Before long then we may reasonably expect that all the capitals of the world will be connected by air lines. Already regular landing-places have been established from London via Paris, Rome, and Constantinople to Bagdad and Cairo. Peking and Tokio will next be added. The flight from London to New York will also soon be an accomplished fact. Then all the capitals of Central and South America will be joined up. The distance from South America to Africa is about the same as that between America and Europe. By reducing the time of travel between all those places to hours the aeroplane will make mountains dwindle into ant-hills, rivers to creeks, lakes to mud-holes, and oceans and seas to ponds. The globe will be aerially circumnavigated. Tokio and Peking will be as accessible to New York as London now is, and vice versa. Then there will be no east or west and with the new aerial age will come a new internationalism founded on speedy intercommunication and good-will toward all man-kind. [Illustration: _Courtesy of Aerial Age Weekly._ The C-5 leaving its hangar at Montauk Point en route to accompany the NC’s on their trans-Atlantic flight. After reaching the vicinity of Halifax the “Blimp” broke away from her moorings and was blown out to sea. The Blimps are equipped with one Hispano-Suiza motor. They measure 200 feet.] CHAPTER XIII THE COMMERCIAL ZEPPELIN THE AMBITION OF THE AGES REALIZED—A GIANT GERMAN DIRIGIBLE—ZEPPELIN ACCOMPLISHMENTS—HIGH COST OF ZEPPELINS—SAFETY OF TRAVEL—SOME BRITISH PREDICTIONS—THE FUTURE OF HELIUM—THE LIFE-BLOOD OF COMMERCE Almost daily during the winter of 1918-1919 reports were coming out of Europe to the effect that Zeppelins were being converted into aerial merchantmen to fly regularly between New York and Hamburg. Because these gigantic lighter-than-air machines, measuring more than 700 feet in length, 70 feet in diameter, buoyed up by more than 2,000,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas, and driven by six Maybach-Mercedes engines, generating a total of 1,400 horse-power, had carried, in all kinds of weather and under adverse circumstances of war, a crew of forty-eight men and a useful load of four tons from Germany over the British fleet and the North Sea and the anti-aircraft guns and by hostile fleets of Allied aeroplanes, and had successfully raided England and Scotland more than a score of times, returning safely to their home ports, often having flown a total distance of approximately 800 miles—the eyes of the aeronautical world, like search-lights in the night, were sweeping the heavens over the Atlantic seaboard to discover whether these leviathans of the air or the little dragon-flies of aeroplanes were to be the first to appear in the firmament, aerially transnavigating the 1,195 miles of water that separates the Old World from the New.