Sometimes there are moments in life when seemingly well-known and even familiar things appear before us in a completely unexpected light. Take, for example, the familiar childhood work of the English writer Jonathan Swift, Travels to Some Remote Countries of the World in Four Parts: The Essay of Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon and then Captain of Several Ships (or Gulliver's Travels).
Gulliver's Mystery
In the third part, Swift describes his hero's journey to the flying island of Laputa. The main attraction of the island is a huge magnet, shaped like a weaving shuttle:
“This magnet is fixed on a very strong diamond axis passing through its middle; he rotates on it and is suspended so precisely that the slightest touch of his hand can turn him. It is enclosed by a hollow diamond cylinder, four feet high, as thick and twelve yards in diameter, and supported horizontally on eight diamond legs, each six yards high. In the middle of the inner surface of the cylinder are two sockets, each twelve inches deep, into which the ends of the axle are inserted and in which, when necessary, it rotates.
No force can move the magnet we have described, because the cylinder, together with the legs, makes one whole with the mass of the diamond that serves as the base of the entire island. With this magnet, the island can rise, fall and move from one place to another. For, in relation to the part of the earth's surface subject to the monarch, the magnet has an attractive force at one end, and repulsive at the other.
When the magnet is placed vertically and its attractive pole is facing the earth, the island drops, but when the repelling pole of the magnet is facing downward, the island rises straight up. When the magnet is in an oblique position, the island also moves in an oblique direction, because the forces of this magnet always act along lines parallel to its direction."
Before us is no less than a description of a magnetic motor made in 1726! How could such an idea have arisen in a time when the very concept of "engine" did not exist, and all transport devices were moved only by muscular force and sails?
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This description does not exhaust all the mysteries of Gulliver's Travels. Here is how Swift talks about one of the discoveries of the "Laputian" astronomers:
“These scientists spend most of their lives observing the movements of celestial bodies with the help of telescopes, which are far superior in quality to ours. And although the largest telescopes there are no longer than three feet, they magnify much more than ours, which are a hundred feet long, and show celestial bodies with greater clarity.
This advantage allowed them to leave far behind our European astronomers in their discoveries. Thus, they compiled a catalog of ten thousand fixed stars, while the most extensive of our catalogs contains no more than one third of this number.
In addition, they discovered two small stars, or satellites, orbiting Mars, of which the closest one to Mars is removed from the center of this planet at a distance equal to three of its diameters, and the farthest is from it at a distance of five of the same diameters.
The first makes its revolution within ten hours, and the second - within twenty one and a half hours, so that the squares of their revolution times are almost proportional to the cubes of their distances from the center of Mars, which fact clearly shows that the aforementioned satellites are governed by the same law of gravity to which other celestial bodies are subject”.
We are talking about the moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos, which were discovered by the American amateur astronomer Asaf Hall in August 1877. The question is, how could Jonathan Swift find out about these satellites a century and a half before their official discovery?
From what mysterious sources did he get this unusual information? Unfortunately, today we are not able to answer these questions. However, all the talk about "miraculous insight" seems extremely unconvincing. Be that as it may, the description of the giant disc-shaped aircraft (Laputa) and the mention of the satellites of Mars provide the key to a completely new reading of this work of Swift.
Friedrich Zander's invention
The idea of using the Earth's magnetic field to move aircraft, outlined in Swift's book, received an unexpected continuation in the works of one of the pioneers of rocketry, the Soviet scientist and inventor Friedrich Arturovich Zander (1887-1933).
The famous writer Alexander Petrovich Kazantsev described this story as follows:
“In 1910, the engineer Zander invented the electrolyte, the principle of which was the interaction of gravity and electric current passed around the apparatus, which may well be disc-shaped, resembling a“flying saucer”. If special magnetic screens are made in certain places, then the Ampere force will act upward and slightly to the side, and the apparatus can fly due to the energy of the Earth's magnetic field.
But aviation took a different path, despite the fact that a year later, in 1911, the phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered, when an electric current can flow without loss in a ring. By the way, experts decided to check whether the flying island of Laputa Swift is actually possible. It was calculated that if a similar Laputyan island was surrounded by a superconductor through which the reflected current flows without loss, then interacting with the earth's magnetism, the island could fly in exactly the same way as described by the writer.
Here is how Andrei Zlobin, an employee of the Central Institute of Aviation Motors, comments on Zander's idea:
- There is nothing contrary to the canons of physics in the possibility of the existence of devices on electromagnetic traction. Improving the idea, Zander wrote in 1930: “… crossing the magnetic flux at a very high speed, it is possible, by passing an electric current through a conductor and closing the current in space outside the ship, to obtain a force acting on the conductor in a certain direction. This can be used to change the path of the ship, to lift from the surface of a minor planet, especially if at low temperatures it is possible to use the superconductivity of metals. The potential capabilities of devices on electromagnetic traction are amazing.
They could jerk to the side abruptly, almost at right angles. Or stop rooted to the spot. Like flying saucers. After all, the control force will act equally and simultaneously on every part of the structure. The reaction is instantaneous.
An electric flight over the Tunguska taiga?
Considering Zander's proposal in the context of the 1908 Tunguska explosion, Zlobin comes to the following conclusion:
- It is interesting that in this state of affairs, the Tunguska phenomenon appears in a somewhat unusual light - as an experimental confirmation of the idea expressed back in the 1930s by F. A. Zander. Those. we are talking about the fact that the "Tunguska body" could be an artificial electromagnetic device!
Zlobin believes that the events of 1908 had a significant impact on Zander's research. It was in 1908 that Zander published his first work on interplanetary travel. It is known that this time was the peak of his research activity as a meteorologist and astronomer. A close acquaintance with Zander's early works leaves an impression of some understatement, if not a secret.
What is the meaning of the enormous work undertaken by Zander as a meteorologist and astronomer? What prompted him to monitor the state of the Earth's magnetic field, observe clouds day, evening and night, photograph them and, finally, develop ways to change the weather through vigorous human intervention? How did observing the starry sky gradually grow into an irresistible urge for space travel?
There is no direct answer to these questions yet. But if we turn to archival materials, then a vague premonition of some kind of riddle develops into confidence - at the beginning of the century, Zander's interest in the sky and weather was not accidental.
Let's open an extremely curious book “Handwritten materials of Friedrich Arturovich Zander in the Archives of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Scientific description "(1980). The dry lines of annotations from archival materials on their own probably would not have attracted much attention. If not for one "but". One gets the impression that the overwhelming majority of Zander's manuscripts were evaluated and annotated only from the point of view of practical usefulness for space rocket technology. Whereas numerous meteorological and astronomical records have remained practically unclaimed by modern researchers.
Zlobin emphasizes that Zander, being a romantic, a dreamer, was at the same time a highly qualified professional practitioner. A significant part of his ideas was reflected not only on paper, but also had a specific technical embodiment.
Unfortunately, the matter of recognizing Zander's manuscripts is complicated by the fact that a significant part of them are encrypted according to a forgotten stenographic system developed by Franz Gabbelsberger in Germany in 1834 and which became widespread in the 19th century in Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Russia. Most likely, Zander got acquainted with this system during his studies at the Royal Higher Technical School in Danzig. Most of the 7000 pages of manuscripts have not yet been deciphered or translated, and some are considered lost.
Alexey KOMOGORTSEV, Interdisciplinary Research Group "Origins of Civilizations"