nd more interesting events, the telling
of which must not be delayed, I should undertake to describe the
particulars of this first visit of men to another world.

[Illustration: _I had myself been one of the occupants of the car
of the flying Ship of Space on that night, when it silently left the
earth, and, rising out of the great shadow of the globe, sped on to the
moon._]

But, as I have already intimated, this was only an experimental trip. By
visiting this little nearby island in the ocean of space, Mr. Edison
simply wished to demonstrate the practicability of his invention, and to
convince, first of all, himself and his scientific friends that it was
possible for men--mortal men--to quit and to revisit the earth at their
will. That aim this experimental trip triumphantly attained.

It would carry me into technical details that would hardly interest the
reader to describe the mechanism of Mr. Edison's flying machine. Let it
suffice to say that it depended upon the principal of electrical
attraction and repulsion. By means of a most ingenious and complicated
construction he had mastered the problem of how to produce, in a limited
space, electricity of any desired potential and of any polarity, and
that without danger to the experimenter or to the material experimented
upon. It is gravitation, as everybody knows, that makes man a prisoner
on the earth. If he could overcome, or neutralize, gravitation he could
float away, a free creature of interstellar space. Mr. Edison in his
invention had pitted electricity against gravitation. Nature, in fact,
had done the same thing long before. Every astronomer knew it, but none
had been able to imitate or to reproduce this miracle of nature. When a
comet approaches the sun, the orbit in which it travels indicates that
it is moving under the impulse of the sun's gravitation. It is in
reality falling in a great parabolic or elliptical curve through space.
But, while a comet approaches the sun it begins to display--stretching
out for millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions of miles on the
side away from the sun--an immense luminous train called its tail. This
train extends back into that part of space from which the comet is
moving. Thus the sun at one and the same time is drawing the comet
toward itself and driving off from the comet in an opposite direction
minute particles or atoms which, instead of obeying the gravitational
force, are plainly compelled to disobey it. Th