I
The future of the aerial sailing-ship or heavier-than-air flying-machine will be affected more by the attitude which the world adopts towards it than by technical achievement. In England the national attitude towards machinery is moulded by statesmen and financiers. Under the guise of preserving the liberty of the individual that attitude strangles the life out of the machine; it may be described in the words of the schoolboy who said that Habeas Corpus was a phrase used during the great plague of London meaning ‘Bring out your dead’.
The statesman has helped to mould the national attitude towards the motor-car through the medium of laws and the manner of their enforcement by his servants the police, and the Courts. The history of the cause and effect of the national attitude towards the motor-car is being repeated with the flying-machine, and the parallel is close.
Having the safety of the public for its ostensible object, the Motor-Car Act limits the speed of motor-vehicles to twenty miles per hour, proclaims it an offence to drive to the common danger and to be drunk while in charge of a motor-car.
Of the last-mentioned provision I will say nothing beyond mentioning that there are motorists who are incapable of driving safely except when they are drunk. Of the other two, the 20 m.p.h. speed-limit for many years has been generally recognized as having no bearing on safety or danger, whereas for many years motorists have been condemning certain manoeuvres on the road as constituting, legally as well as in truth, driving to the common danger.
The English police, with the connivance of magistrates and Home Secretaries, have concentrated on enforcing the speed-limit and have ignored the dangerous manoeuvres.
This pass has been brought about by the statesman, who has no direct interest in motor-cars or other new-fangled machines (except when there is a general strike). As a consequence, the car built as a car for speed and control is becoming an object of general dislike. The continued insistence that speed of itself is dangerous and the pompous tyranny of the police (who find motorists tamer and more plastic than thieves) are gradually engendering in the public fear of and dislike for the machine-entity. Instead the wheeled furniture-shop is gaining in popularity. The doctrine of Safety First is threatening initiative and killing the spirit of adventure, while there is ignorance of how to attain safety. Road-racing, the only sure means of increasing car-safety, is prohibited because it is not safe. The result is the dismal, abysmal mess described as the modern British motor-car, which is chiefly remarkable for not containing a single original idea.
Now the result of statesmen moulding a similar attitude towards the flying-machine will be equally dismal. Yet they are already exerting their influence in that direction.
Instead of employing policemen and Courts to harry and hunt the herd of aeronauts, designers, and constructors, however, the statesman employs an army of air-officials. In the world of aeronautics these officials are all-mighty. The private person has no control over them and no reply to them. If he goes to Court against them he will lose. If he appeals against the decision of the Court he will lose again. If he appeals to public opinion he will lose for the third time. The official tells the airman what he may not do, warns the designer of the manner in which he may not design, and informs the constructor how he is forbidden to construct.
The result of this official attitude towards the flying-machine is already faintly visible.
At the time I write Britain holds no world’s air-records. For seven years she has made no great flight. She has three or four commercial air-lines against Germany’s forty-three. Her fastest aircraft is about 50 m.p.h., slower than the fastest foreign aircraft. Her highest climbing aircraft cannot attain within thousands of feet of the altitude attained by foreign aircraft. Her longest range aircraft can accomplish little more than half the distance covered by foreign aircraft. Her Air Force can put fewer effective war-machines in the air than any one of three other countries.
One of our pilots has succeeded in proving that, in an English aeroplane, you can go from London to anywhere else more slowly, and in more acute discomfort, than by boat and train.
In one thing only does England excel. She spends more on aviation than any other country in the world.
I am familiar with the excuses for England’s aeronautical failings. I know that the House of Commons has been told that there is no object in England attempting to obtain world’s air-records. I have heard the claim that the Royal Air Force flies more than any other air force, and I have heard the Air Ministry refuse to supply any figures in support of the claim. I know that the French are said to obtain their high speeds and great distances by cutting down the load-factor of their machines. I have been told about the theory that we could gain world’s records, run air-lines, win air-races, and have an effective Air Force but that we do not want to do so. I am familiar with these excuses, and, having mentioned some of them, I think I can proceed to indicate a cure for the failings in British aviation. For some cure is the essential preliminary to any future for the flying-machine in England.
