ers, "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 leading London papers--he was singularly not adapted for
inspiring hall-porters with confidence--and he positively attempted
to induce the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a
confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs.
"The man's a crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General in
his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open for the Japanese
to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side of
warfare--a priority they still to our great discomfort retain.

And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his
contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves of a new
oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial model of his
invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment, desisted from all
further writing, and, with a certain secrecy that seems to have been an
inseparable characteristic of all his proceedings, set to work upon
the apparatus. He seems to have directed the making of its parts and
collected most of it in a room in Shoreditch, but its final putting
together was done at Dymchurch, in Kent. He did not make the affair
large enough to carry a man, but he made an extremely ingenious use of
what were then called the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first
flight of this first practicable flying machine took place over some
fields near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed and
controlled its flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.

The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success.