Stephanie Johnson

TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM

BY H. G. WELLS

CONTENTS

1.  Filmer

2.  The Magic Shop

3.  The Valley of Spiders

4.  The Truth About Pyecraft

5.  Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland

6.  The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost

7.  Jimmy Goggles the God

8.  The New Accelerator

9.  Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation

10.  The Stolen Body

11.  Mr. Brisher's Treasure

12.  Miss Winchelsea's Heart

13.  A Dream of Armageddon

1.  FILMER

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men--
this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only 
one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work.
But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided
that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew,
should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to 
honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the
steam-engine. And surely of all honoured names none is so 
grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer's, the timid,
intellectual creature who solved the problem over which the world
had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations,
the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare
and well-nigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never
has that recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man
in the face of the greatness of his science found such an amazing
exemplification. Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain,
profoundly obscure--Filmers attract no Boswells--but the essential
facts and the concluding scene are clear enough, and there are
letters, and notes, and casual allusions to piece the whole together.
And this is the story one makes, putting this thing with that,
of Filmer's life and death.

The first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is
a document in which he applies for admission as a paid student
in physics to the Government laboratories at South Kensington,
and therein he describes himself as the son of a "military bootmaker"
("cobbler" in the vulgar tongue) of Dover, and lists his various
examination proofs of a high proficiency in chemistry and
mathematics. With a certain want of dignity he seeks to enhance
these attainments by a profession of poverty and disadvantages,
and he writes of the laboratory as the "gaol" of his ambitions,
a slip which reinforces his claim to have devoted himself exclusively
to the exact sciences. The document is endorsed in a manner that
shows Filmer was admitted to this coveted opportunity; but until
quite recently no traces of his success in the Government institution
could be found.

It has now, however, been shown that in spite of his professed zeal
for research, Filmer, before he had held this 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" 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.