When the United States entered the war against Germany in 1917 there was no phase of her forthcoming industrial effort from which so much was expected as from the building of airplanes and equipment for aerial warfare; yet there was no phase of the immense undertaking in which the United States was so utterly unprepared. In many other branches of the work of providing matériel for a modern army, however inadequately acquainted America might be with the developments which had gone on in Europe since 1914, yet she had splendid resources of skill and equipment which could quickly turn from the pursuits of peace to the arts attending warfare. But there was no large existing industry in the United States which could turn easily to the production of airplanes, since such airplanes as were known in Europe in 1917 had never been built in the United States. It seems difficult now for us to realize how utterly unlearned we were, both in official and technical quarters, in the design, the production, or the use of aeronautical equipment in those early days of 1917. Here in America mechanical flight had been born; but we had lived to see other nations develop the invention into an industry and a science that was a closed book to our people. In the three years of warfare before American participation, the airplane had been forced through a whole generation of normal mechanical evolution. Of this progress we were aware only as nontechnical and distant observers. Such military study of the progress as we had conducted was casual. It had, in fact, brought to America scarcely a single basic fact on which we could build our contemplated industry. When the United States became a belligerent no American-built airplane had ever mounted a machine gun or carried any other than the simplest of necessary instruments. Such things as oxygen apparatus, electrically heated clothing for aviators, radio-communication with airplanes, landing and bombing flares, electric lighting systems for planes, bomb-dropping devices, suitable compasses, instruments for measuring height and speed, and the like--in short, all the modern paraphernalia that completes the efficiency of combat airplanes--these were almost entirely unknown to us. The best of the prewar activities of America in this line had produced some useful airplane engines and a few planes which the countries then at war were willing to use only in training of aviators.