Esoteric London

Farringdon Road, London, EC1. Photo © Roger Dean 2010

In the Days of Bicycles and Bustles – R D Blumenfeld, 1930:

I had a whole hour with old Sir Hiram Maxim at lunch today at the Café Royal. The old man drank water and ate some sort of  fancy bread that he had in a paper bag. Every now and then he would suck away at a glass contraption which he called his anti-asthma pipe. He said he had spent £17,000 in trying to make a flying machine, but the thing no sooner rose from the ground than it fell down. As for navigable balloons, he agrees with the late Duke of Argyll that man can never overcome the natural laws that condemn all buoyant bodies to an inertia that makes them useless. He does not think Count Zeppelin will have much success with his forthcoming experiments.