Robur the Conqueror. Jules Verne

with the blades of a propeller, the same result is achieved.”⁴

      What Robur had just said had been said before him by all the partisans for aviation, whose work must, slowly but surely, lead to the solution of the problem. To Messrs. de Ponton d’Amécourt, de La Landelle, Nadar, de Lucy, de Louvrié, Liais, Béléguic, Moreau, the brothers Richard, Babinet, Jobert, du Temple, Salives, Pénaud, de Villeneuve, Gauchot and Tatin, Michel Loup, Edison, Planavergne, and so many others, is due the honor of spreading these simple ideas! Abandoned and taken up again so many times, they will not fail to triumph some day. To aviation’s enemies, who declare that the bird can only stay in the air because he breathes it in and inflates himself with it, need we wait for their response? Hasn’t it been proven that an eagle weighing five kilograms would have to fill himself with fifty cubic meters of warm air, merely to remain in space?

      That is what Robur demonstrated with undeniable logic, amid commotion rising from every side. And, for his conclusion, here are the sentences he threw in the balloonians’ faces:

      “With your aerostats you can do nothing, reach nothing, dare nothing! The most intrepid of your aeronauts, John Wise, though he had already made an aerial crossing of twelve hundred miles above the American continent, had to give up his project of crossing the Atlantic! And since then, you haven’t moved a step, not one single step, in that path!”

      “Sir,” said the president, forcing himself in vain to keep calm, “you forget what our immortal Franklin said when the first Montgolfier balloon appeared, at the moment when the gas balloon was about to be born: ‘It is only a child, but it shall grow!’⁵ And it has grown—”

      “No, president, no! It has not grown! It has only put on weight—which is not the same thing!”

      This was a direct attack on the projects of the Weldon Institute, which had ordained, supported, subsidized the making of a monster-balloon. And so propositions of the following type, hardly supportive in nature, soon crisscrossed through the hall:

      “Down with the intruder!”

      “Throw him off the platform!”

      “Yes, make him prove he’s heavier than air!”

      And so on.

      But these were only words, not assaults. Robur, impassible, was still able to cry out:

      “Progress is not in aerostats at all, citizen balloonians; it is in flying machines. The bird flies, and it is not in any way a balloon; it is a machine!”

      “Yes, it flies,” shouted the fuming Bat T. Fyn, “but it flies against all the rules of mechanics!”

      “Really?” replied Robur, shrugging his shoulders.

      Then he resumed:

      “Ever since the flight of great and small flyers was first studied, one simple idea has prevailed: that all that has to be done is to imitate nature, for nature is never wrong. Between the albatross, who flaps its wings at most ten times a minute, and the pelican, who does so seventy times—”

      “Seventy-one!” said a jeering voice.

      “And the bee at 192 times a second—”

      “A hundred and ninety-three!” came the mocking cry.

      “And the fly at 330—”

      “Three hundred thirty and a half!”

      “And the mosquito at millions—”

      “No—billions!”

      But Robur, interrupted, did not interrupt his demonstration.

      “Between these various figures—” he resumed.

      “There’s a long way to jump!” returned a voice.

      “—there is the possibility of finding a practical solution. On the day Monsieur de Lucy proved that the stag beetle, that insect weighing only two grams, can lift a burden of four hundred grams, or two hundred times its own weight, the problem of aviation was solved. Furthermore, it was shown that wing surface decreases relative to the augmentation of the dimension and weight of the animal. Since then, people have been able to imagine or construct more than sixty apparatuses …”

      “Which will never be able to fly!” shouted the secretary Phil Evans.

      “Which have flown, or will fly,” replied Robur, not at all disconcerted. “And, whether we call them streophores, helicopters, orthopters, or, in imitation of the French word ‘nef,’ meaning ‘vessel,’ from navis, we employ the word avis and call them ‘efs,’ we arrive at the apparatus whose creation will render man master of space.”

      “Ah! the propeller!” riposted Phil Evans. “But the bird has no propeller … that we know of!”

      “It has,” replied Robur. “As Monsieur Pénaud demonstrated, in reality the bird acts as a propeller, and its flight is helicoidal. Therefore, the motor of the future is the propeller, the helix—”

      “From such an evil spell,

      Saint Helix, preserve us!”

      sang one of the spectators, who, by chance, remembered that tune from Hérold’s Zampa.⁶

      And everyone took up the refrain in chorus, with such intonations as to make the French composer shudder in his grave.

      Then, after the last notes had been drowned in a horrendous uproar, Uncle Prudent, taking advantage of a momentary calm, thought it his duty to say:

      “Citizen stranger, until now we’ve let you speak without interruption …”

      It would appear that, for the president of the Weldon Institute, those retorts, those shouts, those pointless digressions, were not even interruptions, but a mere exchange of arguments.

      “However,” he continued, “I must remind you that the theory of aviation was condemned in advance and rejected by the majority of American and foreign engineers. A system that leaves in its wake the deaths of the Flying Saracen in Constantinople, of the monk Voador in Lisbon, of Letur in 1854, of Groof in 1874, without counting the other victims I’ve forgotten, not to mention the mythological Icarus …”

      “That system,” snapped Robur, “is no more damnable than the one whose martyrs include Pilâtre de Rozier in Calais, Madame Blanchard in Paris, Donaldson and Grimwood wrecked in Lake Michigan, Sivel, Crocè-Spinelli, Eloy, and so many others you take such care to forget!”

      This was a “tac-au-tac” riposte, as they say in fencing.

      “Besides,” went on Robur, “in your balloons, perfected though they may be, you could never achieve a really practical speed. You would take ten years to go around the world—which a flying machine could do in eight days!”

      Fresh shouts of protest and denial, which lasted three long minutes, up to the moment when Phil Evans could take the floor.

      “Mr. Aviator,” he said, “you who taunt us with the glories of aviation, have you ever aviated?”

      “Of course I have!”

      “And made the conquest the air?”

      “Perhaps, sir!”

      “Hurrah for Robur the Conqueror!” shouted an ironic voice.

      “Why, yes! Robur the Conqueror. I accept the name, and I will use it, for I have that right!”

      “We’ll allow ourselves to doubt that!” shouted Jem Cip.

      “Gentlemen,” returned Robur, knitting his brow, “when I come to discuss something seriously, I do not accept denials for replies, and I would be glad to know the name of the person to whom I speak …” “I’m Jem Cip … a vegetarian …”

      “Citizen Jem Cip,” replied Robur, “I’m aware that vegetarians generally have longer intestines than other men—longer