This is a hard saying for such of the aeroplane industry as survived the War period and consolidated itself, and it is but the saying of a section which bases its belief on the fact that, as was noted in the very early years of the century, the aeroplane is primarily a war machine. Moreover, the experience of the War period tended to discredit the dirigible, since, before the introduction of helium gas, the inflammability of its buoyant factor placed it at an immense disadvantage beside the machine dependent on the atmosphere itself for its lift.
As life runs to-day, it is a long time since Kipling wrote his story of the airways of a future world and thrust out a prophecy that the bulk of the world’s air traffic would be carried by gas-bag vessels. If the school which inclines to belief in the dirigible is right in its belief, as it well may be, then the foresight was uncannily correct, not only in the matter of the main assumption, but in the detail with which the writer embroidered it.
On the constructional side, the history of the aeroplane is still so much in the making that any attempt at a critical history would be unwise, and it is possible only to record fact, leaving it to the future for judgment to be passed. But, in a general way, criticism may be advanced with regard to the place that aeronautics takes in civilisation. In the past hundred years, the world has made miraculously rapid strides materially, but moral development has not kept abreast. Conception of the responsibilities of humanity remains virtually in a position of a hundred years ago; given a higher conception of life and its responsibilities, the aeroplane becomes the crowning achievement of that long series which James Watt inaugurated, the last step in inter-communication, the chain with which all nations are bound in a growing prosperity, surely based on moral wellbeing. Without such conception of the duties as well as the rights of life, this last achievement of science may yet prove the weapon that shall end civilisation as men know it to-day, and bring this ultra-material age to a phase of ruin on which saner people can build a world more reasonable and less given to groping after purely material advancement.
The Tarrant smash.
Front view of crashed machine. Searching for the injured after the smash.
Part II
1903–1920: PROGRESS IN DESIGN
BY
LIEUT-COL. W. LOCKWOOD MARSH