The question naturally arises as to the sound of conversation from the roof reaching the living-rooms or the sound from the rooms reaching the roof. The cement walls are practically sound proof and for sounds to be heard from roof to house or house to house requires that it pass into the open air and bend through a 180 degree angle. Sound does not travel in that way as one may readily prove by trying to shout around the corner of a ledge of rock or over a stone building. With all windows and doors wide open in the Roadtown home, the only sound of ordinary magnitude to be heard will be from the singing of birds and the play of children in front of the window. The uncanny noise of city streets and of quarrelsome neighbors across the air shaft will be missing. People who cannot content themselves with the quiet of a Roadtown home will have to use the telephone, electric music, roof promenade or go to the social center. Promenaders cannot stare into nor listen at their neighbors’ windows. The Roadtowner’s home is his castle in the truest sense of the word, and more private, notwithstanding the close proximity to neighbors, and hence more consecrated to family life than any previous style of dwelling known.
The Roadtown will have no streets because it will need none. As it is built through the country, there will, of course, be roads as well as streets to cross. Here the monorail will run under, and the roof bridge over the roads. At such road crossings and such other places where roads are built back into the country, stables and garages will be provided.
The natural desire to drive one’s own vehicles up to the door of his own house will cause an occasional remonstrance against the plan at first, but as people find that there is no need of such roadways they will come to consider the Roadtown road crossings as their front door, when viewed from the auto or equestrian’s standpoint, and no more think of the necessity of a private roadway to their own house than that of having their auto sent up the tenth story of an apartment house.
Those who wish to pay a visit to a Roadtown home will come to the nearest point where the railroad crosses the Roadtown or if traveling by horse or auto where the public road crosses the Roadtown and will leave their vehicle in charge of a caretaker and have their name ’phoned in as one does at an up-to-date apartment house or hotel. If the Roadtowner is at home, the caller will then take the monorail or the roof promenade as the distance or his inclination dictates, and thus reach the door of his friend’s home.
Such a system will give the humblest Roadtowner the opportunity of the high class apartment house dweller to say that he is not at home to unwelcome visitors, and yet the Roadtown home built on the ground floor with its windows looking out into a private garden will have all the home-like simplicity of a cottage, and at the same time modern conveniences and luxuries which cannot be found in any King’s palace.
CHAPTER V
CIVILIZATION THROUGH PIPES AND WIRES
THE economies of a continuous house under one roof and of railroad and steam shovel, rather than hand and dump cart methods, are sufficient to make the line construction far more economical than any method now in vogue, but even they are greatly exceeded by the additional saving involved in the installation and operation of the pipes and wires of the Roadtown.
Witness the present situation. The farmer’s house is alone in the middle of his farm. For every pipe, wire or rail utility with which he is supplied, he must have a plant of his own. If he wishes steam heat, he must put in a boiler; if he wishes electric lights, an engine and dynamo.
In practice the farmer, with the occasional exception of the rural telephone, is limited to the products of civilization that can be hauled home in a wagon.