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Aviation History
1914
1914 - 0194.PDF
JycSg FEBRUARY 21, 1914. ARMCHAIR REFLECTIONS. By THE DREAMER. IN the day when Dick Whittington sat on the milestone at Highgate, and listened to the bells telling him in his imagination to return to success and prosperity, London was a city of worshipful companies and apprentices. Holywell Street and the treasures it held are lost to me for ever, and I can but look back on the hours I spent there rummaging through boxes of old books, as a man looks back on the hours spent with his first love. Holywell Street is no more. Some of its attractions are still to be found in Charing Cross Road, and the younger genera tion, no doubt, never having known anything better, are satisfied, but we who knew our love in her native village, as it were — we who could find her hidden away at the bottom of certain old trunks and could dig her out and enjoy her company behind screens and in shop entries, have no use for her in Charing Cross Road, splashed as she is with mud by the motor 'buses. To try and glean a sentence from Harrison Ainsworth with the hoot of motor horns in one's ears is impossible. I carry in my mind many happy re collections of things seen in Holywell Street. I remember a large engraving in a birdseye-maple frame priced at three guineas, and I religiously started every Monday to save up the money to buy it, only to make serious inroads into the fund before I got to the end of the row where now stands the statue of Gladstone. It represented Cheapside in the olden time. Picturesque with its old gables, inviting with its taverns and chop houses, I cannot but feel pleased that it is not of that picturesqueness to-day. Apprentices in jerkin and shorts stood about the court entries seeming to have nothing more to do than carry a large stick, yet when I look back I can plainly see those apprentices as representing the coming big men of the city. There was no royal road to success in those days without the precincts of the royal palaces. Courtiers finding favour with royal masters or mistresses might wake one morn to find them selves famous and one step nearer the Tower, but in trade, in silversmithing, in silk-mercing, in all the hundred and one businesses proclaiming a worshipful company resplendent in apron, magnificent under silken banner, there was but one way to the top; but one road whereby a youth might climb to an exalted position in his master's business—the apprenticeship. It is perhaps well that in these days when men and youths pass from one business to another, when any opening that offers a little more weekly salary is grasped, no matter what the business may be; when a man is jack of all trades and expert in none, it is, I say, perhaps well that the apprenticeship system should become practically obsolete, but it gave us good men of their trade and guaranteed a succession. There was no reason to go to America in those days to find a man capable of managing a railway, because there were no railways, but when railways did start to Jay their lines, reaching like tentacles through our ® ® A Four-wtnged Monoplane. A RBMARKABLE monoplane has recently been built by the Ponnier works for M, Bonamy, who has entered it for the com- hand, but U appears that there are two sets of main planes, the first pa,r, of the usual Ponmer shape, having a pronounced dihedral peaceful valleys, men were wanted, and working on the only system then known, were moved up into higher positions as they became vacant. Then we started to- live in irresponsible fragments. The great stores came along and taught us departments—we lead a departmental life. Everything is measured and cut and boxed and labelled for us by men who know nothing about anything except measuring and cutting and boxing and labelling in their respective ways. The porter at the station is there to carry your luggage —ask him the time of the next train, and he will tell you—after he has looked at the time-table: ask a Waterloo porter, for instance, how to get across London to Euston and he will gaze at you open-mouthed—who ever wanted to go anywhere out of London except from Waterloo ? And so when a new manager is wanted for an English railway, he has to be imported. In aviation we have not yet become departmental. Perhaps, this is because the industry is so young; perhaps later on men will know one thing and one thing only, but at present the top rungs of the ladder of success in aviation are there waiting to be grasped by any who care to climb to them through the school of thoroughness. It is easy to learn to fly j it is easy to pay a fee to be taught; it is easy to secure the coveted brevet, and it is easy to pass away into oblivion and be forgotten. Think for a moment of the hundreds of pupils who have joined the various schools and learned to fly; where are they? Scattered, gone. Where are the men who took up aviation seriously in the early days ; who started in the workshops and sheds; who had to do anything and learn everything; who had to help to build a machine first and learn to fly it afterwards ? You will find most of them still at it and generally somewhere near the top. I cannot agree with ^Lord Claud Hamilton that it is necessary to go abroad to find men capable of filling high positions. The thinking men of England are every bit as good or better than they ever were, the trouble is they do not get the chance. Hedged in as they are by all sorts of restrictions; boxed up as they are in one department—often meaning, as it does, discharge to be found in another—how are they ever to know anything about the working of the machinery of which they are but one cog, coming round in their turn to engage with another cog, so forcing on the wheels of progress by ever so little towards an end of which they know little, and in time get to care less. In time, as they wear out, a new cog will emerge starfish-wise and gradually eclipse the old one, which will almost imperceptibly dissolve away into nothingness, his work done, forgotten. It may be that economy demands that it shall be one man one job in order, as would be most likely pointed out, that skill and exactness be obtained in each department, but it will never have the effect of bringing the good men to the top, and there will ever be a dearth of men with an all-round knowledge whilst the system obtains. angle for the purpose of securing lateral stability, while immediately behind them is a pair of wings, arranged in V form, as on the Dunne machine, for the purpose of obtaining longitudinal stability. The machine has been tested at Rheims by Bielovucic and Emile Vednnes, and, fitted with a 70 h.p. Gnome motor, easily lifted a load of 640 kilogs. '94
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