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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: a necessary condition if aerial navigation was to have any practical
value. It is Filmer's particular merit that he perceived the way
in which the contrasted and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon
and heavy flying machine might be combined in one apparatus,
which should be at choice either heavier or lighter than air.
He took hints from the contractile bladders of fish and the pneumatic
cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement of contractile
and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded could lift
the actual flying apparatus with ease, and when retracted by the
complicated "musculature" he wove about them, were withdrawn
almost completely into the frame; and he built the large framework
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