The Angel of the Revolution | Page 2

leisure,
freedom from all other concerns, and money for the necessary
experiments, he would not have succeeded long before his capital was
exhausted.
So he put the money into a bank whence he could draw it out as he
chose, and withdrew himself from the world to work out the ideal of his
life.
Year after year passed, and still success did not come. He found
practice very different from theory, and in a hundred details he met
with difficulties he had never seen on paper. Meanwhile his money
melted away in costly experiments which only raised hopes that ended
in bitter disappointment His wonderful machine was a miracle of
ingenuity, and was mechanically perfect in every detail save one -- it
would do no practical work.
Like every other inventor who had grappled with the problem, he had

found himself constantly faced with that fatal ratio of weight to power.
No engine that he could devise would do more than lift itself and the
machine. Again and again he had made a toy that would fly, as others
had done before him, but a machine that would navigate the air as a
steamer or an electric vessel navigated the waters, carrying cargo and
passengers, was still an impossibility while that terrible problem of
weight and power remained unsolved.
In order to eke out his money to the uttermost, he had clothed and
lodged himself meanly, and had denied himself everything but the
barest necessaries of life.
Thus he had prolonged the struggle for over five years of toil and
privation and hope deferred, and now, when his last sovereign had been
changed and nearly spent, success -- real, tangible, practical success --
had come to him, and the discovery that was to be to the twentieth
century what the steam-engine had been to the nineteenth was
accomplished.
He had discovered the true motive power at last.
Two liquefied gases -- which, when united, exploded spontaneously --
were admitted by a clockwork escapement in minute quantities into the
cylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansive force
of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weight but the
engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefied gases. Furnaces,
boilers, condensers, accumulators, dynamos -- all the ponderous
apparatus of steam and electricity -- were done away with, and he had a
power at command greater than either of them. There was no doubt
about it. The moment that his trembling fingers set the escapement
mechanism in motion, the model that embodied the thought and labour
of years rose into the air as gracefully as a bird on the wing, and sailed
round and round in obedience to its rudder, straining hard at the string
which prevented it from striking the ceiling. It was weighted in strict
proportion to the load that the full-sized air-ship would have to carry.
To increase this was merely a matter of increasing the power of the
engine and the size of the floats and fans.

The room was a large one, for the house had been built for a better fate
than letting in tenements, and it ran from back to front with a window
at each end. Out of doors there was a strong breeze blowing, and as
soon as Arnold was sure that his ship was able to hold its own in still
air, he threw both the windows open and let the wind blow straight
through the room. Then he drew the air-ship down, straightened the
rudder, and set it against the breeze. In almost agonised suspense he
watched it rise from the floor, float motionless for a moment, and then
slowly forge ahead in the teeth of the wind, gathering speed as it went.
It was then that he had uttered that triumphant cry of "Victory!" All the
long years of privation and hope deferred vanished in that one supreme
moment of innocent and bloodless conquest, and he saw himself master
of a kingdom as wide as the world itself.
He let the model fly the length of the room before he stopped the
clockwork and cut off the motive power, allowing it to sink gently to
the floor. Then came the reaction. He looked steadfastly at his
handiwork for several moments in silence, and then he turned and
threw himself on to a shabby little bed that stood in one corner of the
room and burst into a flood of tears.
Triumph had come, but had it not come too late? He knew the
boundless possibilities of his invention -- but they had still to be
realised. To do this would cost thousands of pounds, and he had just
one half-crown and a few coppers. Even these were not really his own,
for he was already a week