The cause of England’s aerial impotence is chiefly official interference leading to a wrong national attitude towards the aeroplane.
The cure is to give English aviation the freedom of the air.
If the official is given powers to make vehicular transport safe, he will, as we have seen in the motor-car analogy, infallibly not make vehicular transport safe and he will stop any mechanical development in the vehicle itself. Freedom, then, is the essential condition of aeronautical development.
I said at the beginning of this essay that the financier, as well as the statesman, helped to mould the public’s attitude towards the machine. I speak only of the pure financier or business-man who uses aeroplanes, motor-cars or tin cans with equal indifference as money-making tools; who has no direct interest in any material creation; who repeats that honesty is the best policy and hopes the other man will believe it.
All such business-men in England are humble imitators of American business men. In their advertisements, offices, talk, and indigestion they endeavour as closely as possible to copy the Americans. They therefore believe that, if English people are to produce cars or aeroplanes, they must produce them in the American way—that is cheaply and in mass. Standardization has, in their view, taken the place of craftsmanship and mass-production of hard work.
Already events have shown that the English are incapable of imitating the Americans well. The reason is that the American mechanic regards his work as an unpleasant necessity, to be got through as quickly as possible and to be paid for at as high a rate as possible in order that he may have time and money for the real purpose of life—doing nothing. The English mechanic, although the statesman is trying to knock such foolishness out of him, still expects to find something satisfying in his work. He still seeks a measure of contentment in the exercise of skill.
Mass-production fits in well with the American workman’s ideas: it does not fit in with the English workman’s ideas. The English do not and will not produce cheap motor-cars or cheap aeroplanes as quickly and as well as the Americans.
If English flying-machines are to be made capable of competing with American and others, the English, after being freed from official interference, must leave standardization and mass-production to people who are temperamentally suited to them, and instil into these flying-machines some of the idiosyncrasy of their race. Their flying-machines must be creations expressive of the characters of those who design and construct them.
The only English cars having any success in America (and elsewhere) are those few in which perfection of craftsmanship and idealism in design are notable. They are the kind of cars English designers and mechanics are temperamentally able to produce. The mass-produced cheap English car or flying-machine will remain a feeble imitation of the American. But the idealistic creation, the machine-entity of the English artist-scientist in car or flying-machine has a place to itself in the scheme of things. In its best form it is unique.
The financier’s influence in aviation is not yet so noticeable as in motoring, but it is becoming stronger. Should the aeroplane pass entirely into his hands, it will cease to progress as a flying-machine and will start progressing as a bank-note churn. With the future of such an instrument I am unable to deal, since I have no personal experience of either churns or bank-notes.
If it is to make headway as an individual creation the flying-machine must receive the freedom of the air. It must develop its own individuality as a machine-entity. Freedom of the air and the complementary institution of mechanical craftsmanship are the essential conditions for development of the flying-machine. Without those conditions I have nothing to write of its future. With those conditions the flying-machine presents possibilities of development in high-speed transport that will warrant future generations describing the present age as the static age.
But I must insist that, for the forecast I am now to make, I postulate the gagging and binding or otherwise bottling-up of the statesman and financier.
Only then will this machine-entity, the creation of the artist-scientist, grow. And that the machine-entity, the car or aeroplane as a real and living thing exists will be accepted by all who have spent much time in controlling and looking after high-performance aeroplanes or racing-cars. These machines, built with a single purpose, are sensitive to the treatment they receive as the stone is sensitive to the sculptor’s chisel or the violin-strings to the musician’s bow.
Turn for one moment from the standard cars, the wheeled furniture-shops “replete with every comfort including cigarette lighter and flower vase” which make hideous our streets to the other extreme and regard the finely-wrought, aesthetically satisfying racing-car which is to be seen in the American and Continental road-races and occasionally at Brooklands. I do not suggest that racing-cars should be used for transport even in these “most brisk and giddy paced times”; I merely refer to the racing-car as indicative of a certain attitude towards the machine. The makers of flying-machines should be free, if such is their desire, to aim at the fineness, craftsmanship, and originality in design exemplified in the racing-car.