaining information ... would lead to the inevitable result of a war in the air, for the supremacy of the air, by armed aeroplanes against each other. This fight for the supremacy of the air in future wars will be of the first and greatest importance, and when it has been won the land and sea forces of the loser will be at such a disadvantage that the war will certainly have to terminate at a much smaller loss in men and money to both sides.'

The whole matter is clearly stated in these passages. The people of Great Britain live in an island. They do not desire—they have never desired—to dominate the world, or to dictate to other peoples how they shall live. They do desire to be free of the world, and to take their luck in it, passing to and fro without hindrance. This freedom of theirs has repeatedly been imperilled by foreign powers, who have always desired a greater degree of uniformity and control than is tolerable to Britain. In order to keep their doors open the people of this island have been compelled to fight at sea, and have attained a measure of naval power which is sometimes called the mastery of the seas, but which, in essence, is no more than the obstinate and resolute assertion of their right to be the masters of themselves. They have been adventurers and pirates; they have never been tyrants. They fight desperately because they know that even on distant seas they are fighting for their lives, and for all that makes their lives worth living. Their many victories, under which they groan, have compelled them to learn the imperial art, an art which they practise not without skill, but reluctantly, and without zest. With the conquest of the air their task of self-defence has been doubled. It is not to be wondered at that those who were responsible for keeping open the gates of the sea should turn their eyes away from the new duty. But the new duty—command of the air, so to call it—was plainly visible to those who once looked at it. We must keep the highways open, or our freedom is gone. We must command the air. 'I do not say that we wish to do so,' said Captain Sueter, 'but I think we shall be forced to do so.' The whole of our naval history is summed up in that sentence; and the whole of our air policy is foretold.

The force that was to compel us was already in being. The science of aeronautics had passed from the experimental to the practical stage, and foreign powers were rapidly building up very formidable air forces. Of these foreign forces we naturally knew most of the French, for France was both our neighbour and our friend. In October 1911 a very full and illuminative report was supplied to the Government by Lieutenant Ralph Glyn, an officer attached to the newly-formed Air Battalion. It described, with reasoned comments, the aeronautical exercises carried out by the French air corps at the Camp de Châlons during the previous August. At that time the French War Ministry had at its disposal, so far as could be ascertained, something between two hundred and two hundred and twenty aeroplanes. The biplanes were all Farmans. The monoplanes, which were on the whole preferred by expert opinion to the biplanes, were of many types, all famous for achievement—Nieuports, Blériots, Deperdussins, R.E.P.'s, Antoinettes, and others. The methods of training were elaborate and complete, and the air corps were continually practised in co-operation with all other arms—infantry, cavalry, and artillery. 'There is no doubt at all', says the writer, 'but that the Germans have suddenly realized that the French Army since the general employment of aeroplanes with troops has improved its fighting efficiency by at least twenty per cent.... For the last five years the Germans have concentrated their whole attention upon the building, manœuvring, and employment with troops, of dirigibles. They have gained a slight advance over France, in fact, in this branch of aeronautics; but they have quite dropped behind in the question of heavier-than-air machines. France now after an equal period has just, and only just, formed a really efficient fighting aerial corps; and this lead of five years she is determined to maintain.'

This is not an over-statement. From the first the French, who had thought out the whole business, laid great stress on reconnaissance and control of artillery fire as the main uses of aircraft. For reconnaissance the aeroplanes were practised to co-operate with cavalry. For fire control official maps, divided into geometrical squares, so that a pair of numbers will identify a position within a score or so of yards, were supplied in duplicate to the pilots of the aeroplanes and to the commanding officers of batteries. The system of signalling employed was mostly primitive, but already in 1911 the French were experimenting with captive balloons which received the messages from the aeroplane, and by wireless, or some kind of visible signal, transmitted them to the guns. 'Practice', says Lieutenant Glyn, 'has made almost perfect a remarkable system which renders the efficient French artillery more formidable than ever.' Further, infantry were trained to co-operate with aircraft, so as to learn to take advantage of the new arm; and aerial photography was practised, under strict conditions of secrecy, with a surprising degree of success. In short, almost all the uses which later became the commonplaces of the war were exemplified in the French manœuvres of 1911. Battle in the air and the use of aircraft as a weapon of direct offence were later developments.

In October and November of the same year Captain F. H. Sykes, of the General Staff, and Captain J. D. B. Fulton, of the Air Battalion, visited many of the French military and civil aerodromes, and were present at the military aeroplane competition at Rheims. 'The trials held at Rheims', says Captain Sykes, 'are considerably in advance of anything yet attempted.' The machines were flown by the best available pilots, and were under the personal supervision of the makers and designers. Aerodromes were better and more numerous than in England; many of them were situated in wide plains, so that the learner could make his first cross-country flights over good even landing ground. Captain Sykes, in his report, suggests that aeroplane sheds should be erected and flying schools started at stations not very far apart from one another in England, so that cross-country training may be facilitated. 'These stations should be as near as possible', he adds, 'to where troops are quartered, so as to afford an opportunity for aeroplanes to work with troops on field days. The cost would, I think, be inconsiderable in comparison to the value gained.' This suggestion was carried out, but not until the war had compelled an immense expansion of the air force.

The French, then, were ahead of us, and were showing us the way. Of German preparations less was known, and estimates of the German air force, even when made by experts, were largely guesswork. The Zeppelin airships enjoyed a world-wide fame, and there is good reason to think that the German Government practised a certain measure of frankness with regard to their airship establishment in order the more effectively to shroud the very resolute effort they were making to overtake the French in the production of aeroplanes. If ever they thought that the airship alone would do their business, that dream soon passed away. A good deal of valuable information concerning the German air force was obtained in the summer of 1912, just after the formation of the Royal Flying Corps. In June of that year the Technical Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (a body whose cumbrous name does no justice to its swift decisions) dispatched two of its members, Captain Sueter and Mr. O'Gorman, to France, Austria, and Germany, to report, primarily, on the whole airship question. In Germany these delegates took occasion to visit five aeroplane factories—the Rumpler, Etrich, Albatross, Harland, and Fokker, besides inspecting various flying grounds and wireless stations. Their report is full of interest. 'No year passes', they remark, 'in which orders equal to our total equipment are not placed by Germany, France, and Italy.' In Germany they found there were thirty airships available, and a large Government factory for rigids 'only thinly pretending to be a private speculation'. They append a list of no fewer than twenty-eight military flying grounds at which there were flying camps. They were deeply impressed by the evidence of large expenditure, direct and indirect, on aerial preparation, and the systematic manner of that expenditure. 'The position of Germany', they say, 'appeared to us to be widely different from what it is described in the English press ... and far more active.' During their trip in the Zeppelin airship Viktoria Luise they were struck with the fervour of popular enthusiasm. 'On passing over villages, isolated farms, &c., everybody turned out and cheered and waved.' This popular enthusiasm was further demonstrated by the substantial evidence of large subscriptions from municipal bodies and private persons. Everywhere they found reason to suspect a certain amount of concealed Government support and subsidy underlying ostensibly private ventures.

