The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  The Universel held firm. It disdained the ridicule with which others were trying to cover the story and opposed strict reasoning that shook the conviction of many incredulous individuals. It gained a good many readers in consequence.

  At the same time, several details became known regarding the investigation, in the course of which so many witnesses had been heard. It was concluded therefrom that the key to the enigma was not the hypothesis of a large number of dirigible balloons, for if that were the case, it would not have escaped the examinations of the law and the police. It was also concluded, however, that there must be something serious at stake, since such powerful means of investigation had been put to work.

  The mockers gradually began to come round to the Universel’s viewpoint, while the latter declared that it was no longer sticking to its aerostat hypothesis, and limited itself to sustaining, unlike and against everyone else, that something important was going to happen on June the first. The other newspapers began to fear that they might have taken the wrong line. Would they not find that they had played a foolish role if events proved their adversary correct, as was beginning to seem less impossible? That occasioned a change of attitude, just in case it proved to be necessary to yield to the evidence.

  Then echoes arrived of the impression produced in the provinces, initially reflecting, as in Paris, a complete skepticism. Soon, however, things changed. People in the provinces have more time to read and reflect. Some sided openly with the Universel. People abandoned themselves without false shame to all the ardors of violent interest. Many packed their bags in order to come to Paris before June the first. The railway companies wondered whether it was not an opportunity to organize pleasure trains, and would certainly have done so had the government not asked them discreetly to abstain from the project.

  However, it was only the twentieth of May, and people everywhere were already getting tired of always talking about the same thing. They closed their ears to it, as to any subject that has remained on the table too long. They ceased almost entirely to pay any heed to it. Public attention was saturated, and it became fashionable to declare that any allusion to the first of June or the nocturnal distribution irritated the hardened nerves. Three days before the first of June, it seemed that no one was any longer trying to find the key to the enigma—but a new circumstance suddenly awakened the dormant preoccupation.

  There was a second nocturnal distribution, not of handwritten paper notices but of tinplate medallions, slightly larger than five-franc pieces, which were spread with the same profusion as the written message, but without broken windows or gloved hands glimpsed by some.

  On them was engraved, a trifle crudely but quite legibly, the following words:

  Sunday June 1st

  Noon

  Place de la Concorde

  Furthermore, something singular was perceived above the building in which the Universel’s offices were situated. The newspaper had placed on the summit between two chimneys a sheet metal sign bearing its name, cut out in immense characters, visible from a long distance away. A kind of large white banner had been suspended beneath it during the night, bearing a single word written in characters two meters high:

  COURAGE!

  It was positively established that no one had been able to go up onto the roof during the night.

  In addition, the obelisk had been embellished with a new ornament. It was coiffed with a kind of huge sheet metal bonnet with four faces. On each one appeared the words:

  HERE

  SUNDAY

  JUNE 1st

  NOON

  This time, people were not content to be intrigued. They were beginning not to be ashamed to blush. The youth of the schools, workers and the residents of the suburbs, overstepping human respect, were the first to abandon themselves to a curiosity that became contagious. Large bets were laid at the Jockey Club, and in all the other clubs, for and against the reality of the awaited event. Even the Bourse became convinced that the day of June the first would influence prices in one direction or the other, and divided into two camps, the high and the low. Women energetically expressed their desire to go and see for themselves.

  Working class households, in particular, got ready to invade the Place de la Concorde en masse. As for others, there were not a few who had no fear of the crowd and intended to mingle with it. Those who feared that it might be too dense sought to procure windows overlooking the boulevards or the quais. The Rue Royale became the goal of all ambitions. One of its inhabitants put up a notice on the twenty-ninth of May advertising Windows to Let for June 1st. His example was immediately followed and extended like an ignited trail of powder along the boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli and the quais. All were booked at the insane prices that signify a curiosity driven to its paroxysm. On May the thirty-first, at five o’clock in the afternoon, only a few notices remained in the quarters most distant from the Place de la Concorde.

  It was certain that the crowd would be enormous. The authorities were no longer in doubt about that. All troops were ordered to report to their barracks, reinforced by neighboring garrisons, and issued with ammunition for all purposes. The artillery was at the ready, with its guns in harness in the courtyards. All these precautions were, moreover, taken as secretly as possible. Police agents, sergents de ville and National guardsmen, on foot and mounted, were posted before daybreak everywhere that a crowd might gather, with strict orders to maintain order and prevent accidents. The circulation of vehicles was prohibited at several points and regulated everywhere, as on national holidays.

  Everyone already knew that, if it really was a hoax, it had succeeded magnificently.

  II. The Invention

  I had some difficulty myself in perceiving the initial idea of my invention clearly.

