A 90-YEAR-OLD PROPHECY

Evening Star, Issue 21628, 25 January 1934, Page 10

A 90-YEAR-OLD PROPHECY

SUBJECT OF FLYING Ninety years ago—in.. 1842 —Martin [ F. Tapper wrote ah 'interesting if fanciful essay on the subject - ot flying by man a hundred years before the period of which he ventures to prophesy . wonderful modes of “taking the air ” arrived. Following is .his prediction : —• “If we want to fly, let us imitate a bird, and not go blindly beating ‘ a priori ’ bushes. Let us be content to know that Nature’s way is best, perfect, and not to be improved upon; and let our humility be sure that the closer we copy her the more likely are we to become as fisbified, at least as froggified, as possible. When we fly, in shape, in buoyancy, and motion, our fashions must be of the painted people that naturally float upon the air. “First, then, for shape! Away with the intractable clumsiness of sail-rudders, expanding wheels, oars like, the nets of entomologists; away .with the blunt-beaded balloon and its disunited car! We,must fly like sparrows, not like the lingering drop that gravitates a bubble. Wo must link buoyancy to motion, making our arms wings, and guiding the flight by Mercury’s light heels. “ Mechanism can lengthen and strengthen man’s arms, clothe its batpinioned elongations with feathery web, and so connect the lower limbs with the apparatus of an eagle’s tail,, then man shall look like some huge vampire stalking on the wondering earth. Moreover, wo must peak his headpiece and puff him out with lightness to nullify his weight. “ Now for the matter of buoyancy I suppose we must have recourse to common gas; at least until something still lighter, something of the tamed gunpowder kind, or of the fettered and humanised carbonic acid vapour, shall bless us with exalting and imponderable floatiness; and here is a query for chemistry. Can you not give us something as much lighter than hydrogen gas as this is lighter than the atmosphere. Oh, for some shrewd experimentalist to capture exploding powder and give’ it to us as concentrated buoyancy! On, for some patented extract - of live birds’ bones, that have yielded up their secret gases and lifted from contaminating earth the-school-boy that has it in his pocket! Are these things quite impossible? Arise, my grandfathers, and mock at steam! Appear, my grandson, and come unto me flying! “It is—as. in due time it man be—the year of grace 1942, I am standing upon Shakespeare’s Cliff, or what remains of it, wondering at the ruins of the railroad, and waiting for the daily post from Australasia. I see a speck in the clouds, and hail the harbinger of news; the postman alights for half a second (his regulation breathing time), folds his caoutchouc wings, sucks in a concentrated lozenge, the virtues of a quart of London porter, blows his nose with an asbestos pockelT handkerchief, and is off again like a rocket before I have well seen whether my letters have the postmark of Adelaide dr of Sydney! “Verily, if the world is to last much longer, - the sons of our children may see such things; verily some laborious Frankenstein of chemistry may yet send the engineer hoist on his own petard, and cause the fields of air to be as poached by sporting characters as of old time had been the cloddy fields of earth.” .