The Argonauts of the Air

Last updated
"The Argonauts of the Air"
Author H. G. Wells
CountryUnited Kingdom
Genre(s) Science fiction
Published in Phil May's Annual
Media typePrint
Publication dateDecember 1895

"The Argonauts of the Air" is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in 1895 in Phil May's Annual. It was included in the collection of Wells short stories The Plattner Story and Others , published by Methuen & Co. in 1897. [1]

Contents

Written several years before the first flight of the Wright brothers, it describes the painstaking development of a flying machine, in the face of public amusement, and its unsuccessful trial flight over London.

Wells lived at one time in Worcester Park, where the machine is launched; [2] he studied at the Royal College of Science, where it crashes. [3]

Story summary

For several years, Monson has used his wealth on a project to build a flying machine. The apparatus for launching it, "a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber", has become a notable landmark for people passing through Worcester Park in south-west London, and sometimes they see a machine rush along the rails of the apparatus, as the latest version of the flying machine is tested.

Monson's money is running out, and he is impatient with the time taken to put the latest modifications into effect. He is annoyed with the attitude of the public, who regard with amusement and indifference what is actually a painstaking and well-researched project, based on the work of Hiram Maxim and Otto Lilienthal. In particular he is annoyed by the remarks of a pretty young lady:

'How are you getting on with your flying-machine?' she asked. ('I wonder if I shall ever meet anyone with the sense not to ask that,' thought Monson.) 'It will be very dangerous at first, will it not?' ('Thinks I'm afraid.').... 'You must let me know when your flying-machine is finished, Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of taking a ticket.' ('One would think I was still playing inventions in the nursery.')

Monson and his engineer Woodhouse agree to try a flight. They know they will not be able to manage their flight instinctively, as a bird would do. Wimbledon, Primrose Hill and Kensington Gardens are some of the places which they fly over, all the while having difficulty controlling the machine. Eventually their luck runs out and they crash near the Royal College of Science.

So ends Monson's project. All that remains is the rusting ironwork at Worcester Park, and the inspiration for others to attempt creating flying machines.

Related Research Articles

Imperial Airways

Imperial Airways was the early British commercial long-range airline, operating from 1924 to 1939 and principally serving the British Empire routes to South Africa, India and the Far East, including Australia, Malaya and Hong Kong. Passengers were typically businessmen or colonial administrators, most flights carried about 20 passengers or less. Accidents were frequent: in the first six years, 32 people died in seven incidents. Imperial Airways never achieved the levels of technological innovation of its competitors, and was merged into the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1939. BOAC in turn merged with the British European Airways (BEA) in 1974 to form British Airways.

Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg World War II aircraft

The Fieseler Fi 103R, code-named Reichenberg, was a late-World War II German crewed version of the V-1 flying bomb produced for attacks in which the pilot was likely to be killed or at best to parachute down at the attack site, which were to be carried out by the "Leonidas Squadron", V. Gruppe of the Luftwaffe's Kampfgeschwader 200.

Hiram Maxim

Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was an American-born British inventor best known as the creator of the first automatic machine gun, the Maxim gun. Maxim held patents on numerous mechanical devices such as hair-curling irons, a mousetrap, and steam pumps. Maxim laid claim to inventing the lightbulb.

<i>The Time Ships</i>

The Time Ships is a 1995 hard science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. A canonical sequel to the 1895 novella The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, it was officially authorised by the Wells estate to mark the centenary of the original's publication. The Time Ships won critical acclaim. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1996, as well as the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1995. It was also nominated for the Hugo, Clarke, and Locus Awards in 1996.

Jet pack Device worn on the back which uses jets of gas or liquid to propel the wearer through the air

A jet pack, rocket belt, or rocket pack is a device worn on the back which uses jets of gas or liquid to propel the wearer through the air. The concept has been present in science fiction for almost a century and became widespread in the 1960s. Real jet packs have been developed using a variety of mechanisms, but their uses are much more limited than their fictional counterparts because of the challenges of the Earth's atmosphere, gravity, the low energy density of utilisable fuels, and the human body not being suited to flight, and they are principally used for stunts. A practical use for the jet pack has been in extra-vehicular activities for astronauts because of the apparent weightlessness and lack of friction-creating atmosphere in orbit. The term jet suit is used for a system incorporating a jet pack and associated jets attached to the arms to increase manoeuvrability.

Frank Hawks

Frank Monroe Hawks was a pilot in the United States Army Air Service during World War I and was known during the 1920s and 1930s as a record breaking aviator, using a series of Texaco-sponsored aircraft, setting 214 point-to-point records in the United States and Europe. Prolific in the media and continually in the "public eye", in the 1937 The Mysterious Pilot movie serial, Hawks was billed as the "fastest airman in the world." A popular saying from the time was, "Don't send it by mail ... send it by Hawks." After retiring from a career as an air racer, he died in 1938, flying an experimental aircraft.

