No Longer An Island

Plot

"England is no longer an island." These prophetic words of an English newspaper magnate acknowledged that the invention of the airplane meant an end to Britain's traditional reliance upon its sea power as a protection against invasion. No government paid more attention to the early activities of the Wright brothers than the British, but British negotiations with the Wrights present a record of lost opportunities and missed chances, mingled with ineptness and duplicity.The story is told here in all its colorful detail, including the British use of a bungling spy who managed to miss the successful first flight of the Wrights in December 1903, and a later attempt by C. S. Rolls, the cofounder of the Rolls-Royce motor car company, to steal the Wrights' technical secrets. Throughout these hears, high-level infighting—involving such eminent figures as Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Admiral Fisher, General Haig, and Lord Northcliffe—repeatedly threatened to bring the whole effort to a standstill.In 1909, Britain's Secretary of State for War, who was secretly banking on the purloined secrets to be supplied by Rolls, broke off negotiations, thus closing the first chapter in Britain's aeronautical history. The British then began air defense preparations on their own, an endeavor that proved to be of the greatest importance in the two World Wars.