| Creator | Eduard Renggli |
| Printing year | 1913 |
| Sheet size (cm) | 119×108 |
| Printing technique | Lithograph |
| Printer | Graph. Anstalt Huber, Anacker & Cie. |
| Condition | B |
| Asking price | 3'700 CHF |
| Categories | Plebiscites & Campaigns, Swissair & Aviation |
At the latest after the French War Ministry purchased its first aircraft in July 1909 and Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel just two weeks later, the Swiss Army is faced with the question of how to deal with this development. However, the gentlemen are not very decisive, which is why the Swiss Officers’ Association decides in December 1912 to raise money for the establishment of a military aviation service.
In order to inform the population and speed up the process in view of the growing tensions between the European great powers, it commissions the Lucerne glass painter and commercial artist Eduard Renggli to design a poster – certainly influenced by his vigorous poster created a year earlier for the Federal Gymnastics Festival in Basel (see below).
Renggli then chooses a similar approach, again drawing on Ferdinand Hodler’s parallelism: soldiers climbing a hill in unison (an army marching downhill would not be particularly well received) look up to the future: an airplane. A total of 1.7 million francs was raised (that would be around 240 million today, based on the GDP index – as it is not so much the absolute figure that is of interest but rather the proportion that an amount represents in relation to total production in both the base year and the target year), and in July 1914, the army leadership began to establish an aviation division.
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