A trip in 1970
A trip by Hans Dominik in 1970 is a technical and scientific future story. It appeared anonymously in 1909 in the annual book series " Das Neue Universum " (Volume 30) and in the 1980 Heyne Verlag paperback no. 3754 collection of utopian short stories from the new universe "When the world ran out of coal and iron".
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To celebrate his centenary in 1970, a German engineer leaves his country house on Kilimanjaro in his private airship to visit the home of his youth in Germany. On this trip, he and with it the reader learns how traffic conditions in Europe have changed. The traffic from Paris to China is conveyed by a zeppelin of a thousand meters in length and there is a tunnel between Europe and America through which trains travel at the speed of sound, an idea that Bernhard Kellermann describes in detail four years later in his novel The Tunnel . The Cape-Cairo Railway in Africa has also been completed and electrified and trains run at 300 km / h.
To the short story
This short story gives an overview of how the future was envisioned in 1909. Shortly before that, the first reasonably usable zeppelin was built, the LZ 4 , and the speed tests with electric railcars and a locomotive on the Marienfelde-Zossen route with the world record speed of 210 km / h in 1903 were not long ago.
In this story, the traffic in the air is conveyed by huge zeppelins, which, however, do not travel faster than 150 km / h - a correct assessment of the possibilities of the airships by Hans Dominik. He writes: "The motor balloon has become as common as the automobile sixty years ago". Airplanes, called motor kite fliers, are only used by the military and the police. In the same volume of the "New Universe" Hugo Eckener goes into detail in his article "Die Eroberung der Lüfte" on airships, but can only report the first small flight attempts with the aircraft.
On the ground, the railway mediates traffic with trains traveling at three hundred and more kilometers an hour: "The entire German rail network is electrified and is powered by the coal-mining areas of Silesia, the Saar and Ruhr areas and the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen It also explains to me why I didn't see the Rhine Falls at all. It has completely disappeared from the scene. "
In Berlin the streets have for the most part become five-story: "The top floor is the air in which balloons of all kinds float. Then there is the actual street level. It's relatively peaceful here. You see pedestrians, prams, wheelchairs, but The driveway is one floor below this street area. It contains two central embankments for high-speed vehicles and two side embankments on which the company cars run, which bring all kinds of goods into the houses. The next lower floor contains the tunnels for local traffic, which roughly correspond to the trams of my youth, but have become considerably faster and more comfortable than these. The very bottom floor finally contains the tunnels for the high-speed traffic, which radiates from Berlin in all directions. " There are only five horses left in the zoological garden.
The catchment area of Berlin has grown considerably due to the faster railways. The latest achievement in this area is an electric high-speed train from the Baltic Sea coast to Berlin: "It covers two hundred kilometers in just under half an hour and allows half a million better-off Berliners to live on the Baltic Sea coast all summer and in comfort in the morning to be in their Berlin offices. " Even if Hans Dominik complains about the excessively high power consumption of this train, the cause of which is the huge air resistance, he did not consider that the transport of half a million people would require several hundred trains and that this idea is therefore unrealistic.