How Gordon Died

      Of all late Victorian heroes, probably none has captured the imagination more than General Charles Gordon. It is little wonder: a lone Englishman, hundreds of miles from civilisation, valiantly attempting to hold the line against a horde of barbaric religious fanatics, only to be slain at the fall of Khartoum, just two days before the arrival of the force sent to relieve him. I first heard about him in the 1966 film, Khartoum. Who could forget the climax, where Gordon strode out to confront the dervish army in the governor's palace, only to be killed with a spear? But did it happen that way?

"Seadromes": an Idea Whose Time Never Came

       In 1844 Edgar Allan Poe produced a short story about a balloon crossing the Atlantic in three days. Fast forward a century, and we discover that balloons are out of fashion, but commercial transAtlantic flights by aircraft are still in their infancy. The first such flight, by Lufthansa, took place in 1938, and lasted 25 hours. You can immediately see a problem: compared to today, flights were much slower and, unlike balloons, required copious amounts of fuel. Also, there existed other, longer stretches of ocean. The first commercial transPacific flight may have been in 1935, but it involved a series of island hops. Nevertheless, a solution had been suggested for the problem: just as aerodromes were scattered all over the land, it might be possible to scatter the sea with marine aerodromes, or "seadromes" as they were called. Much later, the concept was used to produce floating oil rigs but, basically, it was an idea whose time never came. For your information, nevertheless, I shall introduce you to this forgotten topic by reprinting an essay from the same 1939 British boys' magazine as in my previous article.