 Strange that a world man had known for maybe 10,000 years should come to an end in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Here, sloping down to a point of fading into history, was the world of earthbound people. All the ordinary mortals, all the great souls and brilliant minds of the past, all of them since the dawn of time, lived out their lives on the ground. This was the end of that original world. While the first age expired, a new one was coming to life, focused in the minds of two brothers, taking shape under the pliers, wrenches and hammers that they worked with their hands. Inside the walls of their bicycle shop, Wilbur and Orville Wright were building the parts of an airplane. Like so many lesser events with great implications, hardly anyone knew what was taking place, even when the Wrights took their plane to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and flew it for 59 seconds. The world of 1903 went on about its business. Those were the most momentous 59 seconds in history. Those were the 59 seconds that introduced a new measurement of space, now to be reckoned in hours and minutes instead of miles. There was no great excitement, no vast wave of talk about the accomplishment, but perhaps a few keen ears heard far off in the sky, the first whisper that was to grow into the drumming roar of the future. The strange phenomenon that hardly anyone noticed was this. The world began to shrink under their feet, and it would go on shrinking. The first flight was mentioned in the papers, but people didn't grasp the meaning of the words they read. More flights, more stories in the papers. Finally it soaked in, men were sewing around above the treetops in flying machines. The people said to themselves, huh, a pretty expensive sport. Here and there others may have thought, might possibly be able to carry passengers someday, maybe even parcel posts. Then the military took an interest, because this could mean new long range eyes for the ground forces. Possibly flying machines could be used to direct artillery fire also. In those days it was hard to see into the future. You can get the real meaning of what they missed by looking backward, away back to the foggy morning of time, the people whose world it was first. Even in those misty days, aggression had already been invented, and a man had to defend himself. To begin with he was armed only with his own arm and his fist. Then he found that a stick of wood could make more of an impression, and he picked up a glove. There must have been times when he wished his arm were 50 feet long, so that he could stop the attack at a distance. In time those first people passed their world on to others, learned to put the power of an arm behind spears, behind arrows shot from bows. After a while they developed gunpowder and guns. They had a fist that was eventually able to strike a shattering blow five or ten miles away. By 1903 it looked as though the big cannon might be the best weapon that would ever be devised, and now here was the flying machine to give it eyes and help it strike even more accurate blows. At that lots of people thought the military were wasting their time with a new contraption. The army went against criticism and bought a few flying machines anyway. Then something happened. An incident with a tin plate. A flying officer took a rifle up in the air with him and put holes in the plate on the ground. Tanpuran racetrack in San Francisco became the first spot on earth to be bombed from an airplane. When they dropped a piece of gas pipe filled with power and a three inch artillery shell fitted with fins. Both missiles exploded and blew up the old concepts of warfare. Though no one saw the extent of the damage at the moment. Life had changed a lot since the misty morning of history, but aggression was still going strong. Along came World War I and the flying machine joined up to spot enemy positions and reconnoitred. It wasn't long before opposing pilots began shooting at each other, revolvers and shotguns. Others tried dropping docks on enemy troops, getting louder. It didn't grow to a roar until the last big drive of the war, where the Americans scraped together nearly 1500 planes of all nations for dropping explosives to spearhead the big push. The roar was loud enough now, but not everybody that heard it could understand what it meant. It was really the sound of the earth getting smaller. The world began to shrink fast that day. The airmen could see it dwindle. Their view of the future was better than that of the ones on the ground. Here was a weapon that could be used for almost anything. As already proved in the big push of 1918, it could range ahead of the ground forces to blast enemy infantry, artillery and ammunition dumps. Well then, why not planes big enough to carry bomb loads even farther behind enemy lines and smash the attack where it was being organized? Then why stop there? If the factories and war installations of the enemy could be destroyed, the enemy offensive would be stopped before it began. In other words, cripple the sources of enemy power, political, economic and military, by direct attack. By the time World War II was over, 42 years from the bicycle shop in Dayton, the flying machine had proved itself as a weapon that had no equal. The proof was spelled out in the rubble of Hamburg, Essen and Berlin. It was written in the stark flat aftermath of Hiroshima. The atomic bomb had blasted Japan to her knees before a hostile force set foot on her shores. But the bomb had been delivered over the target in a B-29. The whole story adds up to a factor that governs the lives of nations and individuals. Air power. Because the air connects every spot on the face of the earth with every other, there are no seas and no mountain ranges in the sky. From up in the stratosphere, no moats or walls, no place to hide, no boundaries more definable than time. It is true the world that was born with wings in 1903 has moved farther and faster than the first one did in 10,000 years. But it inherited the first world's worst crisis, greed and aggression. There still exist those who think the only way to achieve our way of life is to take it from us by force. Airmen who could see beyond the horizon, whose ears were attuned to the roar of the future, could sift out the fact that a large part of the sound and fury was the thunder of enemy planes. They were no longer safe behind the seas, but the polar ice cap. They were safe only under the roof of our own air power. In America, full recognition of the fact of air power came at last in 1947. The air arm was moved up to equal status with the others. When there was established, the United States Air Force. The principle of air power is clear enough. But what is air power in fact? There have been enough books and speeches. Experts have launched armadas of words to explain air power. Most of the definitions add up to a sky full of monster planes. Is this all there is to air power? If you wanted to analyze it to the bone, you might say that air power is factories and people on the aircraft production line. Braftsmen, rivities, rigors and electronic specialists. But there is another figure which seems sometimes to be overlooked. Too often lost in the shadow of giant wings. Unheard in the spectacular blast of jet planes scorching through the skies. He is a man in a blue uniform. He is the personnel of the United States Air Force. Without him, the planes sit idly on the ground. Perfect, sleek, but cold and totally useless. You see him on your street, on his in Texas, California, Kansas, wherever you live. He may be a pilot or a ground crewman, a general or a private. But he flies with every United States plane on every mission, everywhere around the globe. In a way, he has to know more than all the masterminds of the ages. His skills encompass nearly all the important skills known to man. Even the broad categories of his fears of operation would bewilder the groundlings he is bound to help defend in the shrinking world. He may be functioning in the headquarters command or as part of the air proving ground or the Continental Air Command, the Air Defense Command, the Tactical Air Command, the Air Material Command, the Air Training Command, the Military Air Transport Service, the Strategic Air Command, the Air Research Development Command, the Air University. He may be part of any of the overseas air commands. The details of his composite job stagger the imagination. You'll find him at the controls of a jet fighter. You'll find him taking its engine apart and putting it together again. You will discover that he is familiar with radar, with electronics, with the technique of arming fighter guns, with the technique of loading bomb bays. You will find him learning and teaching, testing and experimenting. You'll find him plotting a bomber's way over trackless oceans. You'll find him hauling freight through the skies. You'll find him handling shipments of engine parts, penicillin, pork chops and lead pencils. You will find him working with wind tunnels and business machines. Listen, the roar of American engines in the air is powerful music to your ears, but there are men up there controlling machines on their course through the sky. Maybe five years ago other men saw the prototype image in the eyes of their minds and sketched what they saw on paper. Still others made the parts and put the planes together. Each ship has men in its background who tested it, men who look after its metal organs and groom it on the ground. So now the engines have a human sound. The shapes of machines against the clouds begin to look alive, all because of the host of Air Force personnel working together. What is it they represent but your own arm? Its strength magnified ten million times, cocked to defend your life. Together all these people, as much as the swarms of planes, are the air power of America. U.S. Air Force is you and me.