Part 1

PEGASUS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

_For a full list of this Series see the end of this Book_

[Illustration:

GUY ONE-TON LORRY

Hauling a full load up a one-in-two gradient (notice the vertical stick hanging from string from lamp bracket)

[_Frontispiece_ ]

PEGASUS PROBLEMS OF TRANSPORTATION

BY

COLONEL J. F. C. FULLER

WITH 8 PLATES

LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

_Printed in Great Britain by_ MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM

PREFACE

The first part of this little book, namely “The Battle of the Iron Horse,” appeared, very much as it stands, in the September number of _The National Review_, 1925, and I have to thank the editor, Mr. Leo Maxse, for his kindness in allowing me to republish it.

The second part is based partially on personal experience and reflection, and partially on the lectures and papers of others. In the war, the tank brought me to realize the enormous possibilities of cross-country movement, and, in 1921, I set down my ideas as regards its commercial future in a pamphlet entitled _Economic Movement_, which was published in 1922.

Of the works of others, I have borrowed ideas from the following:—

“Improvements in the Efficiency of Roadless Vehicles.” A paper read before the members of The Institution of Automobile Engineers, by Colonel P. H. Johnson, C.B.E., D.S.O., December, 1921.

“Multi-Wheel and Track Motor.” A paper read before the members of the above Institution by Major T. G. Tulloch, March, 1923.

“The Progress of Mechanical Engineering in the Military Service.” A lecture delivered before the members of The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, by Major G. le Q. Martel, D.S.O., M.C., January, 1924.

“Transport in Tropical Africa.” A paper read before the members of The Royal Society of Arts, by Mr. R. H. Brackenbury, February, 1925.

“The Roadless Transport Problem.” A paper read before the members of The British Association, by Colonel P. H. Johnson, C.B.E., D.S.O., August, 1925.

J.F.C.F.

_Staff College, Camberley. November, 1925._

CONTENTS

PAGE INTRODUCTION 9

THE BATTLE OF THE IRON HORSE The Railway Centenary 13 The Protean Problem 17 The X-Ray Transporter 20 Erichthonius, Wheelwright 25 The Philosopher’s Steam 29 George Stephenson, Engine-wright 32 The Nature of the Beast 40 Protean Ignorance 44

THE CONQUEST OF THE ELYSIAN FIELDS The Equation of Power and Movement 48 The Riddle of the Gordian Knot 52 The Problem of Unemployment 59 The Problem of Power 66 Problems of Movement 69 Two-Dimensional Movement 77 The Elysian Fields 87 The Wings of Pegasus 91

PEGASUS

PROBLEMS OF TRANSPORTATION

INTRODUCTION

Whatever man does entails movement, mental or bodily. Movement is, in fact, the mainspring of his evolution and of the civilization which this evolution engenders; consequently, in the economic growth of movement must be sought the direction of all progress, both physical and psychological. As the mind of man moves, so does the world, in which this mind works, move round him, delivering up to his imagination and his hands the mysteries it so sedulously hides. For it is through the conquest of mysteries that man, the mystery of mysteries, strides out of a dark and unknown past towards some unknown future.

It would be both logical and easy, I think, to start with the soles of man’s feet and to work upwards to his brain. To show how, from simple walking, man’s natural means of progression, he took to riding, and then thought of the oar, the wheel and the sail, until to-day he rushes over the surface of the earth, surges through the waves and roars through the air, excelling the horse, the fish and the bird. But in so small a book as this it is not my intention to write a history of transportation. In place, I intend to consider two things: first, the reaction against novelty of movement, and secondly, the possibilities of what to-day is still a novel form of movement, namely, the movement of roadless vehicles, that is of vehicles which do not require roads for their locomotion. Also, I intend to show how these vehicles may help us solve several of our most pressing problems, and above all that of over-population at home and under-population in our Dominions and Colonies.

If I can do this with any semblance of success, it may perhaps excuse the restrictions I am placing on this subject, for I fully realize the immense future possibilities of other means of movement. The railway has not come to the end of its evolution, far from it to any reader of Mr. Horniman’s book, “How to Make the Railways Pay for the War,” in which Mr. Gattie’s “third-dimensional” railway system is described, a system which bids fair, were it introduced, to prove as revolutionary as George Stephenson’s locomotive itself. Nor has the steamship, except perhaps in size, reached its utmost development, for every day heralds a further improvement, and, as for aircraft, they are scarcely out of the nursery; yet I am of opinion that, until a radical change in their engines is introduced, and this change may demand a new motive force, their utility in peace will be severely restricted, and, if restricted in peace, in numbers they are not likely to be so numerous in war as some people imagine. I mention these things here because of the limit I have placed on the items I intend to examine when compared to the subject of economic movement as a whole.

