by Paul Vibert
“That’s the practical solution,” I told him.
“I know that, and when it’s finished, I’ll put a man at the center of the well and the Earth, to prove that he can’t fall in either direction, which will be all the more convincing, as he’s in empty space. Look, it’s not us, my dear friend, but science that is mad. The problem is insoluble.”
“A cruel enigma.”
And he left. The next day, I received a letter from him informing me that, having lost eight years and not being able to be ready for 1900, in twenty-seven months, he was blowing his brains out, leaving it to someone else to find the solution.
And now, dear readers, that I have exposed the problem that cost that poor fellow his life, above all, don’t try to tackle it yourselves. Don’t ever think about it, for I wouldn’t want to have another death on my conscience.
The Flowery Way
To replace the tunnel under and the bridge over the Channel.
A new means of crossing with dry feet. The Victoria regia.
Everyone knows that the English, in their timid and slightly puerile chauvinism, don’t want to let us dig a tunnel under the Channel or erect a bridge above its waters—not even a boat-bridge—for they claim that they don’t want to get angry about it.
Well, I—a modest economist—have the great pretention and legitimate pride of having found the solution, and being able to indicate the means of uniting ourselves with our good friends the English, of offering them a fraternal hand, without causing them the slightest umbrage—and that is what I have the honor of briefly setting before you. That said, I think it useless to insist on the eminently practical and civilizing side of my enterprise, which I will even permit myself to describe as august and serene.
Everyone who has traveled in South America is familiar with the Victoria regia,148 a phenomenal plant found on the river Amazon, which belongs to the great family of Nymphaeaceae. Its leaves, pellate in form, rounded and flat like a table with raised borders, attain truly extraordinary dimensions, being several meters in diameter. Dark green above and reddish below, they are equipped with stout ribs that form a kind of framework, like a powerful bone-structure.
When they are still young, these leaves are rolled up and supported by thick peduncles, which are elongated according to the often-considerable depth of the waters in which the plant grows.
In reality, this plant is an immense nenuphar lily with colossal leaves and flowers. The latter are no less than thirty to thirty-five centimeters in diameter, with dark red sepals, white exterior petals diminishing in breadth toward the center and becoming carmine red. When they are in full bloom, the stamens are displayed in the center, where they form a lovely red and yellow crown.
These flowers only last for two or three days and only bloom at night, with the result that, in order to admire them, it is necessary to equip oneself with the red glass lanterns used by photographers, or their light and luminous friends the tropical fireflies, which are large flying insects as bright as lighthouses.
Their scent is that of magnolia and the fruits are very large; the plant sinks into the water to ripen its seeds.
Now you will understand why my system is not only practical but also full of a delicate attention for our excellent neighbors: the genus Victoria, created by Lindsay, has been dedicated to the queen of England. The Victoria regia, royal Victoria, had been named Nymphaea Victoria by the Danish botanist Schumacker,149 but it is appropriate to conserve the former name, especially if I can obtain my concession.
At the present moment, this marvelous plant, which is no longer cultivated by the City of Paris’s horticulturalist in the Parc des Princes, can easily be grown in a vast artificially-heated aquarium. It is sufficient to maintain the water in the basin at a temperature between twenty and thirty degrees centigrade, according to the phase of the vegetation.
Now, for those who had not been to see the Victoria regia on the Amazon, its place of origin, or in the hothouses of some great lord, I will remind them that they have seen and admired it unwittingly at the Nouveau Cirque, in an aquatic ballet in which each of the leaves supported a pretty young dancer—but then they were made of zinc! The illusion was, however, complete. Nevertheless, the leaves were so vast that many spectators, without suspecting the fidelity of the reproduction, simply thought that they were in Marseilles!
Well, the matter now seems simple and luminous. From Calais to Dover, I sow, plant or transplant—that remains to be decided—seeds, roots or cuttings—that also remains to be decided—of Victoria regia in the bed of the Channel, in such a way as to have a beautiful double row of parallel leaves, two for pedestrians going to England and two or pedestrians returning to France. In order that the plant may live at its normal temperature, I warm the sea water at intervals by means of powerful electric heaters; it’s as simple as that.
And in order not to cause umbrage to England, I establish a system that could scythe down all my leaves at a single stroke, the electric switch of which would always be in the hands of her most gracious majesty. It appears that she has, in any case, decided to set up a special corps of reapers, in case of diplomatic difficulties. So there is nothing to fear for modest Albion!
That’s my plan; I think it’s simply a stroke of genius. I’ve mentioned that the immense leaves, several meters n diameter, have raised borders. One will therefore be certain of never getting one’s feet wet, which will permit the Prince of Wales to come and visit us frequently, in slippers.150
I might be mistaken, but it seems to me in this way, that I would have done much more for world peace than the Hague Conference.151
As soon as the trial run has been a great success—which is not in doubt—I expect to set up a company with a capital of 1,500 million, as for Panama, to install a road of flowers from Le Havre to New York, across the Atlantic Ocean.
