Will the Airship Destroy Civilisation?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 9, 3 March 1909, Page 44

Will the Airship Destroy Civilisation?

FORECAST OF MR. H. G. WELLS

IX the Christmas number of the “ Pall Mall Magazine,” Mr. H. G. Wells brings to a close his startling romance of the future, “The War in the Air.” The etorv, which drags at the , beginning, closes in a scene of unexampled horror. •Yet the last part of the book is infinitely better worth reading than all the preceding chapters. For in it Mr. Wells paints a picture of what may happen, Jnd in all probability will happen, if {he advent of the airship does not rouse he nations of the world 'to a vigorous Effort to suppress war. This sounds fantastic and it seems wrong to despair jef anything. Certainly if Mr. Wells is right—and there are many grounds for thinking that lie is not far wrong—the Jransfer of war from sea and laud is inevitable if war itself is allowed to continue. But war in the air, although it •will be accompanied by comparatively J. ma 11 bloodshed owing to the reduction in the number of combatants, threatens Civilisation with infinitely greater evils ihan those which were produced by wars Of the past. t <ON THE VERGE OF THE ABY<S. ' In Mr. Well's vivid picture we see portrayed some of the consequences of the new kind of war. He shows tts a Tx>n<lon empty and dead. He shows us civilisation smitten as by a thunderbolt, and all the complex machinery by which men find their daily bread shattered by the new instrument of destruction, with the Jesuit that the world is wasted by fatnine, followed by a plague which sweeps oil more than half her inhabitants. It reads like a nightmare: but no one who considers* the highly artificial fabric of modern civilisation and reflects upon the possible consequences of the kind of unending war which the new sy-tenr will Usher in, can seriously doubt- that something very like what Mr. Wells pictured will actually happen. If so. civilisation is on the verge of the abyss, and unless the instinct of self-preservation avails to suppress war. war in the air may •oppress. civilisation. CRA.-H OF THE CREDIT SYSTEM. The following is a description of the end of the civilised world:—Already the whole financial fabric of the world was staggering when thatoccurred. With the destruction of the American fleet in the North Atlantic, and the smashing conflict that ended the naval existence of Germany in the North Sea, with the burning and wrecking of billions of pounds’ worth of property in the four cardinal cities of the World, the fact of the hopeless costliness of war came home for the first time, came like a blow in the face, to the of mankind. Credit went jplown in a -wild whirl of selling. Everywhere appeared a phenomenon that had already in a mild degree manifested itself in preceding periods of panic; a desire to secure and hoard gold before ? rices reached bottom. But now it pread like wildfire; it became universal, Above was visible conflict and destrucTlon; below something was happening jfar more deadly and incurable to the flimsy fabric of finance and commercialism In which men had so blindly put their trust. As the airships fought above, the visible gold supply of the Jworld vanished below. An epidemic of private cornering and universal distrust Swept the world. In a few weeks, money pxcept for depreciated paper, vanished, into vaults, into holes, into the walls of houses, into ten million hiding places. Money vanished, and at its disappearance trade and industry came to nn end. The economic world staggered ami fell dead. It was like the stroke of Home disease; it wa» like the water vanishing out of the Hood of a living creature; it was a sudden, universal coaguof intercourse. . . , AGAIN “WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL.” And as the credit system, that had been the living fortress of the scientifli

civilisation, reeled and fell upon the millions it had held together in economic relation-hip; as these people, perplexed and helpless, faced .this marvel of credit utterly destroyed, the airships of Asia, countless and relentless, poured across the heavens, swooped eastward to America and westward to Europe. The page of history becomes a long crescendo of battle. The broadoutlines of the earlier stages of the war disappeared, under its influence the spacious antagonism of nations and empires and races vanished in a seething mass of detailed conflict. The world passed at a stride from, a unity and simplicity broader than that of the Roman Empire at its best, to a social fragmentation as complete as the robber baron period of the Middle Ages. , FAMINE. PLAGUE. WORLD COLLAPSE. A fourth phase follows. Through the struggle against Chaos, in the wake of the famine, came another old enemy humanity — the Pestilence, the Purple Death. But the

does not pause. The flags still fly. Fresh air-fleets rise, new forms of airship, and beneath their swooping struggles the world darkens—scarcely heeded by history. So that a universal social collapse followed as. it were a logical consequence, upon world wide war. Wherever there were great populations, great masses of people found themselves without work, without money, and unable to get food. Famine was in every working-class quarter in the world within three weeks of the beginning of the war. Within a month there was not a city anywhere in which the ordinary law and social procedure had not been replaced by some form of emergency control, in which firearms and military executions were not being used to keep order and prevent violence. And still in the poorer quarters. and even in the populous districts, ami even here ami there already among those who had been wealthy, famine UNIVERSAL RUIN. And as the exhaustion of the mechanical resources of civilisation clears the heavens of airships at last altogether,

Anarchy, Famine, and Pestilence arc discovered triumphant below. The great nations and empires have become but names in the mouths of men. Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-faced survivors in a mortal apathy. Here there are robbers, here vigilance committees, and here guerilla bands ruling patches of exhausted territory, strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve and religious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine-bright eyes. It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare of the earth have crumpled like an exploded bladder. In live short years the world and the scope of human life have uidergone a retrogressive change as great as that between the age of the Antonines and the Europe of the ninth century. Impossible as this may seem, it is no nightmare, dream of a sensational romancer. It is a prophetic forecast of what may happen in the next ten years. War in the air will kill out the other kinds of war, but, left unchecked to its natural development, it will stamp out civilisation and half the human race.

