This, however, is not the time or the place to go into a detailed description of this wonderful gas or how it was obtained, further than to state that apparatus had to be designed on entirely new lines for the liquefaction of nitrogen into natural gases, at temperatures as low as -317 degrees Fahrenheit; that the natural gas of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Ontario contains 1 per cent of helium; that a $900,000 building was constructed for the Navy Department at Fort Worth, Texas, and a ten-inch pipe-line ninety-four miles long was laid, at a cost of more than a million dollars, from the wells at Petrolia, Texas, for supplying the plant with natural gas; and that the first production of it was in operation April 1, 1918.
Within a comparatively short time, then, we ought to see many companies organized in this country for aerial transnavigation of the globe by helium airship! Before the year 1919 has come to a close we ought to see aeroplanes and dirigibles jumping the Atlantic from shore to shore. Who knows, it may even come to pass that man shall become as much a creature of the air as the birds! As a world of exploration and travel the heavens offer him many adventures. It presents to him the shortest distance and the line of least resistance between any two given points on this planet. By the aircraft he has already designed he has penetrated to a height of 38,000 feet and flown a thousand miles in a straight line without stopping.
Is there any reason to doubt that in a very short time man will extend the capacity of these airships or the distance they can travel? The monetary and laudatory incentives are there. For affording to his fellow man and his chattels faster transportation, man’s reward has been great and commensurate with his success. In order to win that remuneration he has enslaved and domesticated the beasts of the fields; he has harnessed the river and the streams; he has sought out the secrets of nature and devised ways and means to make her hidden forces transport him up and down the highways and byways of the globe; for that reward he has invented machines and engines to rush him over the land and across the seven seas at an ever-increasing rate. When mountains have raised their ponderous bulk between him and his objective he has climbed over them or tunnelled under them or cut them down; when rivers, lakes, or oceans have intervened he has spanned them by bridges or boats; when isthmus or even continents have injected their lengths between him and his markets he has cut them asunder that his ships might pass through.
In short, transportation is the life-blood of commerce, and by it and through it the perishable fruits of India, Africa, and America are carried from the tropics to the remotest corners of the frigid zone; likewise the foods or minerals or other materials confined by nature to the temperate zone are taken to the balmy tropics. In fact, every instrument and every force in nature is enslaved so that man may enjoy all the blessings of the earth at one time and in one place. Taken all in all, the speed of transportation has increased man’s pleasures and years proportionately.
But how many people to-day realize that when aerial transportation of passengers and freight has become an actual accomplished fact in the sense that water and land transportation of man and his goods now is, a complete redistribution and reconcentration of the cities, people, and nations and a new internationalism in the form of customs and language will have become a historic fact! This statement may seem like an absurd phantasy, but if history repeats itself in the future as it has in the past this will take place as surely as the sun rises.
Ever since man transported his goods from one place to another he has followed the lines of least resistance and the greatest speed. For that reason rivers were his first natural highway. At the stopping-places along these routes and waterways he built for himself villages, towns, and cities. The biggest of these, however, have always been located at some favorable terminus or harbor. Nineveh, Babylon, Carthage, and Tyre were ancient cities that grew and flourished because they were either the termini or the harbors of advantageous trade routes or excellent stopping-places on great waterways. With the change in the rivers of commerce those cities decayed and passed away.
The rise of such cities as Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages, when they afforded the best ports for the sailing-vessels that connected the caravan routes which came across Asia from the East for their distribution of goods to Europe and the West, was due to the same cause. With the changing of those routes those cities lost their importance and prestige and became what they are to-day.
At the present time most of the largest cities of the world are located near inviting harbors or in river-mouths where the great ships of commerce come and go and find refuge. London, Liverpool, New York, Hamburg, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Calcutta, Bombay, Havana, Buenos Aires—to mention only a very few—depend primarily upon their strategic geographic position for their business and their very life.
If in time, then, the nearest points of land between continents and countries become the great landing-places for the new passenger and freight ships of the air, it is quite conceivable that the great centres of population and commerce may grow up themselves round those havens.
Moreover, if, as the British Civil Aerial Transport Committee and most of the world’s aeronautical authorities are convinced, Cape Town, South Africa—to take but one example—is only three days’ flight by aircraft from Southampton, England, and if all the remotest capitals of the East are only hours or days instead of weeks away from those of the West, there will be such rapid and constant intercommunication that customs practices will become obsolete and one international language may have to be adopted for trade and convenience. Indeed, the only impediment originally put in the way of the Handley Page Company’s London-to-Paris air-line was the violation of customs practices, which is delaying the aeroplanes from making the round trip between breakfast and dinner.