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these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that
of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata
engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles,
and added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage
it drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time
ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For
many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been
clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem
a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's
roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters
that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful
decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways
thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.
At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively
enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible
to add Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the
aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves
possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or
descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air.
The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the time
phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic
aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to
possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and
danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand
of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared
humming softly into the sky.

And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the
delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked
upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due
to inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary
cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire
reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.
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