Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine by E.J. Rath

Pity the frustrated inventor, who has a remarkable idea that must be shaped to sheer dumb fact. Such is Mr. Penney, latest in the line of Darius Green and other hayseed inventors. Formerly of the city, forced to the countryside for his health, Mr. Penney cannot acclimatize to the condition of being a farmer. His workshop lures him ever onward to misadventure, undaunted by his numerous setbacks.

Written by E.J. Rath, pseudonym of Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd, Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine appears here as it originally did in the August 1908 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Brainerd was a well-established author, many of whose stories had been adapted to film. Tragically, she died at the age of 37 when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington D.C. collapsed under heavy snow on January 27, 1922. The incident also claimed the life her husband Chauncey and 200 others. Illustrations for Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine are by Horace Taylor. Click on each image for a larger version. 

The Tricycle of the Future by Frank R. Stockton

Though little discussed today, save perhaps for one of his most famous fairy tales, Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902) was often compared to his contemporary Mark Twain as a humourist and writer of children's fiction. That most famous work is the ambiguous fairy tale The Lady, or the Tiger? published in The Century Magazine in 1882. In it, the lover of a princess is sentenced by the king to choose between two doors. Behind one is a tiger that will rip him asunder, behind the other is one of the princess' handmaidens whom he would marry. The princess furtively directs him to one of the doors... but the story ends before revealing which one. 

Prior to The Lady, or the Tiger?, Stockton served as assistant editor on St. Nicholas Magazine, one of the higher caliber magazines for children available in the later half of the 19th century. There he sharpened his wit in writing not only fairy tales, but also Scientific Romances. He would go on to write for St. Nicholas' parent-magazine The Century and Harper's, eventually producing full novels. Most notable of these is The Great War Syndicate (1889) about a future war between the United States and Great Britain. 

The Tricycle of the Future is a delightful short story that exemplifies one of the great joys of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances: how writers of the 19th century arrived at modern technologies through the most abstract, complicated, and absurd ways. In this case, Stockton's boy inventor comes up with the idea for what is essentially an automobile with a six-horsepower engine using six actual horses. But as typical for boy inventors from Darius Green on down, it doesn't quite work out as anticipated.

The following is the complete Tricycle of the Future as it appeared in the May 1885 volume of St. Nicholas Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.   

Edward S. Ellis' The Steam Man of the Prairies

The 1860's were a crucial period in American history. Perhaps the most crucial, in fact.

The American Civil War began in 1861, lasting to 1865. Over two million troops from the North and up to one million troops from the South clashed over very different interpretations of individual liberty and the meaning of a "United States." The catalyst for the American Civil War was the question of slavery, and the means to fight it was mass industrialized slaughter. In its terrible wake, 365,000 soldiers of the Union and 290,000 soldiers of the Confederacy lay dead, leaving behind a specter that still haunts the United States to this day. It also left Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, with the dubious distinction of being the first US President to be assassinated. Nevertheless the United States emerged from the violence wounded but whole. The question of slavery was emphatically answered with freedom's ring and the terrible machinery of warfare could be now turned to America's economic ascendancy on the world stage.

The Homestead Act of 1862 and completion of the Transcontinental Railway in 1869 brought a massive influx of newcomers to the prairies. The number of people living on farms doubled from 10 million to 22 million between 1860 and 1880, rising to 31 million by 1905. The rising number of settlers, mountain men, industrial magnates, and tourists also created a crisis on the frontier. In 1864, Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, a piece of federal legislation designating the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia as a California state park. This is turn laid the groundwork for the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the first national park in the United States and the world. Yellowstone was itself only half-believed rumours through the 1860's, and it was in 1869 that Major John Wesley Powell conducted his unbelievable expedition into the Grand Canyon. These ventures only nominally protected these irreplaceable parcels of  land from exploitation. 1862 also saw a gold rush in Montana... Not as iconic as the California Gold Rush of 1849 or Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, it was still this gold rush that, in part, inspired one of the first true American science fiction novels: The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis.