perfidy

I emailed this out to a few people, and was roundly ignored. Perhaps I shouldn't have sent it Friday afternoon at 5:00. In any event, I was thinking some more about this idea in my first eight hour meeting this morning:

Here's a alternate history teaser for you. I was reading a book by James Hogan called Kicking the Sacred Cow, a fascinating look at scientific theories not accepted by the mainstream, yet short (for various reasons) of full-on crackpotism. One of the things he discussed in his book was alternate theories of relativity. Without getting into too great detail, one aspect of this is that some physicists are coming to believe that Einstein's general relativity might have gone too far in trying to explain the speed of light and other conundrums. What they propose is that unlike in Einstein's theory, there is a peferred reference frame, and that that reference frame is determined by the ambient gravitational field. Further, once you accept this, you can derive many physical constants directly from Maxwell's electromagnetic equations that can only be assumed in General Relativity. Even further, it may be that gravity itself is a side effect of electromagnetism. (It may be that that peferred reference frame is in fact equivalent to the idea of the ether, and the reason why the Michaelson Morley experiment failed to detect it was the same for the same reason that it would be difficult to measure the air speed of an airplane from inside the cockpit.)

All very interesting, and worth a read. But what got me is the thought that if this is all true, powerful electromagnetic fields operated in the right way might have an effect on gravity. Which could be really cool for all of us if someone figures it out. And there's that Russian dude who claimed that he could do it himself. But what if someone like Michael Faraday - widely considered the most brilliant experimental scientist of his or any day, and inventor of the dynamo (on which all subsequent electrical technology is based) had a brainwave and built himself a giant electromagnet and figured out how to cancel out the effects of gravity back in 1825?

Suppose he spent the next ten years getting all the kinks worked out. And at the end of the day, he had a funky device that you could mount in a ship, and it would make that ship fly. By 1840 or so, people are building flying ships. Let's assume that ships can be made more or less arbitrarily heavy, thanks to the antigravity. Either another version of the device, or even something as prosaic as propellers, would push these literal airships through the atmosphere. Speeds would therefore be limited to something on the order of the steamships of the day - but they could go up thousands of feet in the air, and cruise for long distances. Essentially, the new aerial ships would have the same range, speed and carrying capacity as the wetter sort of steamships, but able to fly at altitudes of up to several thousand feet.

Further assume that the production of the device is difficult, but within the capabilities of any moderately industrialized nation of the time, limited perhaps by the need for some rare and expensive element. There might be some variation in the ability of different nations or companies or inventors to produce faster or bigger ships, but all will be more or less in the same ballpark, performance-wise.

What would be the effect of this technology on the wars and politics of the last half of the nineteenth century? These new airships would, unlike modern aircraft, have all the advantages of water-bound ships - range, cargo capacity, armaments and armor, etc., but able to travel at will over the whole globe.

Among the big shows scheduled for the 1860s include the American Civil War and the Austro-Prussian War. 1871 would see the Franco-Prussian War and German unification. The 1880s saw the great powers occupied in an undignified scramble for brown people's land. And all that would lead up to the really, really big show of WWI.

Some thoughts: the South would be unable to produce many of these ships, but it would certainly have some. Gen. Stonewall Jackson leading an airborne division? The German Reichsluftmarine wouldn't be as hemmed in by British control of the passages out of the North Sea. Tsarist Russia would no longer be hampered by lack of warm water ports. Switzerland would no longer be landlocked. Railroads would no longer be the only way to marshal troops quickly and transport them to the front. This last is important, given that the greatest effort and thought was put into plans for marshalling troops and equipment for transportation by rail. Much of the diplomatic screwups that led to the First World War were dictated by mobilization and rail schedules.

Air battleships would not be fragile structures of aluminum, easily blown to bits by AA guns. These battleships would in be in essence, real battleships like the HMS Dreadnaught or the USS Iowa given the ability to fly. Of course, in the time of the Civil War, it would be flying CSS Virginia and USS Monitor. But that's the nature of the beast. Naval air ships would carry the largest cannon available, and be capable of intense bombardment of targets on the ground. Cargo ships could hold hundreds of men and their equipment and travel hundreds or even thousands of miles at 20-30mph.

In short, the advantages of naval conflict - mobility, firepower and carrying capacity - would be carried over to land warfare, long limited by the speed of march and the carrying capacity of the individual infantryman.

What do you think might happen?