This report was presented in July 1912. The technical sub-committee, at a later date, drew some further lessons from it. 'The report', they say, 'shows that German airships have, by repeated voyages, proved their ability to reconnoitre the whole of the German coastline on the North Sea. In any future war with Germany, except in foggy or stormy weather, it is probable that no British war vessels or torpedo craft will be able to approach within many miles of the German coast without their presence being discovered and reported to the enemy. Unless we had obtained command of the air, any idea that our torpedo craft could seek shelter among the Frisian Islands and remain there undetected must be abandoned.... The report also shows that German airships have covered a distance equal to the distance from Germany to the British coast without replenishing fuel.... In favourable weather the German airships can already be employed for reconnaissance over vast areas of the North Sea, and one airship, owing to the extended view from high altitudes under favourable weather conditions, is able to accomplish the work of a large number of scouting cruisers. It is difficult to exaggerate the value of this advantage to Germany. By a systematic and regular patrol of the approaches to the coast, it will be possible in fair weather for German airships to discover the approach of an enemy and to give timely warning of attack, and if the approaches are reported free from the enemy the defenders of the ports and the crews of ships in these ports will be relieved for many hours from the intense and harassing strain caused by uncertainty as to the probability of attack.' Further, the sub-committee point out that the great continental airships, which can easily carry thirty persons, can certainly carry a sufficient weight of bombs to destroy torpedo-craft, dock gates, power stations, magazines, and the like; and that they are far less dependent on favourable weather than is generally supposed. 'In short, every one of the strategical and tactical advantages which the Committee of Imperial Defence anticipated in 1909 when recommending the construction of a rigid airship for the Navy, has been, or is in a fair way of being, realized by the German airships. These results have only been attained by perseverance under the most discouraging conditions of disaster and loss.'

The total air force possessed by Great Britain, to set over against these great foreign organizations, consisted of two small army airships, named Beta and Gamma, and a very small number of aeroplanes.

The report of Captain Sueter and Mr. O'Gorman put the whole matter in a new light, and showed the need for action. In regard to aeroplanes, this action had already been taken. In the winter of 1911-12 the sub-committee had recommended the formation of a corps of aviators; and this recommendation, as shall be told in the next chapter, had been promptly carried into effect. As for airships, which chiefly concerned the navy, the question was now not whether the Admiralty were willing to take up experimental work with a newfangled invention, but whether they could afford to neglect a weapon of certain value, which might prove to be a determining factor in war. Airships of the largest size and power must be provided, said the sub-committee, in the near future. But to build these airships at once, they were agreed, would be to court disaster. A large airship is of little use to men who have had no training in the handling and navigation of airships. Such experience as was available was to be found at the Royal Aircraft Factory, which had produced and flown airships for military purposes. The Admiralty responded at once; in September 1912 the naval airship section, which had been disbanded earlier in the year, was reconstituted, and Commander E. A. D. Masterman, Lieutenants N. F. Usborne, F. L. M. Boothby, and H. L. Woodcock, and a small number of ratings were attached to the airship squadron of the Military Wing at Farnborough, to gain experience of work with airships. The airships themselves were to be supplied from various sources. The factory was to build a new airship of the Gamma type. A small Willows airship, which happened to be on the market, though it had no military value, was held to be worth its cost for training purposes. The sub-committee also recommended the purchase of two foreign airships. Here there were difficulties. The best airships of Germany were the rigid Zeppelin and the semi-rigid Parseval. The Zeppelin Company was forbidden by the German Government to sell its ships to foreigners; but negotiations for the purchase of a Parseval airship were successful. An Astra-Torres non-rigid airship of about 400,000 cubic feet of capacity was acquired from France in the course of the year 1913. In July of the same year Mr. Winston Churchill, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, who regularly gave his strong support to naval aeronautics, approved of the construction of two rigid airships and six non-rigid airships. Treasury sanction was obtained for this programme. The rigid airships were to be built by Messrs. Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness. Of the six non-rigids, three were to be of the Parseval type, and three of the Forlanini type. One of the Parsevals was to be built in Germany, and two by Messrs. Vickers, who had succeeded in obtaining a licence for the construction of this type of ship; one of the Forlaninis was to be built in Italy, and two by Messrs. Armstrong Whitworth. When the war broke out, the Parseval airship completing in Germany was confiscated by the German Government; and the Forlanini airship, under process of construction in Italy, was retained by the Italian Government. The building of one of the rigid airships had just begun, and work on it was for a time abandoned. It is necessary thus to anticipate later events, in order to show how it came about that no airships of the larger type, suitable for distant reconnaissance with the fleet, were in the service of Great Britain during the war.

The building and manœuvring of airships is not a pastime within the reach of a private purse. The British Government had taken advantage of the enterprise and rivalry of private makers of aeroplanes, whom it wisely permitted to run the risks and show the way. No such policy was possible in the manufacture of airships, which is essentially a Government business. There was therefore, it is perhaps not fanciful to say, something agreeable to the German temper, and disagreeable to the English temper, in the airship as a weapon of war. The Germans put an absolute trust in their Government. Yet, after all, it is the spirit of a people that matters; the most magnificent and exclusive of Government organizations will fail through weakness if it is not ultimately based on the voluntary efforts and ingrained habits of the people who stand behind the Government and support it. The German navy was a powerful and splendid growth, fostered by the Government. But it was a forced growth, and the failure of the German operations at sea, regarded broadly, must be credited not to the British navy, but to the whole body of British seamen, naval and civilian. The British navy was at its appointed stations; the temper of a seafaring people, self-reliant, resourceful, and indomitable, was everywhere, and shone like a phosphorescence over thousands of unregarded acts of sacrifice.

The private enterprises of officers and men in the navy are limited by the conditions of the service, but such opportunities as could be found or made were not neglected. While the Mayfly was building at Barrow-in-Furness Commander Oliver Swann purchased an Avro aeroplane and with the help of subscriptions from other officers and officers' wives made many experiments with a view to adapting it for work over the water. He tried different types of floats on the machine, and at last, on the 18th of November 1911, he succeeded in getting off the water for a very short flight. He was the first in England to achieve this feat, and from that time forward the development of seaplanes progressed rapidly. A full account of these experiments was sent by Captain Sueter to Lord Rayleigh's Advisory Committee, and thereafter a valuable series of researches was conducted at the National Physical Laboratory by Mr. G. S. Baker and others. One result of these researches was the development of a boat-shaped type of float, with flared bows, in addition to the toboggan shape.

