“All the old methods of transportation,” said he, “have been greatly improved upon, but none of them entirely superseded. Flying machines have been brought to a reasonable degree of perfection at the expense of much thought and many experiments, many fortunes and many broken necks. But they cannot take the place of the freight car or the steamship. They are more rapid, easily making 100 to 150 miles an hour, but they are as yet of limited capacity carrying light letter mails, and a few passengers, but at too great an expense to compete with the improved rail and water carriage of the present. Besides most people would rather be near the ground in case of accident. I mentioned to you the greatly reduced cost of railway transportation in North America where all the lines are operated by the state. In most of the South American states, the roads are merely controlled—not owned—by the state and there is active agitation in favor of the annexation of these states to the Great Union, in anticipation in part of the advantage that will be obtained by the state control of roads that will follow.
“The most beneficent service that the flying machine has rendered is its potent contribution toward the abolition of war. Men have indeed been rapidly educated out of the spirit and habit of war, but the flying machine simply prohibited it. Without it, an age of peace would undoubtedly have been reached in the future, with it, the age of peace is here. International warfare is at an end and probably forever.”
“I don’t quite see how,” said I.
“It is very easy. One of these machines can carry enough dynamite, gun cotton and other destructive explosives to devastate a city of 100,000 inhabitants. It can at will, fly over any place and drop its deadly stuff precisely where it will do the most execution. It can select the palace of the king, the houses of parliament or congress, the barracks, the citadel, or the magazine, or the thickly peopled camp of a great army. It can do this with little risk, deliberately, in broad daylight, poised two or three miles above its victim out of reach of practical gunnery; but in the night it can drop death upon defenseless and unsuspecting sleepers without a moments warning. Battle ships are equally useless. A charge of dynamite dropped from a flyer being able to reduce the greatest ship to scrap iron and send it to the bottom in a moment. As personal armor became a useless encumbrance, when gunpowder was introduced, so the armoring of ships has entirely passed away in the presence of the flying machine and naval warfare is no more practicable than war or land.”
“I should think,” said I, “that the “flyer” could be converted into a dangerous instrument for criminal use. What’s the reason pirates and robbers could not sail down upon a community small enough to be overpowered by them, and then sail off again with their booty to some inaccessible or solitary place?”
“That has been done,” he answered, “but it is no longer easy. Whenever a fresh emergency arises in human affairs, a fresh remedy is found to meet it. It often brings its own remedy. The flyer is as great an agent in the hands of the police as it is in the hands of the criminal. As to solitary places, there are very few left on earth that are habitable, and there is not a spot that has not been seen by men, and that is not subject to police surveillance.”
“Then,” said I, “they must have discovered the north pole.”
“Yes they have, and the south pole too,” he replied. “The first trip to the north pole was made from Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska. The party flew in a straight line from that point, in midsummer, north over the pole and continuing in almost the same direction to the south, reached Hammerfest in Norway a distance of 3,000 miles in forty hours without stopping. Parties have gone from Minneapolis by way of the north pole in an air line to the town of Tomsk in Siberia a distance of 5,500 miles, stopping at the pole twelve hours, and finishing the journey within four days. These trips have often been repeated and many similar ones made. It is possible to make the circuit of the earth in twelve days by means of relays at certain continental points and on some of the Pacific Islands; but it can also be made by rail and water with only four changes, two to rail and two to steamer in fifteen to seventeen days. Railroads run to Alaska reaching Bering Sea and the Pacific at several points, and are met by corresponding roads on the Russian side. The water carriage in summer is only across Bering Strait, but in winter on account of ice the passage is made further south and is longer.”
“Why don’t they tunnel Bering Strait,” I inquired, “or bridge it?”
“They will in the future tunnel it part way and build a dam or embankment the rest of the way,” he replied, “and utilize the enormous power of the current passing through there to drive the trains 1,000 miles on each side of the strait, but the time has not yet arrived. A bridge would not stay there, it would be swept away by the ice.”