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The following is a semi-technical description of the operation of the invisible X-flyers
as compiled by Philip Grant in the year 2021 from official records of the Defense Department
of the United States of North America, and discovered recently by Ray Cummings.
The attainment of mechanical invisibility reached a state of perfection in the year
2000, sufficient to make it practical for many uses. For a century this result had been
sought. It came, about the year 2000, not as a single startling discovery, but as the
culmination of the patient labor of many men during many years. The popular mind has always
considered that science advances by a series of "great scientific discoveries"; "unprecedented";
"revolutionary." That is not so. Each step in the progress of scientific achievement
is built most carefully upon the one beneath it. And generally the "revolutionary, unprecedented
discovery" has very little of itself that is new; rather it is a new combination of
older, perhaps seemingly impractical knowledge. Every scientific theory, every device, is
the offspring from a large and varied family tree of many scientific ancestors, each of
whom in his day was a remarkable personage.
Thus it is, with the principles of mechanical invisibility. I deal here with the famous
X-flyers. The operation of the plane itself is immaterial; its motors; its wing-spread
surfaces; its aerial controls. I am concerned only with the scientific principles underlying
its power of invisibility.
Three scientific factors are involved. First, the process known as de-electroniration; second,
the theories of color absorption; third, the material and inevitable deflection, or bending,
of light rays when passing through a magnetic field.
I take each of the three in order. The forerunners of de-electroniration were the Martel effects,
the experiments of Charles Martel, in Paris, in 1937. A new electric current, of a different
character, now called the oscillating current, as distinct from the alternating and direct,
was developed. Metallic plates were electro-magnetized to produce an enveloping magnetic field of
somewhat a different character from any field formerly known.
Dr. Norton Grenfell followed this in 1946 by using the Martel oscillating current to
obtain a reverse effect. A similar disturbance of electrode balance. But not a surcharge.
An exhaustion. An anti-electrical state, instead of a state of magnetism. A metallic mass so
treated, and with a constant flow of oscillating current holding its subnormal electronic balance,
was then said to be de-electronired.
Scientific discoveries, are largely made by the trial and error system. The scientist
takes what he finds. Generally he does not know at first, what it means. Martell took
his oscillating current and "discovered" the Martel Magnetic Levitation, whereby gravity
was lessened, and then completely nullified. Grenfell, with his de-electroniration, increased
the power of gravity. The two were combined by Grenfell and his associates, and the secret
of interplanetary flight was at hand.
But there was a host of other workers not interested in space flyers; they probed in
other directions. It was found that the subnormal magnetic field surrounding a metallic substance
in a state of de-electroniration had two unusual properties. its color absorption was high;
and it bent light rays from their normal straight path into an abnormally great curve. Yet,
though it absorbed the color of the rays emanating from the de-electronired metal, the metal
itself increasing this result, the magnetic field while bending the rays passing through
it from distant objects behind it, nevertheless left their color and all their inherent properties
unchanged.
The principles of color absorption are these. A pigment, a paint, or a dye if you will,
is "red" because it absorbs from the light rays of the sun all the other colors and leaves
only red to be reflected from it to the eye. Or "violet" because all the rest are absorbed,
and the violet is reflected. Or "black" because all are absorbed; and "white" the reverse,
all blended and reflected. Color is dependent upon vibratory motion. The solar spectrum,
its range of visibility through the primary colors from red to violet, can be likened
to a range of radio wave-lengths; vibration frequencies; and when we eliminate them all
save the "violet", that is what we have left in the radio to hear, in color absorption
to see.
Thus, a de-electronired metal was found to produce black. Not black as habitually we
meet it, a "shiny" black or a "dull" black. But a true black, a real absence of light-ray
reflection, a "nothingness to see"; in effect, an invisibility.
A word of explanation is necessary regarding the other property of the de-electronired
field, the bending of distant light rays into a curve, yet leaving their spectrum unchanged.
It was Albert Einstein who first made the statement, in the years following the turn
of the century at 1900, that it was a normal, natural thing for a ray of light to be slightly
deflected from its straight path when passing through a magnetic field. The claim caused
world-wide interest, for upon its truth or falsity the whole fabric of the Einstein Theory
of Relativity was woven.
