Few people set out to design a flying car and fewer survive the process. Colin Hilton is one of them. Over the course of four years ~ at the cost of one separation, one career and bankruptcy ~ he shows the world it cannot be done. What he salvages is a blueprint for another form of transport altogether: a flat-pack flying machine made of foam. "It will take us" he says, "toward the flying car." Dream on. In a unique 'developer's diary' he describes how you can build a surface-skimmer of your own and look equally foolish.

The first question any inventor has to ask is ‘Why do it at all?’ and pondering the answer had taken me half a lifetime. A measure of angst was understandable in our post-modern world. For the Victorians it was all much simpler and progress was merely an extension of God’s creation, and inventors its instruments. But by the end of the Twentieth century invention had shrunk in terms of scale if not in expectation. Every male English heart at least was still stirred by pictures of Isambard Kingdom Brunel framed by links of chain, and yet contemporary scientific developments had so often been shrunk to the level of the gene, or a sliver of silicon. Furthermore by then it had altered what it actually meant to be human, so that by tinkering with God’s domain in Life’s formative stages, progress either promised to enhance its raw materials or undermine its origins, but rarely seemed neutral. At the same time the general perception was that human abilities were unlimited in this regard, and the consensus was that any technical dream could be fulfilled given sufficient time. It had all been Kennedy’s fault for not reneging ~ as he was supposed to ~ on that most absurd of political promises: a visit to the Moon. Fifty years earlier he would have been impeached or asked to put it on the radio. At the time of writing, for example, prospective passengers are already depositing money with Richard Branson in the firm expectation of flights in space. Meanwhile a perennial favourite among the public remains the flying car, and the confident injunction in my original preface had been ‘Let’s bring it on!’ Nothing proved nearly so simple, and by a process of disappointed expectations and reversals, the model I had once outlined settled in the middle age of its development for the more comfortable life of a flying boat, which was less burdened altogether by expectation. Meanwhile while it changed me as much as I moulded it, I felt compelled to record my efforts on paper, if only to dissuade others from such follies. The founders of the first real coffee bars in the UK had published a book called Anyone Can Do It, and I supposed my own ought to be called Anyone Can Do It… But Who Really Wants To? Few books see the light of day and the same is true of inventions. Although I had produced a stream of inventions on paper at least, eventually there came a form of mid-life crisis when as a way of terminating these fruitless expectations I decided to run with my latest invention to the point of collapse if necessary. And yes, I did collapse. At the beginning at least however it all seemed merely a question of focus, and so I gathered my patent specifications into date order and found to my horror that they spanned twenty years and seventy five separate applications. They had appeared in waves of creativity, one in my twenties and another in my forties. Correlating this with the Seven Ages of Man, this in itself probably as good a representation of ‘vigour’ and ‘desperation’ as any. The second wave urgently needed an artificial breakwater to arrest it, for as Solomon said, people return to folly like a dog returns to vomit. Although I only had a cat I knew where he was coming from.

 

 

 

Flying Foam by Colin Hilton
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