Without replying, the night city editor tossed old Dick the last of Stewart’s story describing the departure and return of the Airship Boys’ newest wonder and then arose with fire in his eyes.
“Give me all you can write up to two fifteen,” he snapped to Stewart, “and—” Just then his telephone rang.
“Yes,” he answered in a tired voice while the telegraph and night editors yet lingered by his desk. “Nathan? You seem to have taken plenty of time for your supper. Well? Oh, they did. All right. You don’t know where they are stopping? Good-bye.” Then he arose and glared once more at his nightly enemies—the telegraph and night editors. “Winton,” he called sharply to that reporter, who was sitting near by with his feet on a table. “These Airship Boys left Newark on the express just after Stewart. Nathan says they’re in town. Take a flyer through the hotels. Land ’em if possible. Make ’em talk. Phone me if you locate them.”
“’S that mean more of this flyin’ machine stuff?” grunted the head copy reader.
“It means I’m attending to my own business,” retorted Mr. Latimer, and with no further word or look for his office associates, he walked hurriedly toward the door. As the sailor “goes to the mast” or to the captain of the ship in a last appeal against unfairness or injustice, Mr. Latimer was on his way to the “old man” or the managing editor on his customary protest against the machinations of the night editor. Stewart hastened to his typewriter and resumed his tale of the aeroplane.
“The problem of how to build an aeroplane large enough to carry passengers hundreds of miles—possibly across the Atlantic—and at the same time develop speed enough to hold its own against storms, seemed unsolvable until two discoveries were made last winter. Both of these are now well known to scientists and both are unknown as yet to the layman. It was the almost simultaneous discovery of the new metal magnalium (due to the development of the electric converter by the steel works in Chicago) and a final determination of the law of the propeller by Professor Montgomery of California.
“With this new magnalium it is at last possible to make an all-metal car with light but rigid wings or planes. This metal, a magnesium alloy with copper and standard vanadium or chrome steel, at once assumed a new place in metals.” (These facts Stewart had secured from a German metallurgical quarterly in the Newark Public Library.) “Magnalium is not only extremely light but it has a molecular cohesion never before attained. Its peculiar toughness gives it a capacity for being worked slowly that is ideal for aeroplane uses. It turns the edge of the hardest chisel driven against it, yet the same drill, under slow pressure, will cleave it almost as easily as aluminum.”
Marking this much of his new story “more,” to indicate to the copy readers that more was to come, and heading his next page “Add 1 Description Aeroplane,” Stewart rushed the prepared “take” of copy to the city editor’s desk and continued:
“It is from this new metal that the car, planes and truss of the Ocean Flyer are constructed. The aeroplane is modeled in general after the body and wings of a gull in full flight, insuring, by its peculiar construction, not only the greatest speed, but, by an ingenious adaptation of the same gull’s wing, the automatic stability long striven for by aeroplane builders.”
