Edisons Conquest of Mars | Page 3

of the Martians had been. Wonderful stories
quickly found their way into the newspapers concerning what Mr. Edison had already
accomplished with the aid of his model electrical balloon. His laboratory was carefully

guarded against the invasion of the curious, because he rightly felt that a premature
announcement, which should promise more than could be actually fulfilled, would, at this
critical juncture, plunge mankind back again into the gulf of despair, out of which it had
just begun to emerge.
Nevertheless, inklings of the truth leaked out. The flying machine had been seen by many
persons hovering by night high above the Orange hills and disappearing in the faint
starlight as if it had gone away into the depths of space, out of which it would re-emerge
before the morning light had streaked the east, and be seen settling down again within the
walls that surrounded the laboratory of the great inventor. At length the rumor, gradually
deepening into a conviction, spread that Edison himself, accompanied by a few scientific
friends, had made an experimental trip to the moon. At a time when the spirit of mankind
was less profoundly stirred, such a story would have been received with complete
incredulity, but now, rising on the wings of the new hope that was buoying up the earth,
this extraordinary rumor became a day star of truth to the nations.
A Trip to the Moon.
And it was true. I had myself been one of the occupants of the car of the flying Ship of
Space on that night when it silently left the earth, and rising out of the great shadow of
the globe, sped on to the moon. We had landed upon the scarred and desolate face of the
earth's satellite, and but that there are greater and more interesting events, the telling of
which must not be delayed, I should undertake to describe the particulars of this first visit
of men to another world.
But, as I have already intimated, this was only an experimental trip. By visiting this little
nearby island in the ocean of space, Mr. Edison simply wished to demonstrate the
practicability of his invention, and to convince, first of all, himself and his scientific
friends that it was possible for men--mortal men--to quit and to revisit the earth at their
will. That aim this experimental trip triumphantly attained.
It would carry me into technical details that would hardly interest the reader to describe
the mechanism of Mr. Edison's flying machine. Let it suffice to say that it depended upon
the principal of electrical attraction and repulsion. By means of a most ingenious and
complicated construction he had mastered the problem of how to produce, in a limited
space, electricity of any desired potential and of any polarity, and that without danger to
the experimenter or to the material experimented upon. It is gravitation, as everybody
knows, that makes man a prisoner on the earth. If he could overcome, or neutralize,
gravitation he could float away a free creature of interstellar space. Mr. Edison in his
invention had pitted electricity against gravitation. Nature, in fact, had done the same
thing long before. Every astronomer knew it, but none had been able to imitate or to
reproduce this miracle of nature. When a comet approaches the sun, the orbit in which it
travels indicates that it is moving under the impulse of the sun's gravitation. It is in reality
falling in a great parabolic or elliptical curve through space. But, while a comet
approaches the sun it begins to display--stretching out for millions, and sometimes
hundreds of millions of miles on the side away from the sun--an immense luminous train
called its tail. This train extends back into that part of space from which the comet is

moving. Thus the sun at one and the same time is drawing the comet toward itself and
driving off from the comet in an opposite direction minute particles or atoms which,
instead of obeying the gravitational force, are plainly compelled to disobey it. That this
energy, which the sun exercises against its own gravitation, is electrical in its nature,
hardly anybody will doubt. The head of the comet being comparatively heavy and
massive, falls on toward the sun, despite the electrical repulsion. But the atoms which
form the tail, being almost without weight, yield to the electrical rather than to the
gravitational influence, and so fly away from the sun.
Gravity Overcome.
Now, what Mr. Edison had done was, in effect, to create an electrified particle which
might be compared to one of the atoms composing the tail of a comet, although in reality
it was a kind of car, of metal, weighing some hundreds of pounds and capable of bearing
some thousands of pounds with it in its flight. By