Romantic Rumpler

There was comment on "the previousness of Herr Rumpler"--Herr Manager Rumpler of the famed Rumpler Airplane Works, Germany--when he addressed the Society for the Scientific Study of Aircraft Development at Dusseldorf last week. But knowing Herr Rumpler's proven abilities, and chary of trusting even their doubts, people listened respectfully to the marvel he related.

The time had come, Herr Rumpler said, to build an enormous airplane that he had designed, a plane with ten 28-cylinder motors capable of 10,000 total horsepower; with wings each spanning 400 feet, in which there would be cabins for the 130 passengers whom the air leviathan could whisk across the Atlantic in 36 hours. There would be six huge pontoons for landing, if necessary, on the sea, and in these a crew of 25 mechanics would be berthed. Tons of trunks and fuel for 16 hours of top-speed flying were provided with stowage and lifting power. From control cabins in the wing tips the pilots would set their course from Europe first to the Azores, thence to the U. S.

No one could remember Romancers Jules Verne or H. G. Wells having compassed a greater imaginative flight than Herr Rumpler. Yet many a newspaper reader with an open mind about the future filed away the despatch from Dusseldorf for their grandchildren to muse over some day.