The sequence which I shall now briefly trace starts in 1917.
This conceptioning development is in turn woven into the warp
of contiguously overlapping conception-to-reality threads which
I have also served throughout a half century. The fabric thus
woven adequately demonstrates my major preoccupations -- and
consequent orientation -- to the important exclusion of, and im-
munization to, secondary value influences of post-maturing life.

During 1917 in exploratory conversations with my command-
ing officer, Commander P.N.L. Bellinger, later a vice-admiral
and one of the Navy's first four aircraft pilots, I started my
theoretical conceptioning and development of a wingless, am-
phibious "jet-stilts" elevatable aircraft which would plummet
aeronautically in tetra-vector guidance. This aircraft would be
powered by twin combination plants, consisting of gas turbines,
jets and rocket assist thrusts, universally hinge-mounted, on both
starboard and port sides, abreast the maximum beam section.
Each thrust would be angularly orientable throughout a spheri-
cal-tetrant sector: vertically, outwardly, forwardly, backwardly,
inwardly, with the geometrical degrees of freedom characterizing
a wild duck's full maneuvring range of wing-thrust angles. The
gas turbines would also be clutchable with breast wheels, or
paddle wheels, for original ground or water taxiing, or for take-
off and alignment skittering.

This slowly gestating jet-stilts flying concept brought me to
a paper and model-making design stage of a conceivably workable
ship in 1927. It was, however, impossible to consider its full-scale
realization in 1927 (even had I the necessary capital or technical
accrediting, which I did not) because of then-prevailing metal-
lurgical heat limits which, however, have since been advanced
to permit practical realization by others of the principles in-
volved, first as jet ships in 1943 and now as vertically orientable
jet ships, 'flying bedsteads,' etc.

I published the concept with a sketch in a two hundred-copy,
privately distributed monograph in 1928, and publicly in Shelter
magazine in November, 1932. In December, 1932, I was invited
to show the models of the jet-stilt "4D transport" in the Grand
Central Building windows of the Engineers' Book Shop in New
York City. In January, 1933, I demonstrated them in a feature

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