In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

6 ARRAYS
curtains. A German fighter squadron, which roars over the battlefield,
sparkles in the last rays of the sun" (197).
Whereas, in such war scenes, men's lives depend on the smooth functioning
of the aircraft of which the human body has become a subordinate
part, flying as a sport stages the plane as a substitute body whose
efficiency can be almost completely controlled (and, on the basis of such
control, continually improved) by the human mind. Ultimately, the
sporting competition is subsumed within the mass of technological testing
and documentation-so much so, indeed, that it can take a long time
to identify the winner of a contest: "The order in which the aircraft
complete their routes is not necessarily decisive for the final ranking,
since the technical performance still remains to be evaluated. The definitive
result depends on a formula of six individual components, consisting
of performance tests. These will probably be evaluated by the end of the
week" (Der Tag, June 10). Such competitions and the record-breaking
achievements that they yield herald a future in which daily life will be
based on technology. The car-producer Renault donates a trophy, the
"Coupe Renault," for nonstop long-distance flights. On October 28 and
29, it is won by the French pilots Costes and Rignot, who cover the
5,400 kilometers between Paris and Jask, on the Gulf of Oman, in
thirty-two hours (Annees-memoire, 179). Flights composed of several
legs, called "raids," are inaugurating new long-distance routes, such as
Paris-Tehran, Paris-Peking, London-Sidney, London-Kapstadt, Berlin­
Lake Baikal, and Spain-Argentina. In the context of this last "raid," the
first transatlantic flight takes place: Ramon Franco, a brother of the
youngest general in the Spanish army, along with two technicians,
crosses the ocean in a hydroplane between Porto Praia and an island off
the Brazilian coast. The style of Franco's diary, published several months
after the completion of his enterprise, is remarkably unheroic. Ending
with a brief summary of "the technical results of the raid," it is the
narrative of an engineer [see Engineers, Wireless Communication] who
presents his experience to a nonprofessional readership: "Within a very
few years, what today can be accomplished only as a raid will become
standard navigation, due to the great progress made by airplanes in a
short period of time. In this raid, we have demonstrated that the airplane
can successfully endure all types of weather, including tropical storms.
Wireless communication has helped us to such an extent that in the
future it will become indispensable for flights over water or desert"