Vehicles of the Air - A Popular Exposition of Modern Aeronautics, With Working Drawings #232787

Nothing but the utmost blindness to existing achievements can continue to belittle what it cannot comprehend. Aerial navigation today is no more a joke than was the railway eighty years ago, or the steamship seventy years ago, or the automobile ten years ago. On the contrary, it is already the basis of a vast and progressing industry, founding itself surely on the most advanced discoveries of exact science and the finest deductions of trained minds, and possessed of a future that in its sociological as well as in its engi neering aspects sooner or later must stir the imagina tions of the dullest skeptics. Inevitably it is a matter of perhaps no more than a few months — certainly of no more than a few years — after this is written when in every country of the world aerial vehicles will enter upon an epoch of wide development and application, the far-reaching reactions of which are certain to carry significances of the profoundest import to every phase of civilization and every activity of the race.