Aerial Navigation. The Best Method.

[Privately printed] Toledo, 1895. Octavo publisher's cloth (a bit rubbed and worn at tips); 90pp, frontispiece portrait and seven plates. Caulkin's address stamp on the front endpaper, probably added to all copies. "A concise description of a new air-ship which the author believes will be the finally accepted plan of successful aerial navigation" and a tantalising foretaste of a promised "large atlas, illustrative of all the parts of the flying ship, and kindred subjects" (preface). That's the book I want. This machine was powered by an electro-magnetic motor that Caulkins, a Toledo MD, had invented in 1865 and had waited some thirty years for the world to be ready for the next step. The mid-nineties seemed the right time, airships were in the air, so to speak. Apparently, in 1896 and 1897, there was a rash of airship sightings similar to the flying saucer boom of the fifties. This flying machine was no bit of frippery, it was massive. "The best constructed air-ships will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some of them millions. They will be immense palaces with wings". Close inspection of the perspective view will reveal figures on the upper deck to the right of the flagpole. I must say, whether or not it got off the ground, as a bit of architecture it was a century ahead of its time. Caulkins wanted the US to own the patents but at the end comes a diaphanous threat that he would go to foreign governments. He lived another ten years after this book but further developments either evaporated or, like Keely's flying machine, were sequestered and quashed by the military.…