"Wells, H G - The War In The Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

Tom. All day and all night the fast cars from Brighton and
Hastings went murmuring by overhead long, broad,
comfortable-looking cars, that were brightly lit after dusk. As
they flew by at night, transient flares of light and a rumbling
sound of passage, they kept up a perpetual summer lightning and
thunderstorm in the street below.

Presently the English Channel was bridged--a series of great iron
Eiffel Tower pillars carrying mono-rail cables at a height of a
hundred and fifty feet above the water, except near the middle,
where they rose higher to allow the passage of the London and
Antwerp shipping and the Hamburg-America liners.

Then heavy motor-cars began to run about on only a couple of
wheels, one behind the other, which for some reason upset Tom
dreadfully, and made him gloomy for days after the first one
passed the shop...

All this gyroscopic and mono-rail development naturally absorbed
a vast amount of public attention, and there,was also a huge
excitement consequent upon the amazing gold discoveries off the
coast of Anglesea made by a submarine prospector, Miss Patricia
Giddy. She had taken her degree in geology and mineralogy in the
University of London, and while working upon the auriferous rocks
of North Wales, after a brief holiday spent in agitating for
women's suffrage, she had been struck by the possibility of these
reefs cropping up again under the water. She had set herself to
verify this supposition by the use of the submarine crawler
invented by Doctor Alberto Cassini. By a happy mingling of
reasoning and intuition peculiar to her sex she found gold at her
first descent, and emerged after three hours' submersion with
about two hundredweight of ore containing gold in the
unparalleled quantity of seventeen ounces to the ton. But the
whole story of her submarine mining, intensely interesting as it
is, must be told at some other time; suffice it now to remark
simply that it was during the consequent great rise of prices,
confidence, and enterprise that the revival of interest in flying
occurred.

It is curious how that revival began. It was like the coming of
a breeze on a quiet day; nothing started it, it came. People
began to talk of flying with an air of never having for one
moment dropped the subject. Pictures of flying and flying
machines returned to the newspapers; articles and allusions
increased and multiplied in the serious magazines. People asked
in mono-rail trains, "When are we going to fly?" A new crop of
inventors sprang up in a night or so like fungi. The Aero Club
announced the project of a great Flying Exhibition in a large
area of ground that the removal of slums in Whitechapel had
rendered available.