Genre:

Reportage, Spoof

Subjects:

Progress, Technology, Aeronautics, Steam-power, Engineering, Instruments, Navigation, Botany, Geology

    Spoof reports are given, dated May 1917, detailing the building of bridges across the River Thames and the English Channel, the explosion of a steam-propelled balloon, the manufacture of a 'pocket-gass-apparatus', the 'discovery of the soap-mine at the Giant's-causeway', the discovery of the longitude by 'Professor Muggins, of the University of Salisbury-plain' (by utilizing the supposed property of the potato 'of increasing in specific gravity in proportion as it is distant from the place of its growth'), and the building of a tunnel under the Alps.