THE AIRSHIP IN THE FUTURE. A FORECAST. BY CHARLES N. L. SHAW. Prophecy is a dangerous pastime, but as the influence of the airship on the future of the world has never received the consideration it merits, it is proposed in this article to outline some of the stupendous changes which may be confidently expected now that the airship is un fait accompli. Hunman society Is in a constant state of flux. Change is the order of Nature. Slavery, serfdom, feudalism, the procession goes on unceasingly. Just as the introduction of the power engine enormously accelerated the transitional period from feudalism to our present social system so the aeroplane will bringabout changes of the most momentous nature in the domains of commerce, war, and sociological development generally. It is unhesitatingly asserted by the writer that the inventor has played a much more vital part in the development of society than the politician, artist, etc. A moment’s reflection will

show how the man in the street tacitly acknowledges this. Ask him what great events marked the progress of the last century, and he will at once instance the invention of steam engine, bicycle, tele* graph, telephone, wireless telegraphy, and so on; then, as an afterthought he will possibly recall the freedom of the Press, the right of free speech, the repeal of the corn laws, etc. The power of invention, however, dominates his mind, and his testimony is all the more powerful in that it is subjective. < Let us take a short review of what has been done in the world of aviation. The Wright Brothers, of America* Henry Farman, of England, and others have demonstrated beyond any possibility of contravention that it is possible for man to fly with comparative safety; in a heavier-than-air machine over con? siderable distances at a speed of about forty miles an hour. Ascents have been made in gusty weather in machines which have more or elss automatically adapted themselves to the immediate conditions. Farman, in a Voisin aeroplane, has, within the last few weeks, flown from Chaloil to Rheims, a distance of twenty-five miles, at a height of two hundred feet whilst Wilbur Wright has on several occasions flown with a passenger in ease and safety. Nothing much, you say. But, my friend, wait until someone has straddled the Channel in a flying machine—then the fat will be in the fire. SIX months should see this accomplished. The Governments of the world are at the present moment subsidising inventors with a view to the development of a ■practical aerial cruiser, and thousands of

■the cleverest brains in existence are now engaged on the problem. Most strileing fact of all —the problems needing elucidation before the giant of the air can spring into being are almost entirely of a mechanical nature. Whe-thei* the final type of airship will have 0, cigar-shaped hull, with helices for lifting, and driven by propellers astern, or whether it will assume the gyropter form, remains to be seen; but all authorities are agreed that the airship of the future will develop enormous speeds up to at least one thousand miles an hour, will have a, radius of action of many thousands oi miles, and that, like its prototype, the Atlantic greyhound of to-day, it will be practically independent of storms', in view! of its capacity to move in more than one plane, and of the possibilities latent in the application of the gyroscope. It must be remembered., in support of these cons terttions, that the airship floats in its* element, not resting upon it as the sliipl on water, that it has only a slight head resistance to overcome, and that it had been demonstrated that tbe power to-’ quired to drive it at great speeds (up to a point) is less than at lower speeds— 4 an extraordinary paradox, having nd parallel in any other form of machiiw*

r Granted such a vessel, if means first of all that war will be to all intents and purposes impossible—the results being unthinkable. The finest armies in Europe would be reduced to mere undisciplined hordes iu the face of an airchip, the navies of the world becoming 60 much scrap iron and their crews negligible quantities. A single airship, Covering over a fortress, could reduce it to ruins in a few minutes by the use of high explosives, without the possibility of retaliation. Heligoland, Port 'Arthur, and Gibraltar, in common with the Suez Canal, become mere names to remind a forgetful world of what once had been.

But someone asks, Whaf is to prevent ‘aerial navies grappling in the central blue,” as Tennyson foretold? What about high-angle fire? Again, let us think the matter out.

The modern gunner will tell you what the chances are of hitting a dizzy speck travelling in the central air two miles above him, at a 500-mile pace. We have no weapons of precision to-day which could hope to accomplish this even in broad day. At night, the feat becomes Obviously impossible. But the inquirer interpolates, What about searchlights? Bet our aerial patrols throw their hundred searchlights into the starry heavens, they will still be unable to find for more than the fraction of a second, if at all, an enemy running on the wings of the wind, hurling death as. she goes. Further, no territory could be occupied by an invading force. War would be merely a question of annihilation. The supreme advantage would be with the attacker —the fipfender being practically helpless. Supposing Germany were at the throat of England the day after tomorrow, when the airship has come to its own. One night a speck in the far regions of the air hovers over the metropolis of the world, raining down high explosives which spread destruction throughout the streets—and she is gone

in the turn of an eye. Where does retaliation come in? Turning to another of the monstrous progeny of the airship, we consider the question of the displacement of labour. Granted that war becomes impossible, and that the nations have to bow to the inevitable —in a short space of time millions of fighting men will be flung on the labour market, congesting it still more. The problem of the unemployment, bad as it is, will be intensified a hundredfold, and the structure of society will have to be adapted to such a contingency. Trade unionism will be seriously weakened, for its principal weapon, the strike, will be futile in the day when it will be possible for the employing classes to transport large quantities of cheap labour in a minimum of time from countries which to-day are practically inaccessible. In this article we have considered the airship only in relation to war and the labour market, but a thousand and one other issues also obtrude- themselves, as for instance the effect of the aeroplane upon frontiers and the world-races, owing to the ease of intercommunication. The subject is pregnant with suggestion to the. biologist and psychologist as well as to the- mechanic, embodying as it does the most tremendous potentialities.