What would be very expensive, I don’t deny, would be to heat the ocean over such a great extent, but a crossing thus contrived would be charming, and would avoid sea-sickness. For good walkers it would be a delightful stroll, and for others, I’ve thought of everything. Firstly, at intervals, there would be vast hotel-café-restaurant ships anchored in place, in which one would find all the comfort desirable or drinking, sleeping, eating and relaxing. The final perfection—which seems to me to be destined for the greatest success—is that two rows of Victoria regia leaves will be covered with light battens, to permit cyclists to cross the Atlantic.
If this progresses as I have every reason to suppose, judging by the enthusiasm of the select few individuals who know about my projects, my first action, to inaugurate this highway, as magisterial as it is poetic, which will outshine the Milky Way itself in the imagination of feeble mortals, will be to organize an international cycle race from Le Havre to New York along my flowery track, my perfumed and intoxicating road across the ocean.
All right!
The Suppression of Train Stops in Big Cities
Circular moving stations. No more loss of time.
Future communications with the planets.
A long time has already passed since the Americans invented the excellent formula: Time is Money—and as more time passes, the more modern society is obliged to recognize that, in every country in the world, it is only too true.
You have trains today that travel, nominally, at a hundred or a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour; that’s doubtless very nice, but as they lose an enormous amount of time stopping in stations and taking on heaps of more-or-less clumsy clients, the result is that one only travels, in effect, at half that speed—which is to say, at sixty kilometers per hour.
It is obvious that this custom, worthy of a festive tortoise, will become increasingly disastrous for people in a hurry, and that is why serious thought must be given to no longer stopping trains in stations, or, at least, only slowing them down to twenty kilometers per hour, which would already be a notable progress. Anyway, to explain the matter briefly, I have only to quote the following lines of Dr.
Héricourt152 on the new and ingenious application of moving walkways to railways. Fortunately, this is a doctor who doesn’t waste his patients’ time; with him, they wouldn’t have time to get rheumatism.
“Five years ago, an engineer of bridges and highways, Monsieur J. Thévenet Le Boul, proposed and elegant, if not very practical, solution to this problem, consisting of making trains circulate continuously alongside rotating platforms.
“This system is essentially different from so-called rolling platforms, with which everyone is now familiar, having seen them in action at the Exposition. For such rolling walkways to achieve the velocity of railway trains would, in fact, require a series of successive walkways, which is economically inadmissible.
“In Monsieur Thévenet Le Boul’s system, on the contrary, the trains are only accessible at determined stations, but they retain a constant speed that can be as high as twelve, fifteen or twenty kilometers per hour, and the travelers board it by means of a unique maneuver, simple and free of danger.
“This faculty of boarding a moving train is assured by rotating embarkation-decks formed by platforms propelled around their center by a movement such that the sped at their circumference is equal to that of the train, which passes around approximately three-quarters of their perimeter.
“The public board these platforms at the central region, whose speed is, of course, considerably reduced. If the radius of the central gap were, for example, four meters, and the total radius twenty meters, the train moving at twelve kilometers per hour, the travelers would only have to confront, at the center of the embarkation-deck, a velocity of 0.66 meters per second—which is to say, half walking speed.
“One sees, therefore, that a traveler, even if his use of his legs is slightly impaired, can easily get on to such a rotating platform and head toward the exterior edge, where he will then have a velocity equal to the train. He can then climb aboard the latter without experiencing any appreciable reaction, as easily as one moves long a compartment of a moving train.
“The descent from the train will be effected with the same facility, by the inverse maneuver, the traveler having at his disposal, to quit his compartment, all the time during which his carriage remains in contact with the platform of the station at which he wants to get off.”
Monsieur Perry has conceived a more comfortable and practical plan:
“Of course, with trains composed of ordinary carriages, only able to follow very broad curves, platforms of small radius could not be used, and those envisaged by Monsieur Perry would be no less than 150 meters in diameter. To achieve a speed of 12.8 kilometers per hour at the open edge, the central stairway of such a platform would have to effect its revolution in 134 seconds. The time left for travelers to board or descend would be sixty seconds—a broadly sufficient time in these conditions—and prominently-placed indicator-boards would indicate the time still available for that operation: fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, ten seconds. At the signal zero a barrier would close the extremity of the corridor, the traveler would see the train draw away, and would wait for the next train. The train door could, in any case, be opened and closed automatically at the initial contact with the rotating platform and at the moment when the train quits it.”
It is evident that with this further improved system it would soon be possible, by increasing the number and the successive speeds of the circular sections of the rotating platform, to embark at forty, fifty or perhaps even eighty kilometers per hour. That would be ideal.
In the future, however—distant, if you wish—I dare to hope for even better. As I have demonstrated a thousand times, it is certain that our planetary system, and the entire universe, is ruled and governed by a single force: electricity. Well, on the day when we have absolute mastery of the mysterious fluid, there is nothing to say that we will not be able to bring the planets—those that are our neighbors—closer together, and succeed in bringing them into virtual contact, at a distance of exactly one centimeter.
