HELPS TO STUDY
Describe the balloon Hans constructed. How did he extricate himself from each difficulty he encountered? What characteristic did this show? Note the changes in the appearance of the earth as he made his journey. On what day did he see the North Pole? In what region was he when he saw the moon? What did he find when he reached that body?
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
- From the Earth to the Moon—Jules Verne.
- The War of the Worlds—H. G. Wells.
THE GREAT STONE OF SARDIS[391-*]
This fanciful tale is taken from Frank R. Stockton’s The Great Stone of Sardis. In this book the hero, Roland Clewe, is pictured as a scientist who had made many startling discoveries and inventions at his works in Sardis about the year 1946. One of his inventions was an automatic shell. This was an enormous projectile, the peculiarity of which was that its motive power was contained within itself, very much as a rocket contains the explosives which send it upward. The extraordinary piece of mechanism was of [v]cylindrical form, eighteen feet in length and fourteen feet in diameter. The forward end was [v]conical and not solid, being formed of a number of flat steel rings, decreasing in size as they approached the point of the cone. When not in operation these rings did not touch one another, but they could be forced together by pressure on the point of the cone. One day this shell fell from the supports on which it lay, the conical end down, and ploughed its way with terrific force into the earth—how far no one could tell. Clewe determined to descend the hole in search of the shell by means of an electric elevator. Margaret Raleigh, to whom he was engaged, had gone to the seashore, and during her absence, Clewe planned to make his daring venture.
On the day that Margaret left Sardis, Roland began his preparations for descending the shaft. He had so thoroughly considered the machinery and appliances necessary for the undertaking and had worked out all his plans in such detail, in his mind and upon paper, that he knew exactly what he wanted to do. His orders for the great length of chain needed exhausted the stock of several factories, and the engines he obtained were even more powerful than he had intended them to be; but these he could procure immediately, and for smaller ones he would have been obliged to wait.
The circular car which was intended to move up and down the shaft, and the peculiar machinery connected with it, together with the hoisting apparatus, were all made in his works. His skilled artisans labored steadily day and night.