Experiment was active also at Eastchurch. During the summer of 1911 the four naval officers whom Mr. Cockburn had taught to fly continued to make practice flights on the two machines supplied by Mr. McClean. In October Lieutenant Samson succeeded in persuading the Admiralty to buy the two aeroplanes and to send to Eastchurch twelve naval ratings, as the basis of a naval flying school. The experiments of this little band of pioneers were all directed to adapting the aeroplane to naval work. Lieutenant Longmore and Mr. Oswald Short designed and tested airbags, by the aid of which a machine successfully alighted on the water. Lieutenant Samson designed and got leave to build in Chatham Dockyard a platform with a double trackway for starting aeroplanes from the decks of ships. The idea at this time was that the machine should start from the ship and by the aid of the airbags should alight on the water under the lee of the ship, whence it could be lifted on board. The platform was erected on board H.M.S. Africa, and Lieutenant Samson made a successful flight from it in December 1911. Thereafter, with the help of Mr. Horace Short, he worked out a design for a seaplane; the machine was completed in March 1912 and its first flight was made at Portland. On this seaplane Lieutenant Samson flew, first and last, for about a hundred and fifty hours, without breaking a strut or a float, which is a signal testimony to the merits of both the design and the construction. The Royal Aircraft Factory, working for the Air Department of the Admiralty, also produced a seaplane, which was successfully tested on Fleet Pond. Meantime the first flying boat had been designed by Mr. Sopwith, so that all the material requisite for naval aviation was rapidly making its appearance. If the number of aviators was still very small, that was due to lack of opportunity, not to lack of zeal among naval officers. When the original four were taught to fly their names were selected from a list of about two hundred, all of whom had volunteered for the new service.

Scattered incidents and experiments, like those narrated above, are what make up the history of the beginnings of the national air force. In such a story no closely-knit dramatic sequence is possible. The history of the growth of an oak tree from an acorn may perhaps be told in dramatic form, but who can tell the history of the obscure workings of yeast, or of the growth of a field of grass? The earliest aviators were self-willed and diverse. As Captain Bertram Dickson remarked, when he was questioned concerning their enrolment for the national service, 'One man is a rich man; another man is an artist, or he is an actor; another man is a mechanic. They are funny fellows. You will get a certain number if you pay them well, because they are out for making money; you will get others who will do it for sport, and others who will do it for the advertisement.' The problem for the Government and for those who advised the Government was how to make a united body out of these odds and ends; how to reduce these talented, excitable, artistic, highly individual elements to the discipline and purpose of a great service. Two admirable instructors were at hand—the army and the navy. The thing had to be done quickly, and most of those soldiers and sailors who realized the importance of the problem were agreed in thinking that the only right way was to get the army and the navy each of them to develop its air service. Some others, looking at the thing in a broader light, held that the air should have its own service. The laws and habits of the land, they argued, are not the laws and habits of the sea; surely the air differs from both of them as much as they differ from each other. But this opinion could not be acted on at short notice. A great service cannot be built up from the beginning in one year, or even in the lifetime of one generation of men. Time is needed; and time was what was lacking. The only resource for immediate purposes was to engage the sympathies of the army and the navy, who are always willing to co-operate, though never to coalesce, and let each of them build, up its own air service after its own fashion. A certain formal unity, which might by degrees become a real unity, could be given to the two air services by the magic of a uniform and a name.

Meantime, what of the Air Battalion, which was formed in the spring of 1911, and continued in being until it was annulled and superseded by the formation of the Royal Flying Corps in the spring of 1912? The Air Battalion numbered among its officers men distinguished for their achievement, but it was born out of due time. These years, 1911 and 1912, were years of divided counsels and uncertain policy. Rumours and reports of the passenger-carrying flights of the Zeppelin, which by this time had outlived its early misfortunes, and of the formidable development of the French military aeroplane, distracted opinion and paralysed effort. The old debate between heavier than air and lighter than air was reopened. England could not hope to overtake Germany in the construction of airships; could she hope to match France in the production of aeroplanes? And if she could, was there not a chance, after all, that the future, even for military purposes, lay with the airship? The very composition of the Air Battalion reflected these uncertainties. Its headquarters were at Farnborough; the flying camp for aeroplanes was at Larkhill. Sir Alexander Bannerman, who was in command, was a balloon expert, with a distinguished record in the South African and Russo-Japanese wars. At a later date, in April 1912, he qualified as an aviator on a Bristol biplane at Brooklands. His adjutant, Captain P. W. L. Broke-Smith, had been an instructor at the balloon school, and was a skilled military airship pilot. Of the officers attached, Captain J. D. B. Fulton, of the Royal Field Artillery, and Captain C. J. Burke, of the Royal Irish Regiment, have inscribed their names on the history of aviation; Captain A. D. Carden, of the Royal Engineers, and Captain E. M. Maitland, of the Essex Regiment, were apostles of the airship. Captain Carden was an expert in meteorology, and Captain Maitland's name will long be remembered in connexion with the first airship flight across the Atlantic, achieved by the R 34, piloted by Major G. H. Scott, in July 1919. The gradual rise in esteem of aviation is witnessed by the fact that during the last days of the Air Battalion's short career not only Sir Alexander Bannerman but also Captain Broke-Smith and Captain Carden were engaged in qualifying for the aviation certificate of the Royal Aero Club. There is, of course, no inconsistency in the union of the two methods; the Air Battalion took all aeronautics for its province; there need be no falling out between the aeroplane pilot and the airship pilot so long as each recognizes and believes in the other. What most delayed progress was that the higher authorities did not know what to encourage. The most valuable work done for the national air force in the winter of 1911-12 was done in committee at Whitehall, where the whole matter was conscientiously investigated, and the scheme of the Royal Flying Corps was prepared. Meantime the Air Battalion, in view of its probable speedy extinction, received very little support. The number of aeroplanes supplied to the flying camp at Larkhill was almost ludicrously small, and a large proportion of the time spent in training was devoted to theory and observation work.

