`Aeronautics', wrote the Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, `was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle'. And so it must have seemed in its early days, not only to the many who watched fearful and flabbergasted from below but to the relative few who, like the young Sikorsky, actually soared aloft. The miracle was achieved a hundred times over by the pilots of aviation's infancy. It was these venturers who were the first to ask: Can I get there from here in an airplane? They often answered the question in machines that men a decade later would have considered instruments of suicide. Their achievements, seem modest only in hindsight. Miracles all - and they were by no means always safely accomplished. The advent of war in 1914 ended the brief era of the first pathfinders, but their deeds had contributed an inspiring prelude to the golden age of aviation.