Peeps Into The Speed Age.
In this "flight into the future" HARRY HARPER foresees men and mails being flashed across the Atlantic in rockets, everyday people going round the world by air for their annual holiday, and regular rocket passenger services operating through outer space.
It is a new world that is dawning for us all - a wonderful world!
During the war science, chemistry, and engineering made such strides that more was done in those six war years than in fifty or even a hundred years of slower progress.
Now all that war taught our scientists, chemists, and engineers can be switched over to useful purposes - to purposes which will make the world a better, happier, and far more interesting place for all of us to live in.
Our new world will be a world of speed.
We shall all be moving faster than we have ever moved before. Journeys which used to take weeks will be made in days, and those of days will shrink to hours.
Suppose I give you an example of what this speed age will be really like compared, say, with anything we know.
Let's say that today I have an urgent business letter I want to send from one part of London to another. I ring for a messenger-boy. He hurries off with this letter for me, and most likely it will have gone from door to door, and will have been duly delivered, in somewhere about half-an-hour.
Now let's turn from present to future, and to the not-so-very-distant future, either. This time, let's suppose, I have an urgent letter I want to go not just to another part of London, or to any town or city in this country, but right across the Atlantic Ocean from London to New York.
What do I do this time?
I send this letter by the super-express ocean rocket mail which, by this time, we shall have in regular operation. Placed in a mail compartment in a great streamlined projectile, that letter of mine will go rushing up clear of the Earth's atmosphere and into the outer space above, and there it will have flashed high above the Atlantic at such a colossal speed that in not much more then half-an-hour it will have completed its 3,000-miles journey between London and New York.
There you have the idea I want to give you. Today it may take an express letter, say, half-an-hour to travel from one part of London to another, while in our coming era of the rocket-mail we shall be able, in about the same time, to flash an urgent letter right across the wide Atlantic from London to New York.
Let me give you another example.
Today, if we make up our minds to slip down from London to Brighton for a little sea air and a battle, it takes us an hour by electric train. But in these coming days, when giant rocket-driven air-machines will be carrying passengers as well as mails on upper-zone rushes above the oceans of the world, we shall be able to dash across on an urgent visit to New York in that same space of an hour that it now takes us to get down from London to Brighton.
Fifty miles in an hour by train today! Three thousand miles in a hour by rocket air-liner in those coming wonder-days of super-express high-flying travel!
To me there is nothing more fascinating than to run over in my mind all that great pageant of progress by which man has been quickening and improving his methods of travelling from place to place. Far away back in the dim past, when he wanted to go anywhere, he had just to use his own feet and walk. Then came the day of the horse, and of the first crude vehicles with wheels. These were improved until we had our coaches with their horses, carrying people from city to city. After the coach came the train, and after the train the motor-car and the 'plane.
Always it has been a tale of speed and still greater speed - from the 12-miles-an-hour jog-trot of the horsed vehicle to the 60 or 70 miles an hour of the express train, and from that to the hundreds of miles an hour of our fast-flying 'planes; and those hundreds of miles an hour will increase to thousands in our coming days of rocket-travel high above the Earth's atmosphere.
As with the land, so with the sea.
Away back in the past men took tree-trunks and hollowed them out to form first rough canoes. Crude paddles gave place to oars. Then came the era of the sailing vessel, to be followed by that of our steam-driven ships. And now today we have great flying-boat which are really ships with wings. The ship has, in fact, left the sea and gone up into the air. And again the story is of speed, speed, still more speed.
Nobody will welcome the dawning speed age more than our captains of industry - those chairman and managing directors who are at the helm of our great business enterprises.
Not so many years ago, when the head of some big firm in England found he had to travel 10,000 miles to Australia for important business talks, the only thing he could do was to make a journey by sea, which took him a month, and if he stayed a month our in Australia, and then needed another month to get back to England, this meant that he would have to be as long as three months away from his office in London - a very inconvenient thing for anyone with a lot of important and probably urgent affairs on hand which needed his personal attention.