The difficulties of the position appear in a memorandum sent by the commandant on the 25th of August 1911 to the chief engineer at Aldershot. This memorandum discusses the employment of the battalion during the coming winter, and recommends that No. 2 Company (that is, the aeroplane company) be recalled to Farnborough for a time, 'in order that the men may live in barracks, do a little drill, and be generally smartened up'. But as some new machines will need trying during the winter, a detachment of the company, it is suggested, should be kept on Salisbury Plain, and its members changed from time to time, so as to prevent the discipline of the company from becoming too lax. Further it is urged that extra leave for a period of two months should be granted to officers, so that they may go abroad and see what is being done in foreign countries. In discussing the question of special pay for officers the commandant remarks that there is a tendency to devote attention solely to aeroplanes. 'At present there are, I believe, forty applicants for vacancies with the aeroplanes, and as far as I know none for work with the dirigibles.' If the rates of pay were made less for dirigibles than for aeroplanes, as is done in foreign countries, this difficulty, he says, would be accentuated.

These misgivings were justified by the event. The recommendations of the commandant were, in the main, carried out, but the conditions during the winter made progress almost impossible. There were no proper living quarters at Larkhill, so officers and men lived at Bulford—the officers at the Royal Artillery Mess—and went to and from their work in horsed transport wagons. As they used to go down to Bulford for dinner at midday, the actual work done in the sheds was inconsiderable.

A further very real difficulty was inevitable, and might be compared to the growing pains of any healthy organism. The air forces of Great Britain took their origin, as has been explained, from the Royal Engineers. For a very long time—something over a quarter of a century—the Royal Engineers had the monopoly of the air. When science quickened new growth, this new growth was still attached by habit and tradition to the old body. In March 1912 eight out of fourteen officers of the Air Battalion were members of the Royal Engineers. The remainder, including some of the keenest students of aviation—Captain Fulton, Captain Burke, Captain Maitland, Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett—were, in a regimental sense, interlopers. Those who understand the strength and virtue of regimental society and regimental tradition will easily understand also how in a mixed body the old loyalty and the new pull different ways and impede the smooth working of the machine.

All these difficulties deserve mention if only because they did in fact make the work on Salisbury Plain poor and ineffective during the winter of 1911-12. But they are not the whole of the story. 'The first thing that strikes me', Keats once wrote to a friend, 'on hearing of trouble having befallen another is this—"Well, it cannot be helped, he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his spirit."' That pleasure was enjoyed by the little band of stalwarts who about the end of April 1911 went into camp at Larkhill as No. 2 Company, Air Battalion. If they received scant encouragement, they got to work without waiting for more. When Mr. Cockburn, after instructing the naval officers at Eastchurch, returned to Larkhill to find his old machine, he found the company in possession on the plain. Captain Fulton was in command. Most of the officers had had some little experience of flying. 'Captain Fulton', says Mr. Cockburn, 'had had some practice on my machine; Lieutenant Conner had had some also, but not nearly so much. Captain Burke had learnt in France, and was about on a par with Captain Fulton. These two were certainly the best pilots at that time. Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett had had a short course on a Blériot some time before, but had not flown for some months. Lieutenant Cammell was flying a Blériot of weird and wonderful type, his own property. These were the originals, but Captain Loraine and Lieutenant Hynes joined soon afterwards.' To these names should be added another—Lieutenant H. R. P. Reynolds, of the Royal Engineers.

Having taught the navy to fly, Mr. Cockburn now lent his help to the army. 'The machines', he says, 'with the exception of the Blériot were either Farmans or Bristol box-kites.... Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett had no experience on these, and Lieutenant Reynolds had no experience on anything. The experience of the remainder was not sufficient to admit of their acting as Instructors, so Captain Fulton got permission for me to carry on and take Barrington-Kennett and Reynolds in hand. This was an easy business compared with Eastchurch—a three miles' straight with good landing all the way made the first flights an easy matter. There were no incidents, except in a joy-ride for Lieutenant Cammell when his cap blew off and back into the propeller, causing a most tremendous noise which scared us badly, me particularly, as I didn't know the cause.... Progress was good; every one was very keen; and the Air Battalion soon developed into quite respectable pilots without any accidents.'

The company had a glorious and adventurous summer. It is strange to compare their doings with the elaborate exercises which were being practised at the same time by the French air corps at the Camp de Châlons. On Salisbury Plain very little effort was made to co-operate with other arms, except spasmodically. The pilots were new to their work, and the triumph was to get into the air at all. The first united effort of the battalion, says Mr. Cockburn, was to fly from Larkhill to Farnborough. 'It was a most exciting event; they went off at intervals, and every one of them got there. It was a very creditable performance both for them and for their mechanics. It must be remembered that the latter were all inexperienced, but what they lacked in experience they made up for in zest, always ready to learn, and as keen as possible to go up. One of them at this time was the eldest of the McCuddens, and many of the others are now (1918) officers holding considerable positions in the Royal Air Force. They were a fine lot of men, and deserve their success as pioneers.'

The higher grade Aero Club certificate was obtainable by the successful performance of a cross-country flight to a destination named a short time before the start. Cross-country flights were much in fashion, so that pilots were away from the battalion for about half their time. They flew in mufti; Lieutenants Barrington-Kennett and Reynolds more than once got into trouble for being away as much as a week at a time. These absences were sometimes due to engine failure, sometimes (it was believed) to the discovery of a well-provided country house and kind hosts.

The army manœuvres of August 1911, appointed to be held in Cambridgeshire, were the event of the summer; and the Air Battalion was detailed to take part in them. Owing to the shortage of water in that droughty summer the event never came off, but the aeroplane company started from Larkhill, and met with plenty of incident on the way. Air Commodore Brooke-Popham, who was at that time attached to the company from the Staff College, has very kindly set down his memories of the flight. He started from Larkhill with Captain Burke on the old Farman, with the object of making Oxford, but owing to a slight adverse wind and the low speed of the machine, which made only thirty miles an hour in a calm, they had to be content with Wantage, and got to Oxford the next morning. Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett, with a mechanic, made a forced landing in the neighbourhood of Burford, but with the assistance of Captain Brooke-Popham and Lieutenant Hynes, who went to his rescue in the only motor vehicle possessed by the company, he got into the air again, and also reached Oxford. Meantime Lieutenant Conner had had a crash in a fog, without hurting himself, on high ground at West Ilsley, south of Oxford. Maps, in those days, were mostly provided by the officers themselves, and Lieutenant Conner had steered himself successfully by the aid of a map torn out of a Bradshaw Railway Guide. Eventually the mobilized military air force of the British Empire, that is to say, Captains Burke, Brooke-Popham, and Massy, Lieutenants Barrington-Kennett and Reynolds, arrived in Oxford, at the end of the first stage. Here there were no tools available for repair, the few belonging to the company having been dispatched, by orders given at cross-purposes, straight to Cambridge. Nevertheless the little band of enthusiasts bravely started on the last stage of their journey. Captains Burke and Brooke-Popham had engine failure about ten miles out of Oxford, and, landing in a ridge-and-furrow field, broke a tail skid. Most of the day was consumed in getting this skid mended, patchwork fashion, by a coachbuilder in Oxford, to procure whose aid Captain Brooke-Popham returned to Oxford by earth. When the machine flew again it was forced to land at once, this time with serious damage. The other three officers had all been compelled by the bumpy weather to land not many miles away. In the evening they started again. Captain Massy had engine trouble fifty yards from the start, and completely wrecked his machine without hurting himself at all. Lieutenant Reynolds, who was the next to go, ran into a thunder-storm. His famous accident deserves to be recorded in his own words:

