Sees Commercial Use of Flying Craft Soon

1916

Aviator Says Aeroplanes Will Be Used for Express and Mail Service Within Few Years.

"I expect to see aeroplanes in daily commercial use within two or three years. They will be used for high-class express and mail service and there will be no trouble of these machines crossing the ocean."

This was the statement made by Art Smith, 22 years old, champion "loop-the-loop" aviator, who is in a Chicago hospital for treatment of a leg which he injured in an accident in Japan.

Smith said he would not fly again himself, but that he planned to become interested in a $5,000,000 plant for the manufacture of aeroplanes in Japan.

"I think some of the aeroplanes in military use in Europe now can fly across the Atlantic," said Smith. One of the latest Curtiss machines in the British army has three motors and measures ninety feet from tip to tip of its wings. It is equipped with boats and can travel on water."

Smith has had a romantic and brilliant career as an aviator. He built his own aeroplane in Fort Wayne, Ind., when 16 years old. It was in this machine that he flew with his sweetheart to Hillsdale and was married. It was the first aeroplane elopement.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Sept. 16, 1916, p. 9.

French Copying Many Yankee Notions

1910

By Harold F. Tracey

When in Paris lately I ran across so many Yankee notions and devices that I concluded the capital of La Belle France and New York City would be very much like twins after the lapse of a few more years.

They have American dentists, American saloons, where all kinds of mixed drinks of the sort we are used to are served; skating rinks, Luna park shows, shops where one can buy shoes from the Massachusetts factories, and hundreds of other products of the States.

You can see the fair dames of France wearing the long veils which the daughters of Uncle Sam introduced after motoring became fashionable and the Parisiennes have actually adopted the big handbags that only American women formerly carried on their shopping expeditions and by which their nationality was easily proclaimed.

I also saw in many stores roll top desks, adding machines and cash registers bought in this country and in my hotel in Paris was a mammoth self-playing piano which was branded U.S.A.

Saying He Never Felt Better, Died

1905

The death of W. H. Rockhill, ex-clerk of the courts of this county, here verifies in a way the thesis of Goethe that no man can survive a happy moment.

He had been feeling ill and went to the office of his physician to tell the doctor that he was improving in health and that he never felt better for many days.

The words had no more than escaped his lips than he keeled over and died of heart disease. — Lebanon correspondence, Cincinnati Enquirer.


Effects of Prosperity

In the six years of the country's greatest prosperity, from 1897 to 1903, average prices of breadstuffs advanced 65 per cent, meats 23.1 per cent, dairy and garden products 50.1 per cent, and clothing 24.1. All these were products of the farmer and stockman who profited more than any other class of the community by these advances. The miner benefited 42.1 per cent by that advance in the average price of metals. The only decrease in the average prices of commodities in that period was in railway freight rates which decreased from .798 per ton-mile in 1897 to .763 in 1903, a loss of 4.4 per cent. The report of the Interstate Commerce Commission shows that the average increase in the pay of railroad employees in the period was trifle above 8.5 per cent.