John Hale's Flying Machine by Anna Leach

"Where's my flying car?"

That is the cry of the disappointed futurist who bemoans that our most ambitious dreams have yet to reach fruition... No flying cars, no robot maids, no lunar colonies, alas. We must only make due with high-speed internet, 4K digital displays, personal computer/telecommunication devices kept in our pockets, instantaneous news and messaging, robot vacuums, and other dreary modern conveniences.

In reality, what we need is not always the same as what we want. And more often than not, what we need isn't even apparent to us until someone invents it. And occasionally, those aren't even the things the inventor set out to invent.  

Anna Leach explores this topic in her comic short story John Hale's Flying Machine. Published in the 1894-95 volume of The Argosy magazine, her literary misdirection explores the idea of accidental invention through that classic trope of the Gay Nineties: boys down by the ol' fishin' hole...

Click on each page for a larger version.

The Great Unknown by Clement Melville Keys

There are two great intractable expanses that have always captured the imaginations of writers, being the vast desolations at the Earth's poles. From Arthur Gordon Pym to Captain Hatteras to the Miskatonic University Expedition to the Antarctic to the incessant true-life quests to find the South and North poles, and the Northwest Passage, the endless ice have attracted adventurers and lovers of mystery.

The North-West Passage by John Everett Millais (1874)

The Great Unknown by Clement Melville Keys was originally published in the 41st volume (1902-03) of The Argosy magazine, and reads more like the set-up for a larger story than a story unto itself. Though published as a short story it could easily be a first chapter. It was not to be, at least as I have been able to uncover. Keys is far better remembered for his role as a financier for Curtiss-Wright, China National Aviation Corporation, North American Aviation and TWA. Though born in Canada in 1876, he came to be known as "the father of commercial aviation in America." Literature was apparently more of a recreational sideline.

That leaves the titular Great Mystery up for the reader's imagination to discover... Or to simply savour, respecting that sometimes a perpetual terra incognita can be more enticing than the actual discovery. 

The complete text of The Great Unknown appears below, as published in The Argosy. Click on each page for a larger version.

Those Fatal Filaments by Mabel Ernestine Abbott

Subtitled "A wonderful invention and the story of why it was never perfected", Those Fatal Filaments by Mabel Ernestine Abbott explores one of those turning points in history when the inventor faces down the prospect of great discovery with even greater costs. There are things that Man Was Not Meant to Know, including the thoughts of other men... and especially the thoughts of women. 

The following is the complete text of Those Fatal Filaments as it appeared in volume 41 (1902-03) of The Argosy magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.