'That evening, soon after seven o'clock, I started again, it was warm and fine but rather suggestive of thunder; the air was perfectly still. I scarcely had occasion to move the control lever at all until I got to Bletchley, where it began to get rather bumpy; at first I thought nothing of this, but suddenly it got much worse, and I came to the conclusion it was time to descend. A big black thunder-cloud was coming up on my right front; it did not look reassuring, and there was good landing ground below. At this time I was flying about 1,700 feet altitude by my aneroid, which had been set at Oxford in the morning. I began a glide, but almost directly I had switched off the tail of the machine was suddenly wrenched upwards as if it had been hit from below, and I saw the elevator go down perpendicularly below me. I was not strapped in, and I suppose I caught hold of the uprights at my side, for the next thing I realized was that I was lying in a heap on what ordinarily is the under surface of the top plane. The machine in fact was upside-down. I stood up, held on, and waited. The machine just floated about, gliding from side to side like a piece of paper falling. Then it over-swung itself, so to speak, and went down more or less vertically sideways until it righted itself momentarily the right way up.

'Then it went down tail first, turned over upside-down again, and restarted the old floating motion. We were still some way from the ground, and took what seemed like a long time in reaching it. I looked round somewhat hurriedly; the tail was still there, and I could see nothing wrong. As we got close to the ground the machine was doing long swings from side to side, and I made up my mind that the only thing to do was to try and jump clear of the wreckage before the crash. In the last swing we slid down, I think, about thirty feet, and hit the ground pretty hard. Fortunately I hung on practically to the end, and, according to those who were looking on, I did not jump till about ten feet from the ground.'

Those who were looking on were two men, stark naked, who had been bathing near by. About fifty or sixty people soon collected, and some time passed before it occurred to any one to remark that these two men had no clothes on.

The military air force of the Empire had now been reduced to two serviceable aeroplanes which got to Cambridge, one piloted by Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett, the other by Lieutenant Cammell, who had been delayed at Larkhill for some days but had flown by way of London without mishap. These officers were well received and entertained by the resident members of the University.

Later in the autumn the Government bought some new machines for the battalion. In one of these, a two-seater Nieuport monoplane, with a fifty horse-power Gnome engine, Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett made a record passenger-carrying flight. On the 14th of February 1912 he flew 249-1/2 miles in four hours thirty-two minutes. In a rapidly advancing tide every wave makes a record, which is obliterated by the next wave. But the use of the word 'record', so frequent in the annals of aviation, does convey some sense of the exhilaration of the pioneers. Another of the machines supplied by the Government was a Bréguet biplane with a sixty horse-power Renault engine. 'It was a most unwholesome beast,' says Mr. Cockburn, 'with flexible wings, steel spars, and wheel control.' It required enormous strength to steer it, and was perseveringly and valorously flown by Lieutenant Hynes. There was also a Deperdussin two-seater monoplane, which Captain Fulton flew; and the earliest of the B.E. machines from the Aircraft Factory, which fell to the lot of Captain Burke. The battalion was much impressed by the number of instruments fitted to their new machines. In the machines they were accustomed to there was nothing but a revolution counter, and sometimes, though not always, a compass. If the pilot's scientific ambitions went beyond this simple outfit, he carried a watch on his wrist and an aneroid slung round his neck. The risks that these early pilots cheerfully faced at the call of duty were serious enough, and it is surprising that their casualties were so few. The only fatal accident in the Air Battalion was the death of Lieutenant R. A. Cammell, R.E., who was killed while flying a Valkyrie monoplane at Hendon on the 17th of September 1911. The machine was not familiar to him, and it is believed that he forgot to work the forward elevator; at the height of about ninety feet the monoplane tilted to one side, and fell with a crash. Lieutenant Cammell was one of the pioneers of British military aviation. So early as June 1910 he had been sent to France to take over a Blériot machine. He attended the Rheims meeting of that year and sent home some valuable reports. He was a daring and skilful aviator, and had qualified also as an airship pilot.

The story of Great Britain's apprenticeship in the air has now been brought down to the point at which the Royal Flying Corps, famous on every battle front of the world war, makes its first appearance. So far it has been a story of small things, of interrupted experiments and tentative advances; of the caution of the Government, and the boldness of the private adventurer. There is nothing new in the story; the air was attacked and mastered in the English fashion. When we are confronted with great issues, it is our habit, or so we are fond of saying, to 'muddle through'. Foreign nations, and especially enemy nations, do not so describe our activities. But we are great self-critics, and not free from that kind of inverted self-esteem which makes a man speak of his own achievements with deceitful and extravagant modesty. The business of history is to tell the truth; the truth is that we muddle through with amazing success. This success we affect to regard as an undeserved reward bestowed by Providence on improvidence. But is the law of cause and effect really made void on our behalf? The people of the island, it is true, are slow to make up their minds; their respect for experience and their care for justice make them distrust quick action if it is not instinctive action. They are unimaginative in this sense, that they are not very readily excited by the theatrical exhortations which are addressed to them from day to day. In a much deeper sense they are imaginative; they have a sure instinct for the realities of life. When they are presented with a doubtful novelty, they prefer to wait; and they can afford to wait, for they know that their young will be eager to show the way, and, in the meantime, they are not afraid.

CHAPTER V

THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS

In November 1911 the Prime Minister requested the standing sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, under the chairmanship of Lord Haldane, to consider the future development of aerial navigation for naval and military purposes, and the measures which might be taken to secure to this country an efficient aerial service. Things had moved fast since 1908, when a distinguished general had expounded to a similar committee the futility of observation from the air. This time the committee came to a quick decision, and recommended immediate action. The chief of their recommendations were as follows:

The creation of a British Aeronautical Service, to be regarded as one, and to be designated 'The Flying Corps'.

The Corps to consist of a Naval Wing, a Military Wing, and a Central Flying School for the training of pilots.

The Flying Corps to be kept in the closest possible collaboration with the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and with the Aircraft Factory, so that the work of experiment and research should have its due influence on practice.

