Boosting with Oxygen

AS with so many other wartime developments it has long been a secret de Polichinelle that certain British aeroplanes were equipped with systems for increasing the performance at altitude by injecting oxygen in some form or other into the engines. It was also known—though probably to a smaller circle of initiates—that the Germans were using the same device. With their characteristic gift for imaginative publicity the Americans from time to time put out eye‐catching stories of the injection of water to obtain a more or less momentary increase on somewhat similar lines—obviously a method with a more striking appeal to the popular mind.