Welcome back JRT. So glad to know that you are in one pice, if battered and bruised.

As I learn that your typing for a short while will be somewhat limited, I thought a little bit of reading might do you good; in fact, in celebration of your safe return to us, I have felt inspired - other factors have contributed as well - this evening, to put together the facts of some research I have just concluded.

Without further ado, for your reading pleasure, - or not here is:



GREAT DESIGNS

As modern scientists and engineers marvel at the technology of Civilizations lost, like for instance the great Pyramids of Giza, just how did they manage such amazing precision building, and does the placing of the Pyramids really represent the stars of the Sirius constellation, or the treasures of the libraries of Ancient Greece, how much knowledge did they really hold, history much more recent reveals that the works of progressive thinkers are plentiful and often hidden, until someone, quite often by pure chance, stumble upon and unearth designs so bold and daring in their vision that they were completely unrealizable by the means available to mankind at the time these ideas were committed to paper.

Such a visionary design was recently brought to my attention and when I saw that the dates scribbled almost as an afterthought on the papers was 1850, I realized with a shock that the author, one Jacques-Frere Csilly, clearly of French ancestry but Briton by birth and thanks to a long line of ancestry traceable directly back to French Nobility, was not only ahead of his time, he was also ahead of great thinkers and scientists like Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg. He was also quite ahead of the capabilities of our present day modern world as even now, when we are entering the last year of the first decade of the 21st Century, we have no means of realizing his grand schemes.

By a fluke of fate, I myself happen to be of the same ancestry, so the papers I was privileged to see, were from the hand of a great-great-great-grandfather of mine.

Strangely, great-great-great-grandfather is not remembered for his revolutionary papers which have finally been uncovered after years of oblivion but more for his eccentricity.

Despite the French heritage, some would argue because of it, he was known more as the eccentric Earl of Wombatshire where he in later years took to taking invigorating walks in the countryside,…. In the nude.

Not only did Jacques-Frere predate the discovery of the Brown movements, proving that Atoms exist, a feat quite remarkable and which would no doubt have kept poor Boltzmann from hanging himself in a bout of depression years later because he was being ridiculed and ostracized by fellow scientists who did not want to hear another word about his Atoms, J-F also cleverly anticipated the plasma space drives which science-fiction writers used as a convenient way of getting their protagonists from point A in the Galaxy to point B within the space or time allotted to them in a novel or a motion picture. As a by-product, he also accidentally formulated what years later would become known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Great-great-great-grandfather unceremoniously called this, to his mind a necessary but uninteresting calculation on his way to greater things, “The Magic Trick”.

How different would the world not be today, if only J-F Csilly’s papers had not been stowed away by an unknowing clot, who completely failed to realize that these papers would advance our civilization by perhaps as much as several hundred years if they were to be publicized and made known to the world, instead of allowing them to rot in the darkest corner´s of the darkest cellars and attics of the estate when great-great-great-grandfather had his fatal accident.

One day, when on his by now customary nude stroll in the countryside, no doubt pre-occupied with thoughts of his work which kept him busy through all waking hours, he failed to make himself known to the gamekeepers on his estate and was shot dead by one overzealous gamekeeper mistaking him for a poacher. Why a poacher would be naked in the first place while poaching, was a question that no-one afterwards, could ever come up with a satisfactory answer to.

While great-great-great-grandfather devised a scheme to convert the Brown movements in the Atoms to energy, energy that could be harnessed and utilized in rocket ships capable of launching man towards the stars, his great scheme did suffer from one minor flaw.


You see, his rocket ship to the stars was driven by steam.