a necessary condition if aerial navigation was to have any practical

value. It is Filmer's particular merit that he perceived the way

in which the contrasted and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon

and heavy flying machine might be combined in one apparatus,

which should be at choice either heavier or lighter than air.

He took hints from the contractile bladders of fish and the pneumatic

cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement of contractile

and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded could lift

the actual flying apparatus with ease, and when retracted by the

complicated "musculature" he wove about them, were withdrawn

almost completely into the frame; and he built the large framework

which these balloons sustained, of hollow, rigid tubes, the air

in which, by an ingenious contrivance, was automatically pumped

out as the apparatus fell, and which then remained exhausted

so long as the aeronaut desired. There were no wings or propellers

to his machine, such as there had been to all previous aeroplanes,

and the only engine required was the compact and powerful little

appliance needed to contract the balloons. He perceived that such

an apparatus as he had devised might rise with frame exhausted

and balloons expanded to a considerable height, might then contract

its balloons and let the air into its frame, and by an adjustment

of its weights slide down the air in any desired direction. As it fell

it would accumulate velocity and at the same time lose weight,

and the momentum accumulated by its down-rush could be utilised

by means of a shifting of its weights to drive it up in the air again

as the balloons expanded. This conception, which is still the

structural conception of all successful flying machines, needed,

however, a vast amount of toil upon its details before it could

actually be realised, and such toil Filmer--as he was accustomed

to tell the numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in

the heyday of his fame--"ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave."

His particular difficulty was the elastic lining of the contractile

balloon. He found he needed a new substance, and in the discovery

and manufacture of that new substance he had, as he never failed

to impress upon the interviewers, "performed a far more arduous

work than even in the actual achievement of my seemingly greater

discovery."



But it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard

upon Filmer's proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly

five years elapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber

factory--he seems to have been entirely dependent on his small

income from this source--making misdirected attempts to assure

a quite indifferent public that he really HAD invented what he had

invented. He occupied the greater part of his leisure in the

composition of letters to the scientific and daily press, and

so forth, stating precisely the net result of his contrivances,

and demanding financial aid. That alone would have sufficed for

the suppression of his letters. He spent such holidays as he could

arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with the door-keepers of



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