In order that there should be no friction or impact, the two planets that want to come together, brushing without colliding, would each have prepared a vast plain—an immense, perfectly flat hippodrome able to contain two or three million travelers and tourists—and at the moment when the two planetary hippodromes pass alongside one another the travelers would pass from one platform to the other. It would be as simple as daylight
“But you’re forgetting that these planets move at three or four hundred thousand kilometers a second.”
“I’m not forgetting anything; from the moment that they’ll both have identical speeds, one won’t feel a thing. It’s the story of the candle whose flame is motionless in the most violent tempest, aboard the gondola of a free-moving balloon that is following the wind at a hundred kilometers an hour.”
“That’s true-but where will you find the station-maters and signalmen for these interplanetary pleasure-trips?”
“In our Observatories, of course; they will be put in communication by a serious transmitter cable with poles converted into immense domesticated dynamos. One flick of the manipulator’s—or manometricist’s, if you prefer—switch, and according to the impulsion of the fluids, the worlds will draw closer or further apart at will.
When the next voyage takes place, I intend to organize a performance by Sarah Bernhardt on the planet Mars; there’ll be money to be made. But then, there’s no time to lose—before she gets too old.
“Unless you can clap the two of them together.”
“Don’t discourage the tenacious researchers and audacious inventors like that!”
The Art of Killing People
Tomorrow’s war. No noise and much light.
Toward universal peace by means of science.
Following in the noble tradition of my father, I have always energetically demanded the abolition of the death penalty, and I consider war as the most ignoble and cowardly of murders unless its sole objective is the defense of the borders of the soil of the fatherland.
That is why, every time someone tells me that a new, reliable, powerful and rapid means of killing men en masse has been discovered, I jump for joy.
That joy seems cruel and paradoxical to imbeciles, and yet, it is science alone that will one day triumph over the passions of headstrong tyrants, in rendering war impossible by virtue of the exorbitant power of its means of destruction. Whether one likes it or not, nothing is truer or more certain.
So, true or false, I am happy to acquaint my readers today with two new inventions in the art of killing the poor fellows whom the ambition or dementia of kings and emperors send to be butchered, with great efficiency.
The first of these inventions, which is no more than an improved catapult, and is somewhat reminiscent of the circular rotating platforms about which I talked in the last chapter, is designed to kill noiselessly. Unfortunately, it’s American, like the second, and that’s what makes me slightly suspicious.
In any case, here are the essential details, according to my colleague Gautier:153
“Imagine a large disk 1.56 meters in diameter, weighing 225 kilograms and rotating, under the action of an electric motor, at the vertiginous speed of two hundred rotations per second. The projectiles are arranged, one after another, in a groove excavated in the perimeter of the disk and things are arranged in such a way that they can, at a given moment, be released automatically. Being no longer retained in any way, they would yield to centrifugal force, which would give them an initial velocity of 610 meters per second, with a range of over three kilometers.
“It is, as one can see, as simple as saying hello.
“This is not a new invention in the true sense of the word. It is, rather, an exhumation, a resurrection, and the holy King David would tell you that it was a machine of the same sort, although more rudimentary and on a smaller scale, that he employed, with the collaboration of the same centrifugal force, to relieve Goliath of his appetite for bread. The only essential difference is that, in Biblical times, it was called a
sling.
“One could launch a projectile at each half-rotation of the disk, which is two projectiles per rotation: four hundred per second; twenty four thousand a minute. But the inventor is not as ambitious as that; he will be content with only one projectile every four rotations, which would still permit him to hurl upon the enemy in a single minute three thousand small explosive shells 7.5 centimeters in diameter and forty centimeters long—a veritable whirlwind of gunfire, a continuous rain of iron or steel.
“‘But,’ you might say, ‘don’t the Bange, Krupp, Armstrong, Canet, Schneider, Maxim and Hotchkiss cannons, etc., all those ‘Long Toms’ and ‘pompoms’ that are performing marvels in the Transvaal and in China, satisfy our present needs much better? What point is there in resuscitating these ridiculous machines that one had thought to be abandoned for good as old junk?’
“A complete error! Cannons of bronze or steel, whatever kind of explosive one employs to charge them, make a lot of noise—far too much noise. They are cumbersome, dangerous to handle, and excessively expensive into the bargain.
“With a rotatory catapult with an automatic release-mechanism, the projectile duly launched at the psychological moment will fly ‘sweetly,’ without shock, din or any noise at all, to fall on the backs of the enemy, who will have no suspicion of it until the downpour begins. Not to mention that you have a summary, rustic artillery exempt from recoil, presenting as small a vulnerable surface as possible, easy for any common-or-garden locksmith to set up effectively in a matter of hours, no matter where, able to go almost anywhere, over mountains and through valleys, to be mounted in a battery as easily at the summit of a steep crag or the steeple of a bell-tower as in the depths of a ravine or the roof of a house.