As soon as the first air services began to fly through to Australia, this helped quite a lot, the time of an air journey on this route across the world coming down from weeks to days. But it will go on getting quicker and quicker until we get to the thousands of miles an hour of our great space-flying passengers rockets.
Don't think it will be only people like Government officials or business chiefs who will benefit by our tremendous speeding-up of all forms of transport.
Ordinary folk will find themselves in a new world, too. This great speed age will make all the difference to you and me, and all of us, more especially when we are planning our annual holidays.
Instead of just going down to some seaside place in this country, or perhaps taking a trip over to the Continent, we shall find the entire world beginning to open up for us as a holiday resort. In the few weeks of an ordinary vacation we shall be able, if that appeals to us, to take a trip by air to explore, say, the wonders of the Rocky Mountains, or we may book a flying passage which will waft us down all the beauties of the South Pacific islands.
As for a complete round-the-world tour by air, this will become just as simple as is the case, today, with a motor-coach tour of this country.
It will not only be the sheer speed of our great air age which will be making things so different for us. The use of big commercial aircraft, able to lift and carry loads weighing tons, will enable prospectors and explorers to go out into remote parts of the globe where all sorts of wealth still awaits those who can overcome barriers of Nature that have, so far, prevented such wealth from being reached - barriers in the shape of great mountain ranges and thick forests and jungles.
Away out in Peru there are mines containing all kinds of rich minerals high among mountains difficult and dangerous to scale from ground-level, mountains which have made impossible, so far, the working of those mines in any sort of useful way. But given powerful multi-motored cargo 'planes - big lorries of the air - and regular flights could be made from a coastal station up to a landing-ground among the mountains, carrying machinery and stores on the upward flights, and bringing back ore from the mines on the trips back to the coast.
We have had a good example, already, of what can be done in this way. It comes from New Guinea, where there are rich gold-mines hidden away among great mountain ranges in the interior of the country. By started a flying service to and from these mountain-mines, it was possible to make by air, in only half-an-hour, a journey which by tedious and difficult surface routes up the sides of the mountains might take something like a fortnight.
All sorts of things were flown up from the coast to those New Guinea mines - not only pieces of machinery but portable buildings which were arranged in sections small enough to fit into the cargo compartments of the aircraft. Even a piano and a billiard table went up by air for the amusement of the miners in their huts.
Great new air machines are in design for world exploration. Some will be what one might call "land-sea-air" craft. In one and the same machine will be combined car, boat, and 'plane. They will have a wheeled chassis, making them capable of moving at high speed across the surface of a desert. They will have boat hulls, enabling them to be navigated across lakes or rivers. When required those using them will be able to extend telescopic metal wings from the sides of these machines and go soaring into the air.
With machines like these, and others designed for special jobs, it will be possible to explore every corner of this globe.
It was an aircraft-designer friend of mine who, while we were discussing such wonders of the future, suggested going one better and building one of these machines with a hull enabling it to act as a submarine when the explorers using it wanted to do under-water investigations. If one could do this, one would have in actual fact that "four element" machine which has been dealt with more than once by fiction-writers - that is to say, a magic craft which would fly through the air, run along the ground, move across the water, and finally, dive beneath the surface of the water.
What designers are actually working on, and what has been tested already, is a form of machine which, when it can be turned into a regular production job and built in large numbers, may become known as "everybody's flying car." It's body, as worked out at present, is much like that of a car, and it has pneumatic-tyred running wheels like those of a car. Above the roof of the body, fitting into a special recess of casing when not in use, is a two-bladed rotor, or vane, such as is used in any revolving-wing helicopter type of aircraft. At the back of the car-body, also sliding into a recess or compartment when not required, is a rudder of the type used in aeroplanes.
You can put this machine in an ordinary motor-car garage, and when you take it out its engine will drive it along the roads just as is the case with a car. But when you feel tired of motoring, and want to do a bit of flying, the movement of suitable levers will cause the revolving wing above the top of your care to rise into position, and the air rudder at the back to move our of its casing. And then by special gearing you can turn the power of the engine from the road-wheels into the overhead rotor, and rise from the ground and fly through the air.
