Twelve Stories and a Dream | Page 5

he wove about
them, were withdrawn almost completely into the frame; and he built
the large framework which these balloons sustained, of hollow, rigid
tubes, the air in which, by an ingenious contrivance, was automatically
pumped out as the apparatus fell, and which then remained exhausted
so long as the aeronaut desired. There were no wings or propellers to
his machine, such as there had been to all previous aeroplanes, and the
only engine required was the compact and powerful little appliance
needed to contract the balloons. He perceived that such an apparatus as
he had devised might rise with frame exhausted and balloons expanded
to a considerable height, might then contract its balloons and let the air
into its frame, and by an adjustment of its weights slide down the air in
any desired direction. As it fell it would accumulate velocity and at the
same time lose weight, and the momentum accumulated by its
down-rush could be utilised by means of a shifting of its weights to
drive it up in the air again as the balloons expanded. This conception,
which is still the structural conception of all successful flying machines,
needed, however, a vast amount of toil upon its details before it could
actually be realised, and such toil Filmer--as he was accustomed to tell
the numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in the heyday of his
fame--"ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave." His particular difficulty
was the elastic lining of the contractile balloon. He found he needed a
new substance, and in the discovery and manufacture of that new
substance he had, as he never failed to impress upon the interviewers,
"performed a far more arduous work than even in the actual
achievement of my seemingly greater discovery." But it must not be
imagined that these interviews followed hard upon Filmer's
proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly five years elapsed
during which he timidly remained at his rubber factory--he seems to
have been entirely dependent on his small income from this
source--making misdirected attempts to assure a quite indifferent public

that he really HAD invented what he had invented. He occupied the
greater part of his leisure in the composition of letters to the scientific
and daily press, and so forth, stating precisely the net result of his
contrivances, and demanding financial aid. That alone would have
sufficed for the suppression of his letters. He spent such holidays as he
could arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with the door-keepers of
leading London papers--he was singularly not adapted for inspiring
hall-porters with confidence--and he positively attempted to induce the
War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a confidential
letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs. "The man's a
crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General in his bluff,
sensible, army way, and so left it open for the Japanese to secure, as
they subsequently did, the priority in this side of warfare--a priority
they still to our great discomfort retain. And then by a stroke of luck
the membrane Filmer had invented for his contractile balloon was
discovered to be useful for the valves of a new oil-engine, and he
obtained the means for making a trial model of his invention. He threw
up his rubber factory appointment, desisted from all further writing,
and, with a certain secrecy that seems to have been an inseparable
characteristic of all his proceedings, set to work upon the apparatus. He
seems to have directed the making of its parts and collected most of it
in a room in Shoreditch, but its final putting together was done at
Dymchurch, in Kent. He did not make the affair large enough to carry a
man, but he made an extremely ingenious use of what were then called
the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first flight of this first
practicable flying machine took place over some fields near Burford
Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed and controlled its
flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle. The flight was,
considering all things, an amazing success. The apparatus was brought
in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge, ascended there to a height
of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thence very nearly back to
Dymchurch, came about in its sweep, rose again, circled, and finally
sank uninjured in a field behind the Burford Bridge Inn. At its descent a
curious thing happened. Filmer got off his tricycle, scrambled over the
intervening dyke, advanced perhaps twenty yards towards his triumph,
threw out his arms in a strange gesticulation, and fell down in a dead
faint. Every one could then recall the ghastliness of his features and all

the evidences of extreme excitement they had observed throughout the
trial, things they might otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards in the inn