In 1899 transport was on the verge of a massive revolution. The steam engine had made mass transportation possible. A century earlier it took the best part of a week to travel from London to Plymouth by coach on muddy, pot-holed roads, by train it took a matter of hours. There was talk of a Channel Tunnel. The steam ship had cut sailing times and allowed schedules to be kept, rather than relying on the vagaries of the weather. It took weeks not months to reach Australia. Few doubted that man would be able to fly one day. Just how far and fast nobody could have conceived. Early flight pioneers had a nasty habit of crashing fatally. On December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world's first successful flights in a heavier-than-air craft under power and control. They kept it quiet for some time before releasing the news. The Daily Mail did not report it until 1905 Early flight specialists soon developed the aeroplane so that regular passenger services were up and flying by the early 1920s. Air travel was, however, still a luxury. The jet engine changed all that. Invented by Frank Whittle and developed during the Second World War, the jet doubled aircraft speeds overnight and made it possible to carry heavy loads long distances without refuelling. The British development of radar (derived from the phrase ‘radio detection and ranging’, was instrumental in defeating the Nazis. It gave us eyes to see where we could not before. It could detect objects in the air (and in the case of sonar) underwater. This meant that an aircraft could fly fast through skies at night or completely enveloped in cloud and be able to ‘see’ not only where it was going but what else was up there. Mass air travel arrived with the development of the Jumbo Jet. The Boeing 747 was one of the great engineering wonders of the world. It is safe - air travel is statistically the safest means of transport - and cheaper to run than a high-speed train. The French TGV, perhaps the finest on rails, makes three short-haul trips at well under jet speed, 700,000 seat-miles a day. A transatlantic 747 produces three times the TGV's seat-mile output at half its price, costing about 1.5 pence per seat-mile. While Jumbo Jets have improved their fuel efficiency and range and there are plans for passenger aircraft twice their size, they have reached the limits of their performance. For long-haul flights passengers need to go supersonic. Concorde for all its grace and speed is a noisy, fuel-guzzling, environmentally unfriendly bird. The future of long-haul aviation lies in aircraft that can leave the earth’s atmosphere, skim the edges of the stratosphere and arrive in Australia in a couple of hours. In 1896 the ‘horseless carriage’, ‘light locomotive’ or ‘autocar’ was a rarity owned only by the eccentric rich. Limited by law to a top speed of 14 mph it could still travel further in an hour on London streets than is achievable today, when the average speed is 11 mph! This has been the century of the automobile. In 1994 36 million cars were constructed worldwide. The car has given freedom of transport and choice to millions, but it has also created pollution and killed thousands. As environmental pressures mount and fossil fuels run low, the car will have to change radically for the millennium. The development of new materials for car bodies will help but in the long term there has to be a replacement for the internal combustion engine.