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Aviation History
1911
1911 - 0366.PDF
APRIL 29, 1911. THE VISTA IT is not everyone who recognises the true value of the Daily Mail Prize and of the promised European Circuit, or the vital part that this type of long-distance trial is likely to play in the immediate prospects of the movement. Now more than ever it is necessary for the aeroplane to be brought into evidence; and now at last it is beginning to be time for it to be put forward and proved as a practical means of locomotion fit to take its place side by side with the railway train, the steamship and the motor car. Flight is here—it has arrived to stay, and already the aeroplane has taken its place, as more than a phenomenon, among the commonplaces of civilised life. The man in the street no longer smiles in a semi- incredulous way when he hears or reads of flights which even a year ago would have seemed to him flights of imagination more than of anything else. That is good, so far as it goes, but there is another side which needs now to be realised. It is simply this, that the man in the street hears of and possibly even sees what is being done—he does not participate in it, which makes all the difference in the world. Let us take the analogy of the motor car—it is becoming a little hackneyed, perhaps, but that cannot be helped for it affords the nearest comparison to band. Going back a dozen years it is found that the car was at that time in very much the same position that the aeroplane is to-day. It was beginning to emerge from its first crude beginnings and the ordinary person was commencing to regard it seriously. But the average man still believed that the car must remain for all time the toy of the idle rich or perhaps even of the mere crank, although he had no longer any doubt about its mechanical possibility. That he did not foresee the future is not to be laid to his blame, for how many of those who like ourselves took some small part in help ing forward the development of the self-propelled road vehicle saw as far into the future as 1911 ? Very few indeed. But with the lessons implied in the phenomenal development of the car—mechanically and industrially— the world ought at least to be better equipped to judge of the future of this new movement than people were in the infant days of its elder sister. It is not with idle specu lations of what may happen that we are concerned just now, but rather of what must or should be done to help forward the science and the industry as rapidly as possible. Still keeping in mind the lessons of the car. In its early days it was the same rara avis in tern's that the aeroplane is to-day. It stood in want of publicity—not only the publicity of the newspaper Press, which was extended to it in generous meed, but of that species which can only be described as tangible publicity. That is, it had to make itself seen and known on the highways and in the byways, for no amount of reading of sensational feats by motorist or aviator carries with it the same impression as actual sight of man and machine under ordinary everyday circumstances. Now, the position at the moment is almost identical with that in which motoring found itself just prior to the first Thousand Miles' Trial, except that the prospects of aviation are a whit more rosy than those of motoring appeared then to be. The vehicle itself was crude and undeveloped ; it had to run the gauntlet of bitter hostility from every class of the community, and we state that which we know when we say that the little band of enthusiasts who then formed the Automobile Club were in despair at the thoughts of their favourite movement meeting an almost immediate 3' OPENING UP. demise, so low were the fortunes of motoring sunk at that historic period. Aviation is not in that parlous state, for the gods be thanked these are more enlightened days than those, but there still is need of all the publicity of which we have spoken that can possibly be obtained. Pursuing yet further the analogy, it would be quite im possible to exaggerate the change that was wrought by that place-to-place contest the Thousand Miles' Trial, which familiarised the public with the appearance and the capabilities of the car. Before it took place, it seemed a wild dream of phantasy for anyone to suggest that sedate gentry should give up their carriages and take their journeys abroad in one of the new-fangled mechanical devices which were making a painful bid for the public suffrage. As wild as it would seem now were we to suggest that the Prime Minister should give up his car and betake himself to Westminster in an aeroplane 1 But are the two cases really any different ? We think not, for the aeroplane is at least as far advanced, as safe and as practical as was the car in the middle nineties—when, for example, one well-known firm of makers actually felt it their duty to call before the board of directors the pur chaser of a 12-h.p. 4-cylinder car that they themselves had built in order to warn him that he was acquiring a machine of great power needing to be treated with the greatest circumspection! As for the value of place-to-place events like the contest for the Daily Mail Prize and the European Circuit and their influence on the man in the street, to whom we have to look for the future of the industry, let us put a case in point. Supposing Grahame-White or any other successful aviator to call at the house of the average race-goer on the morning of a Sandown meeting and offer to take him down by air. What would the reply be ? A very decided negative in nine cases out of ten. The only reason for this negative would be that the average person is not familiar with the machine and its capabilities, simply because he has not had sufficient opportunity given him to become au fait with it. Now, let us get on a little and imagine the same episode occurring at the end of the Daily Mail 1,000 mile circuit, when men and machines have given open and ocular place-to-place demonstration of their speed, reliability and safety. The odds are ten to one that the recipient of the offer would jump at it; and it is at least an even money chance that the result of his experience would be that he would become the owner of a machine all to himself only a very little later. As things are to-day, some may think this illustration a little far-fetched, but it must not be forgotten that we have only to sub stitute "motor car" for "aeroplane" and we have exactly what did happen in cases without number when motoring was in its swaddling clothes. Have we not, moreover, already seen during the past week or two so important a personage as Prince Henry of Prussia flying his own machine a distance of 30 miles, so highly-placed a Government official as Colonel' Seely, the Under- Secretary of State for War, taking a trip with Grahame- White in spite of a high gusty wind blowing, and such leading members of British Society as the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, with prominent members of their house party, making short flights with M. Tabuteau on a " Bristol" biplane. Surely it needs but a little such direct familiarity with the aeroplane to produce private owners and users in their scores, then in their hundreds, and before so very long in their thousands.
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