A permanent consultative committee, named 'The Air Committee', to be appointed, to deal with all aeronautical questions affecting both the Admiralty and the War Office.

The preparation of a detailed scheme was delegated to a technical sub-committee consisting of Colonel the Right Hon. J. E. B. Seely, as chairman, Brigadier-General G. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Brigadier-General David Henderson, Commander C. R. Samson, R.N., Lieutenant R. Gregory, R.N., and Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, with Rear-Admiral Sir C. L. Ottley and Captain M. P. A. Hankey as secretaries. The deliberations of this body were remarkable for agreement and dispatch; their report was ready by the 27th of February 1912; it passed through its successive stages with very few alterations, and was approved by the Committee of Imperial Defence on the 25th of April.

The Royal Flying Corps was constituted by a Royal Warrant on the 13th of April 1912; a special Army Order was issued two days later setting up the necessary regulations, and on the 13th of May the old Air Battalion and its reserve were finally absorbed by the new body.

The advantage of government by committee is that it obtains, by successive stages, the sanction and support of the many for the plans initiated by the few. Nothing was ever created by eight men. But eight or more men, expert in various ways, can render invaluable service by listening, criticizing, and befriending. The plans which were considered and adopted by the technical sub-committee had been prepared in private by a small informal body of three, that is to say, by Brigadier-General David Henderson, Captain F. H. Sykes, and Major D. S. MacInnes.

Brigadier-General David Henderson had served at the battle of Khartoum in 1898, and had distinguished himself in the South African War. He was the author of a book on The Art of Reconnaissance, which ran through several editions. His interest in reconnaissance, and his appreciation of its importance in war, made him a friend to aviation. In 1911, at the age of forty-nine, he had learned to fly at Brooklands, and thereafter, as Director of Military Training at the War Office, did all in his power to encourage the new movement. Captain Frederick Hugh Sykes was a General Staff officer who had seen service in many lands. In the South African War he served with the Imperial Yeomanry, and was severely wounded. In 1901 he joined the 15th or King's Hussars, and for two years was stationed in West Africa. Thereafter he was attached to the Intelligence Department at Army Headquarters in India, passed the Staff College, and in February 1911 became General Staff officer in the Directorate of Military Operations under Brigadier-General Sir Henry Wilson. It was in July and August 1904, while he was on leave from West Africa, that he made his first acquaintance with the air. He obtained permission to be attached to the balloon units training with the army on Salisbury Plain; made many ascents, and went through the course and examination at the Farnborough balloon school. Thenceforward he took every possible opportunity to improve his knowledge of aeronautics. He was quick to discern the significance of aviation. When, in 1910, he saw flight in France, he recognized that the work of cavalry in distant reconnaissance was dead and done with. During his time at the War Office he spent the mornings, before breakfast, in learning to fly, and in June 1911 took his pilot's certificate on a Bristol biplane at Brooklands. Within the office he insisted on the importance of military aeronautics, and when the Committee of Imperial Defence took up the question he was naturally chosen to serve on the committee which prepared a draft organization. Associated with him was Major Duncan Sayre MacInnes, of the Royal Engineers, who had been through the South African War, and at the time of the formation of the Flying Corps was serving with the Military Training Directorate. Only those who worked with him will ever know how great a debt the Flying Corps owes to his industry and devotion. During the war he was employed under the Directorate of Military Aeronautics, and in 1916 was made Director of Aircraft Equipment, with the rank of brigadier-general. He wore himself out in the service of the country, and died in May 1918. These three men laid the groundwork of the plans which were approved by the technical sub-committee.

The record of the preliminary meetings of the sub-committee, and of the evidence given by witnesses, is full of interest, and shows history in the making. 'It has been suggested to me', said the chairman, 'that the Royal Flying Corps is a better name than the Royal Air Corps.' And again, when the name for the tactical unit of the force was under consideration, and objection was taken to the words 'company' and 'group'—'Why not squadron?' said the chairman. It is the happiness of the small technical sub-committee that the scheme which they approved was equal to the strain of an unexampled war, and that the very names which they chose are now engraved on the history of the nation.

The choice of the squadron, consisting of three flights of aeroplanes, with four machines to a flight, as the unit of the new force was judicious and far-sighted. In France the unit was the 'escadrille', consisting of six machines, and roughly corresponding to what we call a flight. This precedent was rejected. Not enough competent officers, it was feared, were available to command a large number of small independent units. On the other hand, if too large a unit had been chosen, it would have been difficult to put the air service at the disposal of the various army formations which might ask for assistance from the air. The squadron, when it was created, was elastic and manageable, and secured for the air force, as the war has proved, that corporate spirit and that pride in history and tradition which are the strength of the regimental system.

The deliberations of the sub-committee were conducted in a severely practical spirit. Many of the constructive problems which came before them still remain problems, and might have been debated, with much to be said on both sides, till the conversion of the Jews; but the pressure of time made itself ominously felt in all their proceedings. The country, as a whole, was not awake to the German menace. The sudden appearance of the German gunboat Panther at Agadir in July 1911 ought, it may be said, to have awakened it. But the average Englishman could hardly bring himself to believe that a great European nation would seek war as a duellist seeks a quarrel, from sensitive vanity and pride in his own fighting skill. The army and the navy were quicker to discern the reality of the threat. The military machine that was to supply the small expeditionary force was working at high pressure, and the air was tense. If Germany intended to make her bid for the mastery of Europe, it was recognized that she had every reason for making it soon. 'All the heads of departments', said the chairman, at a meeting in January 1912, 'are very anxious to get on with this—Lord Haldane told me so last night, Mr. Churchill told me so two or three days ago, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself is anxious to see it done, and wisely: but what is the best method to pursue in order to do in a week what is generally done in a year?' 'At the present time in this country,' he said later, 'we have, as far as I know, of actual flying men in the Army about eleven, and of actual flying men in the Navy about eight, and France has about two hundred and sixty-three, so we are what you might call behind.'

Moreover, the committee realized that an air service would be needed by the army of Great Britain more than it is needed by the armies of foreign powers. In a memorandum by the War Office, drawn up in the same month of January 1912, it is pointed out that a British expeditionary force might have to operate as a detached force, and that to such a force information is all-important. The need for haste appears in many of the recommendations of the committee. For the supply of trained flyers to the army and the navy, and for the formation of a reserve, the first necessity was to start work at the Central Flying School, for which a site had been chosen on the Upavon Downs of Salisbury Plain, north of the Upavon-Everley road. The buildings necessary for this school could not be ready till the end of June, so the committee recommended that the work of the school should, in the meantime, be carried on in canvas tents and sheds.