  A kind of vague intuition told me that people had gone astray in wanting to propel aerial vehicles, whether lighter or heavier than air, by means of existing engines. All motive force was fatally insufficient as soon as it required heavy machinery. The more one wants to increase the size and efficacy of wings, sails, helices or any other devices designed to produce locomotion, the more they require a considerable motive force, impossible to obtain in the air by reason of the weight of the machines, especially if they require provisions of water and fuel. One can only increase the power of conveyance by increasing in an even greater proportion the difficulty of the result. The concept of dirigible balloons, or any vehicles receiving propulsion from any known engine implied a contradiction, so far as I was concerned. It was a veritable vicious circle, an impossibility. Something else was necessary, other than what had been attempted thus far. It required an entirely new and radically different primordial conception.

  I reflected that nature might furnish motors thus far unknown, unstudied and, in truth, yet to be discovered.

  At first I thought of gravitation. It is obviously a force, and an enormous force, acting without mechanism—a precious condition. What energy there is in the fall of a rock from a height of a hundred meters, what power in the forces that determine the movement of celestial bodies!

  Except that gravitation is not a dirigible force. For us, it has a unique center of direction, the very center of the globe on the surface of which phenomena within our scope occur. Gravitation is a motor exactly opposite to the one that I required.

  That idea of exactly opposite was a flash of enlightenment for me. Did not gravity have its counterpart?

  It had to exist. The double phenomenon of attraction and repulsion is observed in all chemical compositions and the composition of substances. Electricity is positive or negative.

  Electricity was not understood in that era. People made use of it, however. There was the electric telegraph, an invention that seems so naïve, but which passed then for the nec plus ultra of the genius of practical science. There was a confused suspicion that there must be some relationship between electricity and magnetism, but no one had taken exact count of the identity of those phenomena, of which the electric
spark, magnetism, galvanism, gravitation and chemical affinities are merely diverse manifestations. Perhaps I shall be accorded scant merit for having discovered that gravitation and electricity are one and the same thing, but it’s the story of Christopher Columbus and the egg: every solved problem seems easy to resolve.

  No one can imagine all that it cost me in terms of effort, meditation, hard work, experiments, discouragements and perseverance to arrive at this formula: gravitation is only one of the modes of the manifestation of electricity.

  Electricity is, so to speak, gravitation condensed, quintessentialized and endowed with its extreme power. It is a kind of madness of attraction. It presents two opposites, which are described by the terms positive and negative electricity. In the same way, gravitation, properly speaking, is positive, has as its inverse negative gravitation, or anti-gravitation.

  Their combined action produces the movement of heavenly bodies, and this completes Newton’s discovery. Gravitation only explains half of phenomena—for example, the force retaining the Earth at a certain distance from the sun that attracts it. But one is obliged, in order to explain that it does not fall into it, to suppose an original impulsion, provided once and for all, and which resolves into centrifugal force. The nature of that force—which is not original but continuous, tending to distance the Earth from the sun toward which gravitation attracts it—was unknown. It is anti-gravitation, or negative gravitation, or the force of repulsion, one of the forms of negative electricity. The two gravitations, positive and negative, act in association, in opposition to one another, at an angle whose resultant, varying from one moment to the next, produces the revolution of every planet around its sun and every satellite around its planet.

  The motor existed in nature. It was a matter of becoming its master, of moderating it, of making it something manipulable and usable.

  That has been the most arduous part of my work. How many late nights, experiments, fruitless attempts there were before arriving at the creation of two electrochemical substances that I have named pos and neg, by the simple abbreviation of the words positive and negative. Pos, as yellow as gold, as solid as platinum, meltable at a temperature that is so difficult to attain! Neg, as white as silver, as light as aluminum, as porous as pumice-stone! Isolated, they behave like all other substances, falling to earth and obedient only to the law of gravitation. It is their juxtaposition that gives them particular properties, just as superimposed disks of zinc, copper and a suitably dampened fabric disengages electricity in a Voltaic pile.

  Electricity is also discharged by juxtaposed pos and neg: positive or attractive electricity by pos, negative or repulsive electricity by neg. The former is solicited by gravitation, the second by anti-gravitation.

  Those are the observations to which my experiments led:

  I fabricated a ball, one hemisphere of which was composed of pos and one of neg. When the pos was turned toward the ground, the ball fell. When, on the other hand, it was the neg, it rose up with great force. My first apparatus was naturally very imperfect, but it was sufficient to give me the certainty of eventual success.

  I recognized that the two gravitating electricities, positive and negative, were emitted in a continuous fashion, one by pos and the other by neg, but that emission did not produce any effect on whichever of the substances did not have its surface turned toward the ground. The attractive or repulsive force was annulled, for want of an objective, if it did not have the terrestrial mass in front of it. It is almost as if one were to suppose a heavy body lost in space far from any celestial body. It is still submissive to the force of gravitation, and yet does not fall anywhere because nothing sets it to work. To borrow a comparison from juridical language, it has, so to speak, the enjoyment of the gravitational faculty, but does not exercise it.

