pretty O.K. now? Such an event would be exciting and that’s what I want to hear about.”
Most people, I thought, are like the reporter. They want startlers. And what’s more, they are likeliest to believe the ones which appear most impossible.
I told a group of not very progressive women once that within two years everyone present would have been in an airplane, i.e., anyone who traveled at all. A good many heads shook negatively to that. But when I described the possibility of future high altitude flying in planes sealed to protect passengers in the rarefied air, going at speeds of 500 to 1000 m.p.h., they took such a development almost for granted.
Yet I maintain my prophecy that aviation, as we know it today, will be accepted as an everyday means of locomotion before we progress to stratosphere flying.
After all, when one considers it, the simple idea of flying from one place to another, is a real startler. What would the early balloonists have thought of doing this? They went up for sport, for acclaim or for reward, and then came down—where it didn’t matter. To go by air to a predetermined destination was never attempted.
But the world today has the transportation idea firmly fixed. It even invades sport flying, which as often as not, means going by airplane several hundred miles (instead of thirty by automobile) for a game of golf.