Some problems of wide import forced themselves on the attention of the committee, and were of necessity settled with a view to immediate results and immediate efficiency. When shelter is needed from a pitiless storm, the leisurely plans of the architect must give way. One of these problems was the rank of pilots. Should every pilot be an officer, or should we follow the example of France, and train some mechanics to the work of piloting? From the first, Mr. Churchill was in favour of admitting to the State school of aviation not only a proportion of officers of both services, but also petty officers, non-commissioned officers and men, as well as civilians. In the report of the technical sub-committee the war establishment for an expeditionary force is planned on these lines. The Military Wing of the Royal Flying Corps was to contain seven aeroplane squadrons, each squadron to number twelve machines, with an additional machine for the commanding officer. Two pilots were allowed for each aeroplane, and, in addition, to provide for the wastage of war, an equal number in reserve. The war establishment, calculated on this basis for the purposes of the expeditionary force, required the services of three hundred and sixty-four trained pilots, of whom, it was suggested, one hundred and eighty-two should be officers, and one hundred and eighty-two non-commissioned officers.

This part of the scheme cannot be said to have failed in practice: it never reached the test of practice. The surest and readiest way to obtain the services of skilled flyers was to offer them commissions in the Flying Corps, and it was felt to be invidious that some pilots should enter the corps as officers, while others, of equal skill, should enter in the non-commissioned ranks. Some of the witnesses were of the opinion that not many men of the skilled mechanic class would be ready or willing to risk their lives as pilots. The experience of the war has disproved this forecast; an observer in war must have at least as cool a head and as stout a heart as a pilot, and every one who has flown on the western front knows that among the very best observers not a few were non-commissioned officers. But the fact is that the question was settled by lack of time. To give effect to the scheme outlined in the report of the technical sub-committee would have required much time and experiment and adjustment; in practice the simpler way was chosen, and the business of piloting was reserved, in the main, for commissioned officers. Courage is found everywhere among English-speaking peoples; the real point to secure is that the pilots of one squadron, or the pilot and observer of one machine, should not only meet on duty, but should live together. That perfect understanding and instant collaboration which spells efficiency in the air is the product of habitual intimacy and easy association during leisure hours.

In the early days of the Royal Flying Corps a certain small number of non-commissioned officers were trained to do the work of piloting, so that the officers who flew with them in two-seater machines might be freed for the more important work of observation. This experiment was not favourably reported on, and the opinion has often been expressed that men chosen from the non-commissioned ranks of the army or the lower-deck ratings of the navy do not make good pilots. A wise judgement on the question will consider all the circumstances. Promotion in both army and navy was slow before the war, so that a non-commissioned officer or petty officer was often a married man, considerably in advance of the age at which the most successful war pilots are made. The inspired recklessness of youth does not long persist among those who from boyhood up have to earn their living by responsible work. Moreover, commanding officers, whether in the army or the navy, were naturally reluctant to let their skilled men be taken from them, so that the men whom they sent to be trained as pilots were too often men for whom no other good use could be found. 'If they don't break their necks,' said one naval officer, 'it will wake them up.' Again, in 1918, when cadets, after a preliminary technical training, were graded as officer cadets or non-commissioned officer cadets, all the more promising men were given commissions, so that only men of inferior intelligence were left to become non-commissioned pilots. It is surely rash to lay stress on vague class distinctions. A stander-by who happened, during the war, to witness the management of an Arab camel convoy by a handful of British private soldiers, remarked that though these soldiers knew no language but their own, their initiative and tact, their natural assumption of authority, and their unfailing good temper, which at last got the convoy under way, showed that they belonged to an imperial race. The question of the rank of pilots is really a social question, a question, that is to say, not of individual superiority but of smooth collaboration. If a whole squadron of the Flying Corps had been staffed, as was at one time suggested, by men picked from the non-commissioned ranks, there can be no doubt that it would have made a name for itself among the very best.

The largest question of all in the making of the Flying Corps was the question whether the air service was to be a new and independent service, taking rank with the army and the navy, or was to be, for the most part, divided between the army and the navy, and placed under their control. This question, it might seem, was settled by the opening words of the sub-committee's recommendations: 'The British Aeronautical Service should be regarded as one, and should be designated "The Flying Corps".' But subsequent developments soon showed that this settlement was not accepted on all hands. The navy never fully accepted it. The British navy is a body enormously strong in its corporate feeling, conscious of its responsibilities, proud of its history, and wedded to its own ways. Its self-reliant character, which had made it slow to recognize the importance of the air, made it slow also, when the importance of the air was proved, to allow a weapon necessary for naval operations to pass out of its own control. When the active combatant service of the Royal Flying Corps came into being, it consisted of a Naval Wing and a Military Wing. The Naval Wing had its headquarters at Eastchurch, where the Naval Flying School had been established. For administrative purposes the Naval Flying School was placed under the orders of the captain of H.M.S. Actaeon, and all officers and men were to be borne on the books of the Actaeon. Experiments with seaplanes and flying boats were still in their infancy, and the organization of the Naval Wing was wisely left undetermined for the time. The distribution of the aeroplane squadrons of the Military Wing was left for the consideration of the War Office, but the sub-committee recommended that one squadron should be stationed at Salisbury Plain, within reach of the Central Flying School, and one at Aldershot, in the neighbourhood of the Aircraft Factory. All recruits training as pilots, whether for the Naval Wing or the Military Wing, were to graduate at the Central Flying School, and thence were to be detailed to join either the Naval Flying School at Eastchurch, for a special course of naval aviation, or one of the military aeroplane squadrons, for a special course of military aviation.

That was the plan. So far as the Military Wing was concerned, it was punctually carried out. In the Naval Wing a certain centrifugal tendency very early made itself felt. The official name 'Royal Flying Corps, Naval Wing', after making its appearance in a few documents, dropped out of use, and its place was taken by a name which in process of time received the stamp of official recognition—'The Royal Naval Air Service'. Thereafter the words 'Military Wing', though they were still used, were no longer required, and 'The Royal Flying Corps' became a sufficient description of what was a distinctively military body. The Admiralty from the first worked independently. Soon after the Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps was created the First Lord of the Admiralty set up a new department to supervise it, and placed Captain Murray Sueter in charge, as Director of the Air Department. At an earlier date Commander C. R. Samson had been placed in charge of the Naval Flying School. The energies of the school, pending the establishment of the Central Flying School, were devoted mainly to elementary training in flying. By the provisions of the original scheme this elementary training belonged to the joint Central Flying School, while the Naval Flying School was to be used for experiment and for specialized training in naval air work. But the Naval Flying School continued throughout the war to train naval flying officers from the beginning, teaching them the art of flying as well as its special applications for naval purposes.

