The strides in technology that had defined Edward’s reign continued at a dizzying pace. Less than eighteen years after he had crossed the Channel, Louis Blériot was on hand to greet Charles Lindburgh when he landed in France after his flight across the Atlantic. Just as H. G. Wells had predicted, aeroplanes had by then been deployed as lethal weapons. The primitive air raids of the First World War would be reprised on an infinitely more devastating scale across Europe and Japan between 1939 and 1945.
