Easy travel to other planets

[ffutures]

Someone recently brought an 1847 pamphlet to my attention:

ORRIN LINDSAY'S

PLAN OF

AERIAL NAVIGATION,

WITH A NARRATIVE OF HIS EXPLORATIONS IN THE

HIGHER REGIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE,

AND HIS WONDERFUL

VOYAGE ROUND THE MOON!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edited by J. L. RIDDELL, M.D.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Which is basically a "serious scientific paper" about experiments with something that sounds one hell of a lot like Cavorite, which pre-dates Wells by 54 years.

So I checked, and the British Library had an old microfilm of its original publication. And I have now typed it in, I think pretty well, except that there's an S in one of the equations that seems to have come out of nowhere, and it will be several weeks before I can get back to the British Library and check where I got things wrong.

One thing - I couldn't work out a good way of coding the HTML for the equations without getting ridiculously complicated, so I drew them instead, and they look a bit naff. Anyone up to converting them to HTML?

I've put it on line here, but won't be linking to it on my sites etc. until I'm a bit happier with it.

http://www.forgottenfutures.co.uk/lindsay/moon.htm

Comments

[dergeis.livejournal.com]

The S didn't come out of nowhere and it is not a mistake, it is just not clearly defined. Riddell describes the formula in the sentence above it:

"The amount of space contributing to the atmosphere of each would then approximate ratio of the cubes of these distances, (x, and c - x); and these cubes, divided by the relative surface of each planet, would also approximate the relative amount or weight of atmosphere, condensed over an equal surface of each."

S represents the "relative surface of each planet"

The copy of the story I have in the July 2009 issue of "Science Fiction Studies" (#108, Vol 36, Part 2) has all the footnotes at the end so that they do not interrupt the narrative of the story.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, that makes sense - just odd he didn't clarify it - I'll add it to the notes at the start.

I saw how SF studies had done it, but I wanted to keep the layout as much like the original as possible.

[uk-sef.livejournal.com]

They would probably look worse converted to HTML - which really isn't designed for mixing different sizes of character on multiple levels to pretty effect. In particular the "radic" (root) character wouldn't join neatly onto any of the horizontal line characters for the extension part and it would take a lot of jiggling to get tall brackets around 2 levels of text with a dividing line. The rest looks relatively easy in comparison.

Most people in science and maths really do draw their equations in - but using LaTeX:
http://www.latex-project.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's where I ran into problems too - it can be done after a fashion using nested tables, different fonts, etc. but it's a total pain to get right. I tried an online LaTex editor but couldn't get it to work properly - I'll give it another try.

[uk-sef.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, the trivial one is indeed trivial (angle brackets and ampersands replaced!):

[TABLE][TR]
[TD][U]m[/U][BR /]x£sup2;[/TD]
[TD]=[/TD]
[TD][U]£nbsp;£nbsp;£nbsp;e£nbsp;£nbsp;£nbsp;[/U][BR /](c-x)£sup2;[/TD]
[/TABLE]

[uk-sef.livejournal.com]

Oops - I accidentally deleted the closing [/TR] tag after the last table cell.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's more or less how I did it the simple one when I tried it - but given the complexity of the big equation I decided to go with image files for all of them. Incidentally, you can simplify it slightly by eliminating the underlining and line breaks by putting an [HR] after the m, saves a few bytes in that cell.

[uk-sef.livejournal.com]

My issue with that is that there's too much space around HR (though not quite as bad as with the headers). Of course you can fix that with style and css stuff, but I prefer to keep my HTML as pure (and old-fashioned!) as possible.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

I've just uploaded a slightly revised version which mentions the S thing and cleans up the graphics for the equations slightly.