I have called this little book Pegasus, not only because this famous steed had wings, which to me are the wings of imagination, but because he was born near the sources of the ocean and sprang from the blood of Medusa. To me, the sources of the ocean are symbolic of these little islands of ours, which produced not only the first practical steam engine and the first locomotive, but also the footed wheel which developed into the caterpillar track. Further, Medusa, that monster who turned all who gazed on her to stone, is surely the incarnation of that obstructive ignorance which, by impeding originality of idea and novelty of action, compels thought and things to grow, and through struggle with her to prove their utility and worth.

THE BATTLE OF THE IRON HORSE

THE RAILWAY CENTENARY

I must begin somewhere, and since I refuse to begin at the soles of men’s feet, which are the beginning of his anatomy, the earth is our natural datum point, I will begin just a hundred years ago, when the world we know to-day was as remote from the world as it was then, as the world I hope to point the way to will, in many ways, be as remote from the world as it is now.

On the 27th of September, of this very year in which I write, took place the centenary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railway, and though it was not the first line to be constructed in England (for the Killingworth railway was built in 1814, and again this was not the first upon which locomotives ran), its claim to priority is nevertheless well founded, for it was the first railway the public noticed, and, in democratic countries, the birth of anything original must date from the moment the most ignorant in the land realize its existence. It flatters ignorance to be always first—such is democratic pride.

The 27th of September, 1825, was a very remarkable day in the world’s history, one of those birthdays which have no predictable date, but which depend on the outburst of genius of some great man. The great man was a humble and self-taught engine-wright from Killingworth, one George Stephenson, albeit an honest and persevering man, a worker, a thinker and a dreamer; one of those human thunder clouds which, from time to time, beat up against the conventional currents of thought, and out of which flash the lightnings of unsuspected things—a very remarkable and creative man.

On the 27th of September, a hundred years ago, a great concourse of people assembled at Brusselton Incline, some nine miles from Darlington. There, the travelling engine, as it was called, driven by George Stephenson, the greatest genius of his age, moved forward amidst shrill blasts of its whistle, “with its immense train of carriages,” thirty-eight in number; “and such was its velocity,” writes an eye-witness, “that in some parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour!” It took sixty-five minutes to cover the nine miles to Darlington, and the multitude stood aghast!

But the other day, I travelled in the “Detroiter” from New York to near by the front door of Mr. Henry Ford—another remarkable and self-taught revolutionary—the distance, if I remember rightly, some seven hundred and fifty miles, and the time taken was fourteen hours. From Brusselton Incline the iron horse hauled away, amidst wild excitement, the stupendous load of ninety tons. At Pittsburg, I have seen locomotives hauling six and seven thousand tons of coal, puffing by all unobserved. Surely Einstein is right, the relative is only true, and ninety tons in 1825 was almost as unbelievable as to-day would be a centaur galloping between the taxis of Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue.

All this must have been remembered during the centenary celebrations this year, and broadcast from meeting room, assembly hall and dinner table, for centenaries lose their interest without much feeding. There, little men in tail coats, morning jackets and lounge suits, some with trousers creased and others somewhat baggy at the knee, according to the political creed of the wearer, in port and beer, and, in America, I know not what, toasted the memory of the great man. Pæans and praise gushed from their arid heads like the water from the rock smitten by Moses. These little men, sitting for a bare few minutes on the chariot wheel of genius, did say, “What a dust do we raise!” And in our morning papers we read of all this blather and pomposity, and overlooked an eternal truth. For we got into our railway carriages next day and complained of their unfitness for human habitation, even of the most temporary nature, and condemned the line we were travelling on as impossible, because the train was five minutes late. Outwardly a very ordinary picture, all this—the drinking, speechmaking and travelling troubles of little men, some strap-hangers to genius, but most quite normal nonentities; yet behind it all lurks a somewhat interesting problem—the protean psychology of the very ordinary man.

THE PROTEAN PROBLEM

Since that famous Brusselton gathering, the noise of which has long deafened the world to the wonder of its sound, what changes do we see! A whole earth rejuvenated, as humanity, like a shuttle, works the woof of a new civilization through the warp of an old. Civilization is built on movement, and the picture of life to-day is as different from that of 1825, in rough proportion, as a cinema show differs from a neolithic rock painting. In this short hundred years, the life span of a very old man, such a revolution has been brought about by the locomotive that the world has been reborn. And, to our limited intelligence, always that of a child, we have forgotten the events of this first birthday; and the changes, which it conjured out of the depths of ignorance, are to-day accepted by us all as the essentials of our surroundings and as necessitous to our lives.

