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Show A FLYING MAIL. The late Dr. J. G. Holland, editor of Scribner's Monthly, while a young man teaching school in Vicksbury, Miss, conceived a scheme for the speedy transmission of mails and packages from place to place. Writing to a friend, in 1848, on this scheme, he said. "I am sure that I can send a mail from New York to Boston in one-fourth of the time usually occupied in the passage. I can also send packages weighing one hundred pounds. Provided it would pay, the apparatus could be constructed so as to transmit any required weight. I will give you a rude drawing and then explain the invention-a balanced one-wheeled carriage running upon an inclined wire, at certain points starting a spring, which raises the package carriage to the top of another incline. I am afraid that the preceding very imperfect drawing has puzzled you, but let me explain. The power used mostly a sample gravity. There are some routes where there need not be a "lift" in one hundred miles, going in one direction though more of course, going the other way. You can readily understand how lightning like a one wheeled our with almost no friction would traverse an inclined wire. A car on a wire with the same inclination as the Mississippi River could not stop from Cincinnati may be so arranged as to require winding up only once a week. The cars may be made to follow one another every twenty minutes during the twenty four hours. The thing can be done. The question is will it pay and will it pay me and the man who can help me put it through? You will see that the oar sits astride of the wire and that the wheel keeps its position by the gravity of hanging boxes." This was the scheme, but "Holland's Flying Mail" never became an actual fact.-Industrial News. |