"Remember in 1919," he began, "talking about a thirty thousand horse-power flying-boat. She could have been built then, even with the material and small engines available, but of course she would not have had the speed and carrying capacity the Swift has.
"In 1913, the Curtiss boat of sixty horse-power; in 1918, the Felixstowe Fury of eighteen hundred horse-power; in 1919, the first crossing of the Atlantic by a Curtiss-built American flying-boat; in 1923, the first ten thousand horse-power steam turbine-boat; and now the thirty thousand horse-power boat.
"Remember the land-machine ramp at the end of the Great War; how they pranced on their hind legs and frothed about breaking the rails and shipping companies; and the blokes that put their good cash into companies that promised to carry mails and passengers by air over land and sea. What happened to 'em? Got into flat spins and crashed, mostly.
"Went into an optimistic company as a joystick merchant; saw the whole show from the inside. Tried to run mails in England. Weather conditions and the competitions of the railways did us down.
"Speed and reliability are the essence of mail-carrying. It's the time taken from the office boy licking the stamp until the presentation paper-knife slits open the envelope at the other end that counts, and the letter has always got to get there. The only letter-writers in a tremendous hurry, excepting the mad people who are frantically in love, are in the main centres of population, and they are connected by fast train services. Also, the wireless telephone rather put a bend in the show—talk to anybody anywhere at any time.
Erecting the 15-ton Felixstowe Fury.
"We had to have our aerodromes well out from the centre of the cities—land too hard to get inside. Had to whiz the mail out from the post office to the bus, and tranship again at the other end. Took a lot of time. But the jolly old mail-trains started from a point near the post office, and the letters were sorted while the train was travelling. Mist or fog, gales and snow, blew our time-tables sky-high. You should have seen us tearing our hair in bad weather. Of course bad weather sometimes interfered with the train service a bit, but not to the same extent. There was nothing in it so far as time was concerned, and they had us beaten four ways on reliability.
"We speeded up the faithful old sky-waggons. But that meant bigger grounds to flop down into, so we had to go farther out from the cities. That made the time taken to get mails out to us a bit longer. We saved something at the receiving end by dropping the mails bang on top of the post office building. But the trains were speeded up too; they delivered special mails by motor-cycle straight from the railway station. We had nothing on them.