DREAM OF SKY CITIES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3132, 28 August 1922, Page 7

DREAM OF SKY CITIES.

What will the world he d%ng 10,000 years lienee ? Captain Lawson, the designer and producer in America of the large air liners that hears his name, declares that l»y that time, and probably before, mankind' will he living a wonderful “sky life’’ in vast aerial cities raised and held stationary miles above the earth. At present the human body, propmg, about at the bottom of the ocean of the air, has, according to Captain Lawson’s argument, for too great an air pressure to sustain. Of course, our frames are accustomed to it. ft would bo unwise and harmful to transform man suddenly into a high-al-titude animal] 1 , but if the change is made gradually. Captain Lawson argues, it will have an amazingly beneficial influence on the human body. The world, say« Captain Lawson, will in these future times see great floating “sunlight cities”—-so caviled because, owing to their height above the earth with its mists, clouds, and dense atmosphere. the health-giving rays of the sun will bathe them continuously. Gases of a lifting power unobtainable to-day, imprisoned in enormous storage tanks, will hear the air cities upward to any height—according to _ atmospheric, climatic, or other conditions—that the inhabitants desire There they will float, miles perhaps above the surface of the earth, ilia inhabitants free, for one thing, from the densc-air bacteria which, while we are content to remain “bottom of the aid” creatures, produce many diseases. These great future sky cities, as Captain Lawson sees them, Avill be roofed in with vast, perfectly /transparent domes of a substances resembling glass, but of an actual type unknown to-day. Enormous “collecting towers,” extracting from the upper air solar and electrical energy, which will be employed as the motive-power to drive all the mechanical appliances of the aerial city, will jut up above these domes. The people of the future who live the “sky life” will, it is prophesied, bo a larger-chested, quicter-nerved, far longer-lived people than those who today dwell at the bottom of the ocean of the air.