Daedalus

The most amazing newspictures of the decade appeared last week in the U. S. Press. Obtained in Germany by Hearst's International News Photos, they showed what had never been seen before, or even heard of: a man flying through the air by his own power!

Captions explained the pictures. The man was a Pilot Erich Kocher. He flew by lung-power, utilizing the rotor principle. Strapped to his chest was an assembly of two horizontal rotors. He had skiis on his feet for landing gear, and a finlike tail attached to his stern. By blowing into a box on his chest, Pilot Kocher made the rotors revolve. The turning rotors created a suction ahead, into which Pilot Kocher & apparatus sailed gaily, while his excited friends trotted after him. The august New York Times, proud of its minute coverage of aviation, printed the picture in its rotogravure section under the momentous caption: A MAN FLIES ON HIS OWN POWER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY. The tabloid New York Daily News, biggest circulation in the U. S., did likewise. So did Hearst's New York American and tabloid Daily Mirror and his Chicago Herald & Examiner.

Surely Pilot Kocher's exploit was major news, yet not one word of it had appeared in print in the U. S. until the pictures arrived. There was good reason why. Pilot Kocher had flown only in the fertile imaginations of the editors of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, who had cooked up the pictures for their magazine's famed annual April Fool edition. Hearst's International News had been gloriously hoaxed, and the U. S. Press with it. But in borrowing the Illustrirte Zeitung's feature, the International News editors missed two ingenious points: 1) The pilot did not simply blow the rotors around by sheer lung-power. He breathed normally into the box, in which a marvelous chemical contrivance converted the carbon dioxide of his breath into fuel to run a small motor which turned the rotors! (As everyone should know, carbon dioxide is anything but combustible.) 2) The pilot's name, Koycher (not Kocher), was a freak spelling of Kencher which means "puffer" or "hot air merchant."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.