If some magician could appear to-day, and, by a wave of his wand, banish all railroads to limbo, a calamity would fall upon this world to which no parallel could be found since Noah entered the Ark. The greatest plagues, famines and wars would vanish like wisps of smoke into the night, when compared to its all-consuming horror. It would be like dragging out of the human body the arterial and venous systems, and yet leaving the man alive, an aching mass of bones and fiery nerves. The picture is indescribable, it is beyond the grasp of intelligence to grip it, and yet, in 1825, the ancestors, the grandfathers, and great grandfathers, and great grandmothers, too, of all the little men who in 1925 were dressed in dinner jackets (or tuxedo, as they call it over the Atlantic) morning coats and lounge suits, made to measure and “off the peg,” were shouting down George Stephenson, even more boisterously than their grandsons and great grandsons this year shouted him up. This, then is the protean problem, that eternal truth overlooked as we read in our newspapers that a workman has been killed in Walworth or a girl has deposited a baby outside an A.B.C. in the Strand, and so on, _ad infinitum_, the long categories of the normalities of life. This is the inner problem George Stephenson has to teach us, and let us consider it, for it is a live and moving problem, and one which will not be masticated by very ordinary men, as they gulp down their beer, their port or iced water. It is the problem of “‘Hail, king of the Jews,’ one day and ‘Crucify Him’ the next.” It is, as I say, the veritable protean problem of humanity, and nine hundred and ninety-nine human beings out of every thousand are very, very, ordinary men.

THE X-RAY TRANSPORTER

Let us picture to ourselves another magician descending on this earth of ours, a man of magic with the prosaic name of John Smith, yet none the less a man of genius, for all such are magicians in very fact. He is a very modern genius, and, I will suppose that he has discovered how to transform any and all physical things into ether waves moving at 186,000 miles a second, and that he can precipitate in its original form any article or being sent to any given spot; all this arrived at by tapping a key or pressing a button.

What a traffic problem is here opened to this world; so immense that it puts to blush the power of that horrid wizard who would remove our railways. Its conception is no more impossible than that of broadcasting. Even in so remote a village as Camberley (thirty miles distant from London, and there I write), where electrical genius is conspicuously absent, I can switch on to Paris and listen to Galli Curci or any other human bird. And what appears to me far more marvellous, simultaneously a fisherman in Trondhjem can do likewise. An immense audience in fact this Galli Curci can command, and totally unknown to her, totally unseen and out of contact even with itself, a dust of individuals, each speck of which can travel on or off her song by mere pressure of the hand, each speck of which can travel by ear at infinite speed and to any civilized point on the globe. If this is not magic, what is?

If song can be etherealized, why not then the singer? How much more remarkable would it not be, in place of scanning bold headlines of dead workmen and deposited babies, to read that Melba will sing in New York, at a quarter past three next Saturday afternoon, and at the Opera House in Paris, that very same day, and but twenty minutes later.

If we can transmit one thing, surely the day must soon come when we shall be able to transmit all things, and my genius John Smith is the man of that day. What could he not do? He could solve the traffic problem in Regent Street or Broadway, for all, astonished reader, you would have to do would be to sit on a transmitter, press a button, and in the minutest fraction of a second, you would find yourself in Peter Robinson’s, or Mr. Morgan’s office, or wherever you wanted to go, all for a penny or a couple of cents! He could banish the Communists to the moon, where there are no capitalists and where there is plenty of ice to keep their heads cool. He could replace the League of Nations by a row of chairs. The Grenadier Guards would fall in to the stentorian yells of their Sergeant-Major to be seated. The button would be pressed by the Army Council and, in less than a twinkle of an eye, they would be doing their famous goose-step down the Sieges Alle, to the utter consternation of the terrible Teuton.

Dear and crawling reader, what could he not do, and what could not you do? Half-a-crown, or half-a-dollar, would take you round the world—bag, baggage and all. And if you do not forget your purse, you can breakfast in New York at a cafeteria, lunch with Ongo-Pongo on the shores of Lake Chad, have tea in Yoshiwara, at the “Nectarine” for choice, and sup with Doris in the Bois de Boulogne at 8.30—this, indeed, is to live.

But what would you do—you beefsteak-eating bull of a Briton, yes, what would you do? You would don your lounge suit or your morning coat, or your tuxedo, as your great grandfathers did right back in 1825. You would become thoroughly traditional and would say: “Why, this man is mad—a raving lunatic! Send me to Lake Chad?... Good God, man, what is he thinking about ... Lock him up!”

Then the storm would burst. The leading engineers, “eminent” as they are called by every newspaper, would say it was contrary to etheric law; Harley Street would be thoroughly up in arms, for all their old lady friends might suddenly betake themselves in a second to Madeira and get cured of their ailments; the physicians would say the human frame cannot stand this rush; the bath-chairmen would say that their occupation was gone; the lawyers would say it was illegal and that it would lead to the Cocos Islands becoming a refuge for criminals; the soldiers would say, how could they be expected to protect this dash dashed land, why, it did not fit their strategy, therefore it _must_ be wrong. And what would the clergy say? Heaven alone knows, for whilst antiquity and things antiquated separate the Churches, any novelty of a progressive nature is apt to bring them together with amazing unanimity.

