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[[title]] Mail through the Air [[/title]]

[[bold]] A Review of the Development of Air Mail and the Collection of Aero-Philatelic Material [[/bold]]

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[[bold]] by ERNEST A. KEHR [[/bold]]

Stamp News Editor, N. Y. Herald Tribune

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As Adapted from the Original Brochure by the Late WALTER J. CONRATH

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The regular carriage of mail from New York to Buenos Aires in thirty-seven hours; the global service which links by air every country on earth; the crossing of the continent by jet-propelled planes in six hours; these represent the culmination of man's constant quest for speedier communication methods. They are today's result of a never-ending series of improvements on transportation methods which began when men were garbed in the skins of wild animals. On these bases will tomorrow's systems be built.

It took man thousands of years to plod through civilization until the beginning of our century when the Wright Brothers proved to the world that DaVinci, Clement Ader and Montgolfier were not so very far wrong and that the Mythology of the ancient Greeks was more than a fabled dream when it envisioned Daedalus and Icarus traveling above the earth. Since that incredible Kitty Hawk hop, time, instead of marching on, has flown on. Today there isn't a spot of earth to which an airmail letter cannot be flown; none which is more than sixty hours from any other.

The history of airmail and its progress are interwoven with the romance of famous fliers and epochal flights. Fortunate are we to be able to capture some of this romance and preserve it for posterity in the collection of