The first flight ever made over English soil was made by Mr. A. V. Roe, in a machine of his own construction. Mr. Roe began life as an apprentice at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Locomotive Works, and very early distinguished himself in cycle racing. He then qualified as a fitter at Portsmouth Dockyard, studied naval engineering at King's College, London, and spent three years, from 1899 to 1902, in the merchant service as a marine engineer. The seagulls and the albatross of the southern seas set him thinking, and he began to make model gliders. Returned home again, he spent some time as a draughtsman in the motor industry. The news of the Wrights' achievements found in him a ready believer, and he wrote to _The Times_ to combat the prevailing scepticism. His letter was printed, with a foot-note by the engineering editor to the effect that all attempts at artificial flight on such a basis as Mr. Roe described were not only dangerous to human life, but were foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint. From 1906 onwards Mr. Roe devoted all his time and all his savings to aviation. In 1907 he made a full-size flying machine and took it to the Brooklands motor track. He had no sufficient engine power, and while he was waiting many months for the arrival of a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette engine from France he induced sympathetic motorists to give him experimental towing flights. It was difficult, he says, to induce the motorists to let go at once when the machine began to swerve in the air; they often held on with inconvenient fidelity, and many of the experiments ended in a dive and a crash. In the spring of 1908 his Antoinette engine arrived, and on the 8th of June he made the first flight ever made in England, covering some sixty yards at a height of two feet from the ground. Then he received notice to quit Brooklands. He had never been much favoured by the management, who perhaps thought that the wreckage of aeroplanes would not add to the popularity of a motor-racing track, and his experiments had been made under very difficult conditions, for he was not allowed to sleep in the shed where his machine was housed, nor to practise with the machine during the hours when the track was in use. He applied to the War Office for leave to erect his shed by the side of Mr. Cody's at Laffan's Plain, but was refused. He then consulted a map of London, and pitched upon Lea Marshes, where there were some large fields open to the public, and some railway arches, a couple of which he rented and boarded up. In the stable of a house at Putney belonging to one of his brothers he had already built a tractor triplane which he now removed to Lea Marshes. Under the stress of his misfortunes he had parted with his Antoinette engine, so he had nothing better for his triplane than a nine horse-power J.A.P. motor-cycle engine designed by John Alfred Prestwich. With this, the lowest-powered engine that has ever flown in England, he