The children’s science fiction classic, Flight of the Navigator (1986), is memorable for bringing to life the most enviable of toys for its main character: his own personal spaceship, a Trimaxion Drone Ship from the planet Phaelon located 560 light years from Earth.
The mirror-finished, shape-shifting transmedium craft transports twelve-year-old Joey Kramer into orbit at “Mach 10,” stopping exactly at the height of 20 miles, before returning him, equally as quickly (yet harmlessly) to a dead stop, hovering inches from the ground – “a third-class manoeuvre,” Max, its robot pilot, says breezily.
A “first-class” manoeuvre sees the spaceship morph into a sharpened tear drop before instantaneously accelerating to zip effortlessly through the sky, taking Joey from Florida to Tokyo to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in a matter of seconds. The real fun begins when Joey is allowed to pilot the machine by hand, intuitively pumping exotic-looking chrome-finished foot pedals and buttons, and guiding two glowing control pads on articulating arms.
Navigator is a wonderful cinematic adventure. Like Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), it draws inspiration from UFO culture and real sightings. Its script’s author Mark H. Baker apparently received the idea in a dream.
However, in an archive search, I discovered that the Navigator craft bears a striking resemblance to one in a short story printed in 1890. What’s remarkable is that this was well before the post-1947 modern-era of ufology with its “flying saucers,” and even before the “airship wave” of 1896-97, which, in a time before powered flight, saw hundreds of newspaper reports of metallic cigar-shaped craft with powerful searchlights performing impossible manoeuvers in the skies over the countryside and small towns of the United States.
The story, its title inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is titled Around the World in 28 Hours. It features a “combined flying and swimming machine” that performs almost identically with the Trimaxion spacecraft in Navigator.
In the story, Jim Gerar, a travelling salesman (colloquially known as a “Drummer”) is invited to the house of a client named Brunton to inspect some “mechanics.”
In pursuit of a sale, Jim does so and is led to a kind of hanger: “a high structure in the middle of the back yard.” They enter and he sees “an object with the graceful outlines of a pigeon”. Brunton says: “you now see before you the greatest invention of the age,” a machine whose “motive power is electricity”.
Brunton explains that the machine can rise and move through the air “at lightning speed”.
At the touch of a button, the flying machine, 26 ft long, morphs in shape, its “feet” retracting beneath it. The flying machine, like the Navigator craft, changes shape – from a bird shape to that of a fish. Another push of a button sees its fish covering “uncoiled” and it returns the shape of a bird.
Brunton describes having taken night journeys in the craft and crossing lake Michigan (some 118 miles wide) in just two minutes.
When the machine is turned on, there is a blaze of light. Jim enters the craft and hears: “a sound which I could not understand. I could liken it only to the roar of a cyclone.”
Inside the machine he expects to see wooden walls (perhaps fitting with the period). Instead, in an instant, like with the Navigator ship that has a wall-sized navigation screen, Jim is dazzled by a view through the craft to the outside. Unbeknownst to him, he and the craft are already moving. He sees “open sky, and now and then a bank of fog, into which I passed from which I emerged, almost as soon as I had entered it”.
Like Joey in the Navigator craft, Jim is taken on a ride “higher and higher,” but not in a way that resembles balloon or airship travel of the day. He says, “below me was earth, far, far down.”
Worried about his increasing altitude, he turns a button. The machine responds instantly: “the effect was like magic.” He descends to a fixed altitude and accelerates: “faster than a cyclone – faster than anything of which human beings had ever dreamed.” Again, this is thrillingly depicted in several scenes in Navigator.
Bewildered, Jim presses another button and the craft changes shape, descends, and enters the ocean: “Down, like a flash I went, and soon I realized that I was encircled by the waters of the atlantic.” It maintains its trajectory through the water: “Downward, still downward, and I began to fear that I might reach the bottom or be dashed upon a submarine peak.”
In a direct parallel, Joey and his Trimaxion spaceship also descend from the air into the ocean, seamlessly transitioning between mediums.
Again, at the push of a button Jim’s underwater descent is halted. He’s eventually able to bring the craft to the surface, and then up into the air again.
A main plot device in Navigator is that the spacecraft that takes Joey away from earth travels faster than light, causing him to experience a slowing of time. After his abduction, he returns to find the world has moved on by eight years, his parents are greyed by their grief at losing him, and his younger brother is now his elder.
In 28 Hours, Jim also experiences a distortion of time, saying: “my days and nights were only about six hours in length, just a little over.” Like Joey, at the end of his journey he returns to where he started, coming to a sudden stop and a “restful descent” to earth. Also, like Joey, he had been specially chosen to undergo this strange voyage.
The door opens and Jim sees Brunton, who is described as “a very peculiar man” and after the “indescribable exhilaration” of his trip around the world asks: “is this a dream or are you a wizard?”
The story ends with the narrator asking cryptically whether Jim Gerar was “insane” or if his story was “true”, concluding: “The time of the world’s fair will tell”.
In an interesting interweaving of fact and fiction the world’s fair mentioned in the story is the same one, held in Chicago in 1893, at which another pioneer of electrical engineering Nicola Tesla would but demonstrate his “Egg of Columbus”. This was an electrical rotating magnetic field device that, at the push of a button, would cause a metal egg to magically spin and stand on end…
References
Around the World in 28 Hours – is anonymously written and is in the public domain. It can be read in Evening Capital Journal, Salem, OR (1890) at the Library of Congress digital newspaper archive.
4 June, 1890, P. 4, Chapter 1.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99063952/1890-06-04/ed-1/seq-4
5 June, 1890, P. 4, Chapter 2.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99063952/1890-06-05/ed-1/seq-4
Both chapters, and three illustrations, also appeared in The Clarksville Sentinel, 19 June, 1890.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-clarksville-sentinel/151001745
