BUILDING CITIES IN THE SKY.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 September 1922, Page 2

BUILDING CITIES IN THE SKY.

HUMANITY TO LIVE IN THE AIR. BORNE UP BY GASES. Having exhausted all the possibilities of existence in the solid ground, man, in the more or less remote future (Captain Lawson, the producer in America of the large air liners that bear his name, puts it at 10,0 ff() years), will probably be living a wonderful ‘sky life” in vast aerial cities raised and held stationary above the earth. Now we are comparatively feeble folk, but the men and women of the future who live the sky life are to be, so it is prophesied, a bigger-chested, quieternerved, far longer-lived race than those who to-day live at the bottom rather than towards the top of the ocean of the air. Tn these aerial cities gases of enormous lifting power unknown to-day are to bear humanity and its habitations upward to any height that may be desired. There they will, float miles perha.ps above the earth’s surface; the inhabitants free, for one thing, from dense air bacteria which, while we are content ’to remain “bottom-of-the-air” creatures produce many diseases. SUNLIGHT CITIES. The great sky cities, as Captain Lawson sees them, will be roofed in with vast, transparent domes of a substance upknown to-day. Jutting up above them will be enormous “collecting towers,” extracting from the upper air solar and electrical energy to be employed as the motive power to drive all the mechanical appliances of the aerial city. ft would be unwise and harmful, of course, to transform man suddenly into a high-altitude animal. But if the change be gradual, the air expert argues it will have an amazingly beneficial influence on the human body. The world, says Captain Lawson, will in these future times see great floating “sunlight cities” —so called 'because, owing to their height above the earth and its mists, clouds and dense atmosphere the health-giving rays of the sun will bathe them continuously. So much for the positive side of Cap,tain Lawson’s theory. The prospect of a whole city full of inhabitants slipping upward into the blue, unannounced, and without the’ most normal introductions, to the man in the moon, is so appalling tha.t it has been entirely left out of consideration. Besides, as sometimes happens, even in the House of Commons, the gas may give out.