Twelve Stories and a Dream | Page 4

scholarship a year,
was tempted, by the possibility of a small increase in his immediate
income, to abandon it in order to become one of the nine-pence-an-hour
computers employed by a well-known Professor in his vicarious
conduct of those extensive researches of his in solar
physics--researches which are still a matter of perplexity to astronomers.
Afterwards, for the space of seven years, save for the pass lists of the
London University, in which he is seen to climb slowly to a double first
class B.Sc., in mathematics and chemistry, there is no evidence of how
Filmer passed his life. No one knows how or where he lived, though it
seems highly probable that he continued to support himself by teaching
while he prosecuted the studies necessary for this distinction. And then,
oddly enough, one finds him mentioned in the correspondence of
Arthur Hicks, the poet. "You remember Filmer," Hicks writes to his
friend Vance; "well, HE hasn't altered a bit, the same hostile mumble
and the nasty chin--how CAN a man contrive to be always three days
from shaving? -- and a sort of furtive air of being engaged in sneaking
in front of one; even his coat and that frayed collar of his show no
further signs of the passing years. He was writing in the library and I
sat down beside him in the name of God's charity, whereupon he
deliberately insulted me by covering up his memoranda. It seems he
has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me of all
people--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--of stealing. He has taken
remarkable honours at the University--he went through them with a sort
of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt him before he
had told me all--and he spoke of taking his D.Sc. as one might speak of

taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing--with a sort of
comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously, positively a
protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious idea--his one
hopeful idea. "'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to
teach in it, Hicks?' "The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very
act of budding, and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious
gift of indolence I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and
destruction . . ." A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think
caught Filmer in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was
wrong in anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next
glimpse of him is lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the
Society of Arts--he had become manager to a great plastic-substance
manufactory--and at that time, it is now known, he was a member of
the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the
discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great
conception without external assistance. And within two years of that
paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out a number of
patents and proclaiming in various undignified ways the completion of
the divergent inquiries which made his flying machine possible. The
first definite statement to that effect appeared in a halfpenny evening
paper through the agency of a man who lodged in the same house with
Filmer. His final haste after his long laborious secret patience seems to
have been due to a needless panic, Bootle, the notorious American
scientific quack, having made an announcement that Filmer interpreted
wrongly as an anticipation of his idea. Now what precisely was Filmer's
idea? Really a very simple one. Before his time the pursuit of
aeronautics had taken two divergent lines, and had developed on the
one hand balloons--large apparatus lighter than air, easy in ascent, and
comparatively safe in descent, but floating helplessly before any breeze
that took them; and on the other, flying machines that flew only in
theory--vast flat structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by
heavy engines and for the most part smashing at the first descent. But,
neglecting the fact that the inevitable final collapse rendered them
impossible, the weight of the flying machines gave them this
theoretical advantage, that they could go through the air against a wind,
a necessary condition if aerial navigation was to have any practical
value. It is Filmer's particular merit that he perceived the way in which

the contrasted and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon and heavy
flying machine might be combined in one apparatus, which should be
at choice either heavier or lighter than air. He took hints from the
contractile bladders of fish and the pneumatic cavities of birds. He
devised an arrangement of contractile and absolutely closed balloons
which when expanded could lift the actual flying apparatus with ease,
and when retracted by the complicated "musculature"