Earlier this week, I looked through the July issues of various magazines I own from the mid-19th through the early 20th Century in search of something appropriate for a 4th of July post, and came up empty.

I was sure there’d be a suitable essay or cartoon in the July 7th, 1917 issue of The Graphic—after all, there was a war on, so surely there’d be patriotism on display—but no. Oh, the newspaper’s pages were filled with some nice pictures of Woodrow Wilson and the War Cabinet, and a few over-the-top rants against Junkerdom, but nothing beautiful or funny or poetic or uplifting. And so … no July 4th post.

But I did find something intriguing—a large page of charts and graphs published under the collective header, “When We All Take to the Air: Post-War Propositions for Commercial Aeronautics.”

Check below to see Lord Montagu’s ideas for how to divvy up airspace, the estimated annual cost of running a London-Paris air route, and the distances covered in one hour by different methods of transportation of the day.

Note the warning that with the coming age of non-military aviation, “there may be a revival of smuggling.”

Please forgive the imperfection of the scanning. I don’t own a scanner large enough to accommodate the magazine’s 15.75″ x 11.25″ sheets, and so had to create this image out of two scans. I hope you enjoy it anyway!