disproved; it would probably never have been made but for the admirable
efficiency of the factory in rising to meet a national crisis. National
defence, it is agreed, cannot safely be left wholly to private
enterprise, even in England. The factory carried out an immense number
of experiments in connexion with aeroplanes and airships. The quest for
stability, longitudinal and lateral, in aeroplanes was the chief
preoccupation of these early years. Powerful engines are useless in a
ship which cannot be trusted to keep afloat. It was this quest, as much
as anything, which drew the factory into designing aeroplanes. The
various types of aeroplane designed at the factory bear names which
consist of a pair of initial letters, with a number affixed. The letters
indicate the type of the machine; the number indicates its place in the
series of continually improving variants of the same type. Three of
these types were gradually being evolved at the factory in the course of
the year 1911. The earliest to attain to practical success was the B.E.
type of machine. Every pilot who had his training in the early days of
the war was familiar with this machine, though not every pilot knew that
the initials are a monument to Louis Bleriot, who first flew the
Channel. His achievement gave a great vogue to his monoplane, which was
imitated by many designers; and when the factory produced a biplane
fitted, like all monoplanes, with a tractor airscrew, in front of the
machine, the biplane was called the Bleriot Experimental. The F.E. type
is the Farman Experimental, a pusher biplane, which for a long time held
its own by virtue of two advantages. The observer, being seated in the
very prow of the machine, could fire a gun forward without being
obstructed by the airscrew. This advantage disappeared after 1915, when,
by the invention of synchronizing gears, which timed the bullets to pass
between the revolving blades of the screw, tractor machines were
enabled to fire directly ahead. But another advantage persisted. In
night-flying, when the eyes are strained to pick up dim shapes in the
dark, a clear field of vision is all-important, and the F.E. type of
machine continued to be used in night raids throughout the war. The
third type was the S.E., or Scouting Experimental. The fifth variant of
this type, the S.E. 5, gained an enormous reputation in the war as a
fighting machine, and indeed was preferred by some pilots to the best
scout machines of