“To-morrow? To-morrow, my dear Claude! Why, there may not be a to-morrow for you—or for me, when it comes to that—eh?” “Yes. You’re quite right, old son,” was my cheerful reply. “I’m quite aware that these experiments are confoundedly dangerous—and, besides, there are nasty wind-pockets about just now. I got into a deadly one yesterday afternoon, just across the line at Mill Hill.” “I saw you,” replied my friend Teddy Ashton, a fellow-aviator and chum at Hendon. “It gave me a nasty moment. You had engine-trouble at the same time.” “Yes,” I replied. “I was up over eight thousand feet when, without a second’s warning, I found myself in a pocket spinning over. Phew! If ever I nearly came to grief, it was at that moment!” “I was on the lawn, having tea with Betty, and we were watching you. I quite expected to see you come plumb down,” Teddy said. “You righted your old bus splendidly.” “She’ll have to have a new dope, I think,” was my reply, endeavouring to turn the conversation into another channel, for I did not care to discuss my narrow escape from death over the mishap which was certainly my own fault. I was standing with Teddy in one of the long work-sheds of the Barwick Aeroplane Factory at Hendon on that bright morning early in October, 1915. The wind was light, the barometer high, and both of us had been up, as we had been testing our monoplanes. As he stood leaning against a half-finished machine idly smoking a “gasper”—a cigarette in the airman jargon—he presented a fine picture of the clean-limbed young Englishman in his wind-proof aviation suit, with leather cap and ear-pieces, while his goggles had been pushed upon his brow. Both of us, “as quirks,” had learned to fly at the same school at Brooklands before the outbreak of war, and both of us were enthusiastic airmen. In introducing myself to the reader of this chronicle of fact I suppose I ought—at the risk of using the first person singular a little too much—to explain that I, Claude Munro, aged twenty-five, am son of Sir Reginald Munro, a man well-known as a physician, a prominent prescriber of pills and powders in Wimpole Street. On coming down from Cambridge I had read for the bar a short time, but finding that my inclination was more in the direction of electricity and mechanics, my indulgent father allowed me to take a course of study at a Wireless School, where I was not long in learning most of the recent discoveries in the field of radio-telegraphy.

The Zeppelin Destroyer: Being Some Chapters of Secret History is an adventure tale about aviators Teddy, Claude, and Roseye as they attempt to battle the Germans during the bombing raids on Southern England. Excerpt:"Tomorrow? Tomorrow, my dear Claude! Why, there may not be a tomorrow for you—or for me when it comes to that—eh?"

Death rays! Absurd idea peddled by con artists and amateurs and promoted by a sensationalist press? Not quite. Government and military leaders and mainstream scientists endorsed the possibility of such a fantastic weapon in the years before World War II. A concept born out of research with electricity and other energy sources, the death ray or "directed energy weapon" was widely reported for nearly five decades. Claims for its invention appeared as early as 1876, and increased thereafter, until the "death-ray craze" of the 1920s and 1930s. The idea influenced fiction, making its way from newspapers and magazines into novels, short stories, films, theatrical productions and other media. This book takes a first-ever look at the historical death ray and its impact on fiction and popular culture.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.