An eclipse of the sun in the 1920's established that light is actually bent in the manner
Einstein had calculated. A magnetic field surrounds the sun. In those days they did
not know that it is a field of sub-normal electronic balance, in effect, the result
of de-electroniration. It was found, nevertheless, that stars close to the limb of the sun appeared
not in their true positions, but shifted in just the directions, and with the amount of
shift Einstein predicted. The light rays coming from them to the eye of the observer on Earth
were curved in passing so close to the sun. But the color-bands of their spectrums were
unaltered.
And some of the stars actually were behind the sun, yet because of the curved path of
the light, were visible. I mention this because it is an important aspect of the subject of
mechanical invisibility.
With the foregoing factors, the secret of mechanical invisibility is constructed. Gracely,
an American, following a long series of world-wide experiments, tests of current strength, frequencies
of oscillation, suitable metals, etc., which I cannot detail here, in 1955 was the final
developer of the mechanisms subsequently used in the X-flyers.
Gracely produced what he christened "aluminoid spectrite", a light-weight alloy which, when
carrying an oscillating electronic current of the proper frequency, produced the effects
I have described. It absorbed from the light rays coming from the metal, all the colors
of the solar spectrum, well beyond the range of the human eye at both ends of the scale.
The result was a "visible nothingness."
A moment's thought will make clear that term. A visible nothingness is not invisibility.
The fact that something was there but could not be seen was obvious. A black hat with
a light on it and placed against an average background is almost as easy to see as a white
hat. Gracely's first crude experiments were made with an aluminoid-spectrite cube, a small
brick a foot in each dimension. The cube glowed, turned, dark, then black, then was gone. He
had it resting on a white table, with a white background. And the fact that the cube was
still there, was perfectly obvious. It was as though a hole of nothingness were set against
the white table. It outlined the cube; reconstructed it so that for practical purposes the eye
saw not a white aluminoid brick, but a dead black one.
And this is very much what a man sees when he stares at his black hat on a table. The
hat occults its background, and thus reconstructs itself.
But when Gracely determined the proper vibrations of his oscillating current to coincide with
all the other material factors he was using, the final result was before him,real invisibility.
He used a patterned background, a symmetrically checkered surface, most difficult of all.
The light rays coming from this background passed through the magnetic field surrounding
the invisible colorless cube, and were bent into a curved path. But their own color-spectrum,
in actuality the color, shape, all the visible characteristics of the background, was not
greatly altered. The observer saw what actually was behind the invisible cube. the checkered
background, sometimes slightly distorted, but nevertheless sufficiently clear for its
abnormality to escape notice. Thus the cube's outlines were not reconstructed; and, in effect,
it had vanished.
In practical workings with the X-flyers, no such difficult test as Gracely's cube and
rectangular, symmetrically patterned background is ever met. The varying background behind
a plane, at rest or flying, and particularly at night, demands less perfection of background
than Gracely's laboratory conditions. I am informed that an X-flyer can vaguely be seen,
or rather sensed, from some angles and under certain and unfavorable conditions of light,
and depending on its line of movement relative to the angle of observation, and the type
and color-lighting of its background. But under most conditions it represents a very
nearly perfect mechanical invisibility.
There is one aspect of the subject with which I may close this brief review. I give it without
technical explanation; it seems to me an amusing angle.
The theory of stereoscopics, the vision of the twin lenses of the human eyes, set a distance
apart to give the perception of depth, of the third dimension, is in itself a subject
tremendously interesting, and worthy of anyone's study. I have no space for it here, nor would
it be strictly relevant. I need only state that a two-eyed man sees partially around
an object by virtue of the different angles from which each of his eyes gaze at it, and
thus sees a trifle more of the background than would otherwise be the case. And this,
these two viewpoints blended in his brain, gives him his perception of "depth," of solidity,
the difference between a real scene of three dimensions and a painted scene on a canvas
of two dimensions with only the artist's skill in perspective to simulate the third.
And I cannot refrain from mentioning that in Government tests of the Defense Department
to determine the perfection of the invisibility of the X-flyers, it was a one-eyed man who
proved that they were not always totally invisible!