  In the same way, when I turned my ball pos-downwards, a repulsive electricity was still emitted by the neg, but, finding no objective in space, it did not produce any effect. On the other hand, the ball was violently attracted earthwards by the attractive electricity emitted by the pos. I wanted to ascertain whether that falling effect was the result of weight alone. I gave each of my separate hemispheres a weight of one kilogram. The ball, therefore, if it were only obedient to ordinary gravitation, weighed two kilograms. I placed the pos and the neg in a balance pan. Then I successively increased the weight in the other pan. I could not succeed in lifting up the ball, in spite of a total weight of fifty kilograms. It adhered with an invincible force, like one of those hollow weights that a conjuror can lift with a single finger, but which is impossible to lift, even by employing all his effort, as soon as electrical communication is established. The dimensions of my balance did not permit me to take the experiment any further, but I was content. I had only to rotate the ball through ninety degrees to cancel out the adherence.

  When the ball was turned neg-down, it rose up with great force and struck the ceiling violently, where it remained suspended. The inverse effect had been produced. It was the attractive gravitational electricity emitted by the upward-turned pos that found no objective in space and produced no effect in any direction. On the contrary, the repulsive gravitational electricity emitted by the neg found its objective in the terrestrial mass, and violently distanced the ball therefrom. It was like a taut spring released after having been given a point of resistance.

  I also wanted to verify the degree of adherence of the ball to the ceiling. It was impossible for me to vanquish, in spite of all the weight I suspended from it. That was sufficient for me, and I postponed until later the exact measurement of the force of the system, either in the attractive or the repulsive direction. I turned my ball half way, and in that fashion, easily detached it from the ceiling.

  The problem was three-quarters resolved. I had a motor endowed with an enormous force, ascending or descending at will. A ball the size of my head sufficed for me to raise aerial arks of considerable dimensions. But as yet, that was only a simple improvement over balloons. It was first necessary to find a means of moderating the ascensional force in order not to be drawn to excessive heights, and then to transform it into lateral force in order to steer the apparatus.

  The first result was easy to obtain. The complete adherence of pos and neg produced the maximum emission of positive or negative gravitational electricity. I realized that if I separated them slightly, the phenomenon was not suppressed, but lessened. It was still manifest, albeit very weakly, by placing the two substances two centimeters apart. Thus disposed, they remained in the air almost at the location where they were placed, only descending or ascending with an imperceptible movement and great slowness, according to whether the pos or the neg was directed toward the ground. I was master of the motive force, which I could increase or diminish at will.

  It remained to be able to steer. There, my groping was extended. I shall pass over the details and get straight to the method that furnished me with the solution.

  I tried to compose my ball with one intermediate part of neg and two extreme parts of pos; it was like a slice between two hemispheres. That produced a rather curious phenomenon.

  The juxtaposition of the inferior hemisphere with the intermediary disk emitted positive gravitational energy and tended to carry the ball toward the ground; but at the same time, the juxtaposition of the disk with the upper hemisphere emitted negative gravitational energy and tended to make the ball rise, without the inferior hemisphere providing an obstacle to it—which astonished me. Both phenomena were produced simultaneously. The ball was solicited by two directly contrary forces, attractive and repulsive. It obeyed the one that predominated over the other, rising or falling with more or less force in accordance with the proportions that I gave successively to the various parts of the ball—except that I never succeeded in weighting them exactly enough for the system to remain entirely motionless at the precise location where I placed it in the air.

  Then I had the idea of giving the intermediary slice the form of a bevel. I made it very t
hick on one side, while terminating the other in a thin blade. The effect produced was marvelous.

  The two contrary forces were still produced, but obliquely; their resultant was horizontal. I succeeded in constructing a ball that I placed on my mantelpiece with the thick side of the disk turned toward the opposite wall. It launched forth like a rifle bullet and struck that wall, damaging the paper and dislodging a little plaster.

  It was easy for me to moderate that force by constructing balls whose various parts were more or less distant from one another.

  I had spent long years in pursuit of that result, but the principle of aerial locomotion was finally resolved—in principle. I had the motor and both the means of moderating it and of steering it at will. It only remained to perfect the details.

  That was easy. This is where the modifications that I imagined successively led me. I changed the form of the system, which I rendered sphero-conical instead of spherical. To render my idea graspable, it was like a pear or a fig instead of an apple or an orange. The pear was designed so as habitually to maintain a near-horizontal position. It was made up of three parts, all swelling on the side opposed to the point and thinning toward the tail: in the middle, the pos; above and below, the neg. A simple mechanism permitted me to bring these parts closer together or separate them by turning slightly, in one direction or another, as one turns a key, a stem emerging from the pear and descending vertically. The same stem served, by means of circular movements analogous to those one imparts to a tiller, to turn the tail of the pear in the desired direction, thus raising it or lowering it at will.

  If I imagined myself being suspended from the system, I could see myself traveling in the air with as much facility and rapidity as the most agile bird.

  I began by turning the stem in such a way as only to leave the apparatus a very minimal action, and directing the tail of the pear upwards an angle of forty-five degrees. I was lifted gently and obliquely into the air. Having arrived at a certain altitude, I gave the pear a horizontal position and turned the stem in such a way as to bring the two pieces of the apparatus closer together, and I was carried away horizontally, in the direction I chose, at a speed that I could increase to a lofty maximum.