Aviation in Peace and War

[1] First written and delivered as the Lees-Knowles Lectures at Cambridge University in February and March, 1921. I propose first briefly to trace the history of aviation from its beginnings to the outbreak of war; next to describe the evolution of aircraft and of air strategy during the war; and last to estimate the present position and to look into the future. PRE-WAR Early Thoughts on Flight. The story of the growth of aviation may be likened to that of the discovery and opening up of a new continent. A myth arises, whence no one can tell, of the existence of a new land across the seas. Eventually this land is found without any realization of the importance of the discovery. Then comes the period of colonization and increasing knowledge. But the interior remains unexplored. So, in the case of aviation, man was long convinced, for no scientific reason, that flight was possible. With the first ascent by balloon came the imagined mastery of the air; later, the invention of flight that can be controlled at will. To-day we are still in the stage of colonization. The future resources of the air remain hidden from our view. The Daedalean myth and the ancient conception of the winged angelic host show how the human mind has long been fascinated by the idea of flight, but the first design of an apparatus to lift man into the air, a parachute-like contrivance, was only reached at the end of the fifteenth century in one of Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts. About the same time lived the first of the long line of daring practical aviators, without whom success would never have been achieved, one John Damian, a physician of the Court of James IV of Scotland, who "took in hand to fly with wings, and to that effect caused make a pair of wings of feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of Stirling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brake his thigh-bone." Nearly 250 years later the aeronaut had not made much progress, for we read of the Marquis de Bacqueville in 1742 attaching to his arms and legs planes of his own design and launching himself from his house in the attempt to fly across the Seine, into which, regrettably, he fell. Meanwhile the seventeenth-century philosophers had been theorizing. In 1638 John Wilkins, the founder…