"Wells, H G - Twelve Stories And A Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a
confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs.
"The man's a crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General
in his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open for the Japanese
to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side
of warfare--a priority they still to our great discomfort retain.

And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his
contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves
of a new oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial
model of his invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment,
desisted from all further writing, and, with a certain secrecy
that seems to have been an inseparable characteristic of all his
proceedings, set to work upon the apparatus. He seems to have
directed the making of its parts and collected most of it in a room
in Shoreditch, but its final putting together was done at Dymchurch,
in Kent. He did not make the affair large enough to carry a man,
but he made an extremely ingenious use of what were then called
the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first flight of this
first practicable flying machine took place over some fields
near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed
and controlled its flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.

The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success.
The apparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge,
ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped
thence very nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep,
rose again, circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind
the Burford Bridge Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened.
Filmer got off his tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke,
advanced perhaps twenty yards towards his triumph, threw out
his arms in a strange gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint.
Every one could then recall the ghastliness of his features and
all the evidences of extreme excitement they had observed throughout
the trial, things they might otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards
in the inn he had an unaccountable gust of hysterical weeping.

Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and
those for the most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor
saw the ascent but not the descent, his horse being frightened
by the electrical apparatus on Filmer's tricycle and giving him
a nasty spill. Two members of the Kent constabulary watched
the affair from a cart in an unofficial spirit, and a grocer calling
round the Marsh for orders and two lady cyclists seem almost
to complete the list of educated people. There were two reporters
present, one representing a Folkestone paper and the other being
a fourth-class interviewer and "symposium" journalist, whose
expenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate advertisement
--and now quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement
may be obtained--had paid. The latter was one of those writers