The reader may be beginning to think that I, the writer, am off my head, but I am not. So far, all I have done is to reveal protean possibilities, now I will turn to actualities of the same psychological order. I will imagine that this genius Mr. Smith has, in disgust, removed himself to Aldebaran, and that we are about to get back to the Brusselton Incline.

ERICHTHONIUS, WHEELWRIGHT

I must have missed the Incline in my haste to get back to Brusselton, for I find myself in Athens in the Minoan age, or thereabouts, for the year is 1486 B.C. Everyone seems very excited; porters have thrown down their baskets and are yelling unintelligible words, yet of a pronounced and universal meaning; shoemakers are beating at a house door with their lasts. Whatever is up? A dainty little creature, some now far away Doris, approaches me and says: “Do you know what that old blighter (my Attic is weak) has done? Why, he has invented a thing called a chariot, and all these poor people have lost their jobs.”

Of course, Erichthonius never invented the chariot; the idea of a pure inventor is but a piece of proletarian imagery, a morsel of that ignorance which is the soul of the crowd. This old man, even if he ever lived, which seems doubtful, did no more than Savery did, or Newcomen, or Watt, or Stephenson, or Marconi did; that is, he was a link in that great chain we call progress, each link being the great thought of a great man. Tutenkhamon had his chariot as we well know, and many another before him, and we read in the Acts of the Apostles of a eunuch of great authority, a kind of Maître d’Hôtel of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, journeying to Jerusalem sitting in his chariot reading Esaias, the prophet, which is no mean compliment to the Roman road-makers in Palestine.

I must, however, hasten back to Brusselton, for there lies my goal; but stop, what is this? “A whirlicote,” a “Noah’s Ark,” or, in common language, an Elizabethan coach; for sure—a direct descendent of the handicraft of Erichthonius. The Earl of Rutland, it is said, first built whirlicotes in this country, in 1565, and, in spite of the villainous condition of the roads, my lords and ladies soon took to them. This, apparently, was a sure proof, in its day, that the country was going to the dogs; for, early in the seventeenth century, a bill was brought into Parliament “to prevent the effeminacy of men riding in coaches.” Hitherto Englishmen had ridden or walked, why should they not continue to do so, why not, indeed?

In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the number of coaches in London was reckoned at six thousand and odd, and in a curious old book, published in 1636, and recently reprinted, called “Coach and Sedan,” of these six thousand and odd whirlicotes we read:—

“I easilie (quoth I) beleeve it, when in certaine places of the Citie, as I have often observed, I have never come but I have there, the way barricado’d up with a _Coach_, two, or three, that what hast, or businesse soever a man hath; hee must waite my Ladie (I know not whose) leasure (who is in the next shop, buying pendants for her eares; or a collar for her dogge) ere hee can find any passage.”

It is Regent Street or Fifth Avenue over again, for, according to this author, when there is a new Masque at Whitehall, the coaches stand together “like mutton-pies in a cooke’s oven,” and then he adds: and “hardly you can thrust a pole between them!”

In its turn, the stage coach was opposed tooth and nail, because it was something new. In 1671, Sir Henry Herbert, M.P., stated that: “If a man were to propose to convey us regularly to Edinburgh in seven days, and bring us back in seven more, should we not vote him to Bedlam?” Sir Henry Herbert is what I call a psychological Proteus, a kind of intellectual amoeba which propagates itself by simple division, the parts of which are always with us and alike—they never die.

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STEAM

The Brusselton Incline is now in sight, so I will pause and look back whilst I regain breath. The horse of Troy was a very wonderful beast, and many strange things came out of it, for it was the strangest thing man had seen since the Ark. But years after Troy was burnt, a stranger thing was seen in Alexandria. It was called an aeolipile, a kind of rudimentary steam engine, which was invented by one, Hero, in 130 B.C. He used it to open and close the doors of a temple, yet it was eventually destined to open the portal of a new world, a glimpse of which would have sent Hero or Columbus completely out of their minds. Yet these greater doors remained closed for seventeen hundred years, when another, this time Battista della Porta, in the year 1601, re-discovered the power of steam.

In 1641, Marion de Lorme, accompanied by the Marquis of Worcester, visited the madhouse of the Bicêtre in Paris, and this is what he writes:—

“We were crossing the court, and I, more dead than alive with fright, kept close to my companion’s side, when a frightful face appeared behind some immense bars, and a hoarse voice exclaimed, ‘I am not mad! I am not mad! I have made a discovery that would enrich the country that adopted it.’ ‘What has he discovered?’ asked our guide. ‘Oh!’ answered the keeper, shrugging his shoulders, ‘Something trifling enough; you would never guess it; it is the use of the steam of boiling water.’”