"The Chronic Argonauts" is an 1888 short story by the British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells. It features an inventor who builds a time machine and travels in time using it, and it pre-dates Wells's best-selling 1895 time travel novel The Time Machine by seven years.

Worcester Park Suburb of Greater London, England

Worcester Park is a town in the London Borough of Sutton, in Southwest London, England.

The Flying machine is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in H. G. Wells' classic 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. It is one of the four types of heavy machine the Martians bring with them when they invade Earth, along with the fighting machine, the handling machine, and the embankment machine.

Canadair North Star

The Canadair North Star is a 1940s Canadian development, for Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), of the Douglas DC-4. Instead of radial piston engines used by the Douglas design, Canadair used Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 engines to achieve a higher cruising speed of 325 mph (523 km/h) compared with the 227 mph (365 km/h) of the standard DC-4. Requested by TCA in 1944, the prototype flew on 15 July 1946. The type was used by various airlines and by the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). It proved to be reliable but noisy when in service through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Some examples continued to fly into the 1970s, converted to cargo aircraft.

<i>The Country of the Blind and Other Stories</i> Short story collection by H. G. Wells

The Country of the Blind and Other Stories is a collection of thirty-three fantasy and science fiction short stories written by the English author H. G. Wells between 1894 and 1909. It was first published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in 1911. All the stories had first been published in various weekly and monthly periodicals. Twenty-seven of the stories had also been previously published in five earlier story collections by Wells.

H. G. Wells bibliography Wikipedia bibliography

H. G. Wells was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His writing career spanned more than sixty years, and his early science fiction novels earned him the title of "The Father of Science Fiction".

Gulfstream G650 Executive transport aircraft

The Gulfstream G650 is a large business jet produced by Gulfstream Aerospace. The model is designated Gulfstream GVI in its type certificate, and may be configured to carry from 11 to 18 passengers. Gulfstream began the G650 program in 2005 and revealed it to the public in 2008. The G650 was formerly the company's largest and fastest business jet with a top speed of Mach 0.925, having been surpassed by the larger G700.

<i>The Plattner Story and Others</i>

The Plattner Story and Others is a collection of seventeen short stories written by H. G. Wells. This volume was first published in March 1897 by Methuen & Co.

1911 Paris to Madrid air race

The 1911 Paris to Madrid air race was a three-stage international flying competition, the first of several European air races of that summer. The winner was French aviator Jules Védrines, although his win, along with the rest of the race, were overshadowed by a notorious fatal crash at takeoff.

The idea of a fourth dimension has been a factor in the evolution of modern art, but use of concepts relating to higher dimensions has been little discussed by academics in the literary world. From the late 1800s onwards, many writers began to make use of possibilities opened up by the exploration of such concepts as hypercube geometry. While many writers took the fourth dimension to be one of time, others preferred to think of it in spatial terms, and some associated the new mathematics with wider changes in modern culture.

In the Abyss

"In the Abyss" is a short story by English writer H. G. Wells, first published in 1896 in Pearson's Magazine. It was included in The Plattner Story and Others, a collection of short stories by Wells first published in 1897. The story describes a journey to the ocean bed in a specially-designed metal sphere; the explorer within discovers a civilization of human-like creatures.

British Overseas Airways Corporation

British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was the British state-owned airline created in 1939 by the merger of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd. It continued operating overseas services throughout World War II. After the passing of the Civil Aviation Act 1946, European and South American services passed to two further state-owned airlines, British European Airways (BEA) and British South American Airways (BSAA). BOAC absorbed BSAA in 1949, but BEA continued to operate British domestic and European routes for the next quarter century. A 1971 Act of Parliament merged BOAC and BEA, effective 31 March 1974, forming today's British Airways. For most of its history its main rival was Pan Am.

"The Sea Raiders" is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in 1896 in The Weekly Sun Literary Supplement. It was included in The Plattner Story and Others, a collection of short stories by Wells published by Methuen & Co. in 1897. It was included in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Wells published by Thomas Nelson & Sons in 1911.

"The Plattner Story" is a short story by English writer H. G. Wells, first published in 1896 in The New Review. It was included in The Plattner Story and Others, a collection of short stories by Wells first published in 1897, and in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, a collection of his short stories first published in 1911. In the story, a man recounts his experiences in a parallel world, which he speculates is some form of Afterlife.

References

  1. The Argonauts of the Air title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database accessed 15 August 2015.
  2. Lost buildings Epsom and Ewell History Explorer, accessed 15 August 2015.
  3. H. G. Wells Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed 15 August 2015.