THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8299, 30 November 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1906.

So assured are scientists that a successful aeroplane must speedily malco its anpearance that we may confidently anticipate it as the Great Discovery of the. Twentieth Century. Maritimo navigation has long beon in the hands of humanity and has evolved by spasmodio degrees from the canoe of the South Sea Islanders and the galley of the Meditteranese to the "clipper" of cur fathers and the turbine steamer of to-day. We have solved the problems of laud transit by a stilt more elongated process, leading up through various forms of sledging, packing, and carting to the modern railway system and the modern motor car. But the navigation of tho air still defies civilisation, for thousands of years men iu China and boys everywhere else have flown kites; for some hundreds of years aeronauts Lave mounted iu balloons to drift wherever the wind chose to carry them; for two or three years a feeble effort has been made to direct clumsily these silken bags of hydrogen with their dependent cars. We still await the flying machine by which man will leave tho earth like a bird and direct his course to whatever point and to whatever distance he pleases. When auoh h maohine is invented it will revolutionise not ouly the methods of war but the very coudi-

fciona of peace. The railway oar, whether drawn by a steam engine or driven by electricity, a vast engineering work to precede it. The very motor oar needs a good high road on which to travel unless one can choose one's weather—and always needs a made road. Bat the flying maohfne, like the ship, has its roadway already made for it by Nature. Unlike the ship, it is not limited by any coastline; there is not even any reason why <t should ultimately be interfered with by the loftiest mountain range, certainly not by an ordinary range. So that the aeiial navigator, who Beta out in the aeroplane of the future—in the maohine that is bound to evolve from the first bold flight of a hundred miles through the air—may sail across any notional boundary without challenge and alight where he will under cover of the night. If a machine is once invented that will cross the ooean, it will be an easy thing to cross continents and quite impossible to maintain frontier lines as we now understand them. The North Pole, and the South Pole, too, will be visited by summer tourißts of means, as they now visit tiotorua and the Yellowstone Valley. Indeed; the imagination fails to grasp the ohanges which the flying maohine must inevitably make in hamm affairs, which have all been based upon the supposition that mau is a land animal.