From the time of the first flight of the Wright brothers till the beginning of the Great War, owing to the lack of commercial incentive, the development in aviation was similar to that of any other science that involved some physical dangers. It is true that M. Bleriot had flown across the English Channel on July 25, 1909; that Jules Vedrines had been carried in an aeroplane from Paris via Vienna, Sofia, and Constantinople to Cairo, Egypt; and that Roland Garros had flown 500 miles across the Mediterranean Sea from St. Raphael, France, to Tunis, Africa; but these facts were regarded as sporting events or stunts that could not be regularly performed by aeroplanes without great loss of life. For that reason practically no commercial interest was taken in aviation, and very little military—except by Germany, which was ready to seize upon and develop anything that would help her to realize _Der Tag_ when she would be conqueror of the world. Indeed, few people outside of those connected with aeronautics know that one of the chief reasons why the Potsdam gang made the Sarajevo murders a pretext for hurling the whole world into war was the firm belief that Germany had at that time the complete supremacy of the air. She had constructed a fleet of twoscore Zeppelins, some measuring 710 feet in length and being buoyed up by over 2,000,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas, driven by six Maybach gas-engines, each developing 250 horse-power, and carrying a crew of forty-eight men and a useful load of four tons. What destruction those fleets of lighter-than-air machines wrought upon the open villages, towns, and cities of England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Rumania, and Russia—not to mention the part they played in the naval battle of Jutland—constitutes another chapter in the history of German aerial preparedness and sky-line transportation that is told in the chapter on the commercial Zeppelin. But just as Germany seized on the submarine and developed it for polemic purposes, so she saw the possibilities of the aeroplane as a scout, fighter, and bombing subsidiary to the Zeppelin. With the object of developing the aeronautic branch of the service beyond any other country the German Government gave every encouragement to aviation. In 1914 the Huns offered the sum of $55,000 to be awarded for the best water-cooled and air-cooled aeromotor of 80 to 200 horse-power. Among the points to be avoided in its construction was the “use of material from any other country than Germany.” Under the auspices of the Aerial League of Germany the Kaiser also put up fifty thousand marks in prizes for the best altitude, cross-country, and non-stop records made by standardized aeroplanes taken from stock. Subsidized as the German aero manufacturers were by their government, it was not difficult for their flyers to carry off all the prizes at this meet, so that before the end of July, 1914, they had made the following new world’s records: