Genre:

Introduction; Reportage, Spoof

Subjects:

Military Technology, War, Futurism

    Reflecting on William G Armstrong's long-range gun, and a 'Mr. Somebody's' invention of a machine for 'suffocating one's enemies with a black sulphurous smoke', imagines a report in The Times of an Anglo-French battle in 1959 which includes such British inventions as a 'pocket' Armstrong gun capable of firing shot to 'two hundred and four miles, seventeen hundred times in one minute', 'seven-and-twenty double Leviathans, built for the transport of troops [...] armed with the patent self-acting, self-loading, self-aiming, and self cleaning-gun', and a 'noxious smoke producing machine'.