San Antonio light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1911-1993, 1925-11-15

4 Is! 8 ?.
VII ~
mn C--S
fortunate Victim in the Arabian
Prof. lie Troy Let Loose
'boratory a Mysterious Gas of
Such Frightful Deafness that
1t Overcame All His Precau-
tons and He Fell Into It's
Clutches.
There are plenty of individuals who
would be delighted to put an end to the
universe if they only knew how. There
are TellSlOuS StClS WIN bCltNt Nldb bllO
human race is so hopelessly depraved
it ought to die out, fanatical "redS" will
ing to blow themselves up as long as the
hated captalistic system goes up too.
Then there are plain lunatics like Nero,
who wished that the population of Rome
had only one throat that he might cut it.
Today, if Nero were in the place of Mus
solini, he could choke every Roman throat
with gas.
Every other weapon has been its own
defense, from club to gun. With bow
and arrow, you can keep another, similarly
armed, at a respectful distance and mod
ern battleshps are so scared of each
others big guns that they like to fight on
opposite sides of the horizon, so far away
that only the range-finders in the fighting
tops can see the enemy Gas, however is
no defense against gas. There is no way
that city can discharge gas effectively
at the tiny flying speck far up in the sky
that is raining down death upon it. The
waring nations can only retaliate by
wiping out each others centres of popula-
llOn WILL lIt. lint a tllGNhGi-budiN
swept clear of men.
Yellow fever and malaria have been
driven from the Panama Canal and many
other places by destroying the mosquito
that brings the germ to man, and in this
same policy of killing the carrier, appears
to lie the only hope of the cities against
gas destruction-to destroy the carrying
aeroplanes. Unfortunately for any such
"swat the fly" campaign, progress is 60
ing in favor of the aeroplane, not against
it. Anti-aircraft guns have proved them
selves almost useless against high-flying
craft.
Protecting combat planes, if there are
enough of them and they discover the
invaders in time, can shoot down the gas
bearers. But planes fly faster every
year. Today they travel at $50 miles an
hour and nobody knows what next years
speed win be. This ever increasing swift
ness works in favor of the attackers be-
cause the protecting air fleet cannot be
in the air at all times and all places in
sufficient strength to guard all the cities
against these lightning quick thrusts from
the sky.
Just now America with broad ocean
on both sides has a certain protection
which makes 1t not impossible but difficult
and awkward to gas our cities. Planes,
however, can be launched from ships of
course and nobody doubts that soon a non
stop flight from Europe or Asia to our
shores will become an easy matter.
There have been promises of death
ray which can be shot into the sky
paralyzing the engines and blowing up
the gasoline and explosives of any air
craft that may be on the wing. One in
ventor claims to have such ray but has
only made it effective for a few hundred
feet.
A ray that will sweep the heavens may
well be invented some day and if the
flyers do not devise a protection against
it, would perhaps remove the worst OF
the danger. But such a ray is in the
indefinite future while the gas-dropping
aeroplane is right here now, plenty eff
cient to do its work and being improved
every day. The thing it drops on us may
be as tiny as the germ of the plague that
once killed nearly half of England's popu-
lation 1t may be something that cannot
be distinguished and, like radium, never