Ten years ago the aeroplane was a curiosity—a means wherewith, by a tour de force, a man might lift himself from the ground and make a hazardous flight through quiet air—a means to attract curious crowds to fenced-in county fair grounds to witness the marvel of a body heavier than air actually rising from the ground and moving under some measure of control through the air, and returning safely to its starting point.

What the aeroplane has become in this short but poignant decade of the world's history, and what it stands for to-day, this audience knows too well to need specification in detail.

It is perhaps well within the limits of conservatism to say that no achievement of man's inventive and constructive genius has undergone more intensive, more rapid, or more potentially significant development than has that of flying with an apparatus heavier than the air in which it moves.