Today the Court welcomed Baron Munchausen (above), brought in to advise both about fighting the Turk in the recent campaigns, and about Aero-Nautics, of which he has written much.
The Montgolfier boys, those two young French tearaways that came over with Commander Villaineuse and are currently working with the Navy on Aero-Nautical Scouting against pirates, were fairly rude about the Baron's thinking.
"Flight will be done by kite like arrangments or be like birds, as the great da Vinci has written. These ideas of lighter-than-air gases should be taken with a degree of levity."
One of these days I'll be relating the inventiveness of the Montcroquet brothers, and their discovery of the practical uses of phlogiston for air travel...
ReplyDeleteYet lighter-than-air gases benefit from a venerable authority: Francesco de Lama, a 17th C. jesuit ('battlefield' illustration).
ReplyDeleteThe Montglofiers believed in a force from hot air called "levity" that would caise things to rise - they were of course mistaken, it was phlogiston :-)
ReplyDeleteDe Lama's work is a soure of inspiration to his Excellency and a source of continual frustration to the Chief Engineer.
The thing with Imagi-Nations, is that you can imagine a world - a universe - with phlogiston, and other things... I think I might have an Age of Unreason strip in mind concerning this kind of thing. I like the battlefield illustration. There is a HoTT Army in Christchurch that seems also to have been inspired by the old "Space 1889" game system...
ReplyDeleteHeck, I have an 40K Imperial Guard army inpired by the Space 1889 Thing :-)
ReplyDeleteI have a lot of sympathy for the notion of 'Levity'. Notice that the Cosmological Constant has been assigned the letter 'lambda'? Dead giveaway, isn't it? Methinks the scientific community were reluctant to speak of 'levity' as such, fearing that they would not be taken seriously, or that such an appellation of this strange force lacked ... erm ... 'gravitas'...
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