Speed will have no bounds in the future. As I have already said briefly in passing, aeroplanes will soon be going considerably over one hundred miles per hour. A motorcycle has gone at the rate of one hundred and thirty-seven miles per hour and an aeroplane should be able to go even faster. With the help of a strong wind blowing in the direction of flight, two hundred miles an hour ought to be possible of attainment. Machines for high speed, however, must have some means of contracting the wing area or flattening out the curve in the planes so that when we want to go fast, we can reduce the amount of surface of the machine to lessen friction and so that when we want to go more slowly and land, we can increase the size of the wing surface. The Etrich machine built in Austria has been constructed so that the curvature of the planes can be changed by operating a lever near the pilot; this enables the machine to attain high speed in flight and to fly more slowly in starting and landing. The record is one hundred and eight miles an hour now (September, 1912) and we will not be surprised to see it climb up in proportion as rapidly as the altitude record did in 1911. There is no wonder that an aeroplane race should create such absorbing interest, almost amounting to a craze, in the mind of the public directly interested. Speed is the one thing about the aeroplane that appeals both to the practical and to the imaginative man; the man of business, to whom saving time means saving money, and the poet, or the man of leisure, to whom the words "make a bee-line"–that is, an air line–have always stood for speed and directness. Now in earth or rail friction-machines, the limit of speed has almost been reached, except in the case of monorail vehicles, and there seems to be little progress in this direction. With the aeroplane, on the contrary, speed is only in its infancy. None of the difficulties that check the development of speed in the automobile or locomotive attend the aeroplane. What means speed now–ninety or ninety-five miles an hour–merely marks a stage in the machine's development; a hundred and fifty an hour is even now within its possibilities, and a much greater speed is by no means beyond the vision of the present generation. What the boys of to-day are going to see when they grow up no one can foretell. It is largely a question of motive power that and the reduction of resistance. In the latter respect I have already materially cut down the resistance of the newest type of Curtiss machine, in order to increase the speed. I was able, as I have said, to win the International Cup at Rheims in 1909 with a speed of forty-seven and one-half miles an hour. At Los Angeles during the past winter my latest type was able to fly more than seventy miles an hour, and the same type of engine, an eight-cylinder, has also been made more powerful, thus the increased speed is due to the improvements in