When you want to turn your machine back again from flying machine into a motor-car, it will be a simple matter to guide it to the ground, and to slide back rotor and rudder into their casings. That's the idea, anyhow, and more than one of these flying motor-cars has already been tested on the roads and up in the air.
To me, having watched the first tiny man-carrying 'planes make their way slowly across the sky, it is fascinating to picture in my mind what great passenger air-liners will look like as they go on evolving stage by stage.
Already I have seen the little 'planes of our pioneers grow into great multi-motored craft developing thousands of horse-power. Yet all we have seen is just the beginning of that great super-express era which will make any of the speeds attained so far seem just like dawdling along through the air.
Wonder-craft, truly, will be these coming air-giant I see already in my mind's eye. Huge, gleaming machines, they will stand out on the aerodrome ready to waft their passengers to any part of our globe. They will be a combination of both aeroplane and rocket.
The power plants of such sky-giants, the engine-rooms within their hull, will have two purposes to serve. In the first place they will have to drive the great machines at high speeds up through the atmosphere surrounding this earth, and, in the second, they will have to send them rushing at even higher speeds through those outer-space zones lying just above the Earth's air-belt.
One part of the power-plant will be a jet-propulsion unit, drawing in air in front of the machine, and, after heating and expanding it in combustion chambers, thrusting it out rearwards in a mighty stream which will send the air-liner climbing at ever-increasing speed. This jet unit will go on working until the machine, in its upward rush, has come into thin air just at the limit of the Earth's atmosphere. Then, when the air-intake system of the jet-plant begins to lose its power, the engineers in the control-room will switch over to a rocket propulsion unit, the intake of fuel in its combustion chamber not requiring any mixture of air at all.
It will be this rocket plant which will go on driving the machine higher and higher till it is out beyond the Earth's atmosphere and rushing through the airless void of space.
As it leaves the Earth's atmosphere, and becomes a space-machine rather than an air machine, those controlling it will be able to draw in gradually, or telescope into recesses or casings in the sides of their machine, the outstretched metal wing surfaces which have been bearing it in its upward climb through the air-belt, but which will be no longer needed to support it when it is flashing like a huge projectile at enormous height above oceans and continents.
Through outer space the rocket air-liner will pursue its meteor-like course, those in its luxury saloons being provided with a supply of air just as breathable at at earth level, and with heating and ventilating devices ensuring them every personal comfort.
When after an hour or so they have flashed half across the globe, and the time comes to descend, their great machine will be guided down again into the earth's air-belt, and as it glides lower and lower the telescopic wings will be extended again, not only to support it but also to act as air-brakes, gradually slowing it up till it is able to make its contact with the ground as would any ordinary flying machine.
So far, in picturing such great rocket-planes, I have been looking into days lying not so very far ahead - into an era of progress which lies, so to say, just round the corner. These are the sort of machines we can see on the way now.
But what about the coming of atomic power? What will that mean? Well, our designers are already going into that; but ti may take years of experiment - and pretty costly experiments too - before we get an atomic power plant suitable for installing as a regular commercial job in any big passenger air machine. It will come, through. Experts are confident about that; and when it does come it will mean that we shall have at our command a titanic power something like a million times more powerful than anything we could put in a flying machine today.
Just picture what that will mean.
We shall have great distance-devouring machines of a size and speed eclipsing utterly anything that is possible with any form of power today. Rushing up through the Earth's atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour, these atomic sky-liners of the future will flash across outer space, with their mails, passengers, and urgent freight, at thousands of miles an hour. No part of the Earth's surface, however remote, will be more than an hour or so's "flip" in such a "magic carpet" of the future.
The atomic age! The speed age!
It is these between them which will usher in for us our new world - a world in which we shall have to alter our present notions as to the meanings of those two vital words "time" and "distance"; a world in which our very lives on this earth will seem to be growing longer, seeing that we shall be able to so so much more, and see so much more, in any given period of days, weeks, months, or years.
The very world itself will seem to be growing smaller and smaller, with air speed making next-door neighbours of all the peoples of the globe.
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