The question whether there should be a single air service, specialized in its branches, or separate air services, organized for mutual assistance, is a question that stirs deep feeling, so that the very virtues which make men serviceable to their country are ranged in opposition one to another. The old allegiances are not easily forgotten; when a sailor learns to fly he remains a sailor, and the air for him is merely the roof of the sea. The knowledge, moreover, gained from his life at sea is knowledge not only useful but essential to him if he is to do good work in the Naval Air Service. He must be able to recognize the various types of war vessels, and the various nationalities of vessels of the merchant marine. He must know all about the submarine, the mine, and the torpedo. He must be well versed in weather observation, and able to navigate safely without the aid of landmarks. He must understand naval tactics, and must be able to bear a part in them. All this, it has been urged by many sailors, is a much more complicated and experienced business than the mere flying of an aeroplane. The Naval Air Service, they contend, should be a part of the navy.

There is force and weight in these contentions, yet they are not conclusive. If the navy were itself a new invention, a very similar kind of argument might be used to subordinate it to the army. The main business of the navy, it might be said, is to supply the army with transport facilities and mobile gun-platforms. But this is absurd; the sea will not submit to so cavalier a treatment. Those who believe in a single air force base their opinion on certain very simple considerations. As the prime business of a navy is the navigation of the sea, so, they hold, the prime business of an air force is the navigation of the air; all its other activities depend on this. The science of aeronautics is yet in its childhood; its development must not be cramped by tying it too closely to a service which works under narrower conditions. If there should be another great war (and though no one desires it, no one dares to think it impossible), the fittest man to hold the command of united land and sea forces might well be a Marshal of the Air. But the strongest argument for a single air force is not so much an argument as an instinct. Every kind of warfare develops in men its own type of character. The virtues of the soldier and the virtues of the sailor are not the same; or, if they are the same (for courage and duty can never be superseded), they are the same with surprising differences. The soldier is drilled to fight men when the occasion arises; the sailor is at war all his life with the sea. The character of the sailor—his resourcefulness and vigilance, his patience and stoicism, his dislike of formality—is put upon him by his age-long conflict with his old enemy. In seafaring men there is a temper of the sea, admired by all who have ever made acquaintance with it. Those who were privileged to watch the performance of our flying men in the war know that there is developed in them a temper not less remarkable and not less worthy of cultivation—the temper of the air. War in the air demands a quickness of thought and nerve greater than is exacted by any other kind of war. It is a deadly and gallant tournament. The airman goes out to seek his enemy: he must be full of initiative. His ordeal may come upon him suddenly, at any time, with less than a minute's notice: he must be able to concentrate all his powers instantaneously to meet it. He fights alone. During a great part of his time in the air he is within easy reach of safety; a swift glide will take him far away from the enemy, but he must choose danger, and carry on. One service cannot be judged by the standards of another service. A soldier who knows nothing of the sea might easily mistake naval discipline for lack of discipline. A like mistake has often been made by those who are brought into casual relations with the air force. But the temper of the air force is a new and wonderful thing, born of the duties and dangers which war in the air has brought with it. To preserve that temper as a national inheritance is the dearest wish of those who covet for the air force a place beside the navy and the army.

Now that the officers for the air force are being trained, as officers for the navy and the army have long been trained, at a cadet college with its own traditions, the question will solve itself. The necessity for collaboration during the war did something to unite the branches of the force. But perfect unity can be attained only by men who have lived and worked together. Men who have lived apart speak different languages. In April 1918, when the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps were united in the Royal Air Force, it was found necessary to deal with this language difficulty. The Naval Air Service and the Flying Corps used different names for the same thing. The Naval Air Service used the names they would have used aboard ship. The officers' mess they called 'the ward-room mess', and the dining-room 'the mess deck'. The cookhouse with them was the galley; rations were victuals; and kit was gear. In July 1918 an order was issued by the Air Ministry prescribing the terms to be adopted in the new force. The use of starboard and port for right and left was ordered as a concession to the sailors; and at all air stations the time of day was to be denoted, as on board ship, by the sounding of bells. In some few cases the naval and, military usages were both discarded in favour of a new term proper to the air force. Thus, non-commissioned officers and men, who are described in the navy as 'ratings' and in the army as 'other ranks', were named, in accordance with a practice which had already grown up, 'airmen'. Names are full of compliment and fantasy: 'airman' is the official name for those members of the air force who spend their time and do their work on the ground.

These are not light matters. One of the strongest bonds of human sympathy is community in habits of speech. Divergences in speech are fruitful in every kind of hostility. It was a Scottish captain of the merchant marine who expressed a dislike for the French, and when called on for his reasons, replied that as a people they are ridiculous, for they call a boy a 'mousse'.

The navy and the army have always been loyal comrades, ready to help each other at short notice. These relations persisted between the two branches of the air force. In the scheme for the Royal Flying Corps it had been provided that each branch of the service should be treated as a reserve to the other branch. Thus in a purely naval war the whole of the Flying Corps was to be available for the navy, and in a war that should call for no assistance from the navy (if such a war can be conceived) the whole of the corps was to be available for the army. In accordance with these ideas machines flown by naval officers played a very successful part in the army manœuvres of 1912 and 1913.

Further, in order to co-ordinate the efforts of the Admiralty and the War Office, a permanent consultative committee, called the Air Committee, was provided for in the original scheme, and held its first meeting in July 1912. This committee was a kind of nucleus of an Air Ministry; the importance attached to it may be judged from its composition. Colonel Seely, by this time Secretary of State for War, was its first chairman, and later on Vice-Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the Second Sea Lord of the Admiralty, became its vice-chairman. The officers in command of the Central Flying School, of the Naval Wing, and of the Military Wing had seats on it. So had the Director of Military Training, the Director of the Air Department, and the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory. The committee proved its value as a place of conference, where those who were responsible for aerial development in its various branches might compare their ideas. But it had no executive powers, so that its success in promoting an active policy automatically diminished its own importance. It could consider and advise, but the decision rested with the Admiralty and the War Office. It was useful at an early stage; then, like the Ghost in Hamlet, having prompted others to action, it faded away.

The need for a central controlling body, that is to say, for an Air Ministry, was soon to be acutely felt. The naval and military air forces were friends, but they were also rivals. In so far as this rivalry prompted them to compete in skill and valour, it was wholly good. But rival orders for munitions of war, and especially for aeroplanes, given to manufacturing firms by two branches of one service, are not so good. The output of the factories was not unlimited, and only a central authority could determine how that output might be best used for the nation's need.