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Hello and welcome to Brock-Sudeste Aerospace’s Museum of Modern Aviation! My name is Millie, and I’ll be your guide to the history of philosophico-mechanical aviation. With its roots in both the mechanical regulator designed by Mary Grinning Fox in 1873, and the powered aircraft first flown by Wilbur and Orville Wright some thirty years later, modern aviation merges these traditions into something more powerful than these early hoverers and fliers could have imagined. Now, please follow me into the first gallery, and we’ll get started.
As you probably know, Brock-Sudeste was founded by the sister and brother team of Janet and Steven Brock. This first display case on the left holds Janet Brock’s gold medals from sweeping all four General’s Cup events in 1889, in front of three mannequins displaying the progression of the state of the art in personal hovering technology.
Yes, these are her original medals. It’s said that when she donated them to our museum, she said, “Of course you can put them on display—better than keeping them at the bottom of my sock drawer for another fifty years!” But be advised that this case—and this room—are protected with state-of-the-art anti-theft measures, just in case any of you find all that gold a little too shiny to resist.
Back to the case. The mannequin on the left is dressed in a flight suit similar to the one Janet Brock would have worn in 1889, with the waxed-canvas bag and lever regulator that was typical of the era. The second mannequin’s skysuit is a much sleeker smokecarved laminate by Northwest Aero. This ultra-low-drag style was used by the top competitors in flying competitions from 1918 through the late 1920s, as was the Denver Custom Instruments spiral-cut regulator fitted to a Jenckes rubberized cotton bag that you see in his hands.
I did say his hands, yes, and you’ve probably noticed that this central mannequin is taller and broader than the ones to either side. That’s because this flight suit is the very one that Robert Canderelli Weekes wore on his historic flight on the long course in the 1918 General’s Cup. His third-place finish made him the first male flier to medal in any discipline—of course, that bronze medal was revoked for technical reasons, but we still count it as a victory. Mr. Weekes, of course, has had a very long association with both Dr. Brock and with Brock-Sudeste. You can see a list of his record-setting flights on the placard further down the left wall.
The mannequin on the right is exhibiting the very latest technology for the modern empirical philosopher. Her skysuit is a proprietary smokecarved Skylon blend from DuPont, combining advanced technical fabric with advanced philosophical enhancements. The integrated pressurized powder tank fitted with a precision regulator was machined right here at Brock-Sudeste. These innovations, along with the latest refinements to hover glyphs, are what allow competitive fliers to reach airspeeds of nearly eight hundred miles per hour—just above Mach 1, the speed of sound, and far faster than ever dreamed by our forebears.
Of course, there aren’t many hoverers entering aerial competitions these days. In fact, there aren’t many hoverers at all, these days. The wall on the right side of the room displays facsimiles of the text of many of the anti-sigilry laws passed in Congress and state legislatures in the decade after the Treaty of Versailles brought an end to the First World War. Most of these laws were intended to regulate the general practice of empirical philosophy, but as you look them over, you’ll note that the most stringent restrictions are on the use of hovering and transport sigils.
Our universities and colleges were forced to downsize or even eliminate their philosophy departments. Even the premier institutes, such as Radcliffe and the University of Detroit, shut down their general flying instruction programs and only trained women who had some previous experience with hovering—which mostly meant that if your mother wasn’t a flyer, you had no chance at becoming a flyer yourself. While many philosophical specialties can be self-taught, an incorrectly-drawn koru will simply fail to produce plant growth. A faulty hover glyph may result in severe injury, or even death.
For most of the next two decades, mechanical aircraft largely had the sky to themselves. Northwest Aero pivoted from flight harnesses to wing design, and Steven Brock, who had done so much to improve flight dynamics for hoverers, now worked to develop the long, light wings necessary for monoplanes—that is, aircraft with only one wing extending to each side—to become more practical than biplanes.
Meanwhile, Janet Brock continued to coach the Radcliffe fliers. Radcliffe’s K.F. Unger and Jenny Yu refined the hover glyph, leading to ever faster race times. Janet consulted with her brother for her equipment engineering laboratory, leading to many unique innovations for use in the General’s Cup’s endurance challenge, in which fliers compete to travel the farthest distance using a single pound of powder.
Let’s go into the next room, where we have a chronological display of both types of technology from 1919 through 1924. On the left side, you’ll see a number of Steven Brock’s designs for conventional mechanical aircraft wings; on the right are Janet Brock’s devices for improving the efficiency, safety, and speed of competitive philosophical fliers.
Yes, it’s true that the fliers using her inventions in the endurance challenge were each stripped of the gold medals they won, and each of her inventions was subsequently banned from competition. But for Janet, the competitive aspect of this challenge was secondary to the process of improving flight for all philosophers. For example, although the pressurized powder tank which she invented for Robert Weekes’ endurance flight in 1921 was banned from competition the next year, its advantage over the standard gravity-feed bag was immediately obvious. By the late 1920s, a majority of hoverers and transporters had switched to pressurized powder tanks, and in 1932 the General’s Cup bowed to the inevitable.
But let’s go back to 1924. Despite the existing restrictions on sigilry, new laws were proposed, and usually passed, every year. In 1924, the Philosophers’ Registration Act imposed a nationwide licensing requirement for all sigilrists. Up to then, registration had been handled by the states, and most practitioners registered in the states with the lowest requirements and the lowest fees. Now, not only did sigilrists need to renew their registrations yearly—and pay the not-insubstantial licensing fee—but every individual sigil needed to have a specific permit. Combined with the gradual expansion of no-sigil zones and the development of technology and medical techniques that decreased the need for messaging and smokecarving, these changes led many sigilrists to leave the United States for countries where sigilry was not so heavily controlled.
Some sigilrists, including Weekes and his wife Edie Rubinski, had already moved to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Texas. Janet left Radcliffe and settled in this...fledgling community, so to speak. Yes, that was a joke – but only sort of. The community did include practitioners of other disciplines, but most were fliers, whose freedom to practice their sigilry back home had been so severely curtailed.
Steven left Detroit for Matamoros as well, though he had only a low level of philosophical power and small flying ability. By this time he was a highly-respected aeronautical engineer and had several patents for his designs; Northwest Aero was none too happy to see him go. But his joy in making efficient wing designs had been tempered by the knowledge that even the fastest aircraft of the era couldn’t match the airspeed of the typical female hoverer. Yet philosophical fliers were limited by the less-than-aerodynamic profile of the human body. What if he could combine his aerodynamic designs with Janet’s improved sigilry technology?
And that, folks, was the beginning of Brock-Sudeste Aerospace, and the birth of modern philosophico-mechanical aviation. Please follow me into the next room, where you can see prototypes of the 1926 Brock Hovershell, which Aileen Macadoo used to set a speed record for sigil-powered flight, and the 1929 Brock Aeroshell, with which she broke her own record three years later. These aerodynamic metal enclosures protected and streamlined fliers, allowing speeds of more than double that of a skysuit alone.
Here in the center of the room is a scale model of the Brock Astroshell 1. Some of you may know it by the name it was given in the popular press: the “Brocketship”.
We don’t have the actual Brocketship on display here for two reasons. First of all, the craft as flown incorporates boosters which are powered by additional pilots, so the entire assembly would be too large for this room. The second reason is that the Astroshell 1 is on permanent loan to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Does anyone here know why?
That’s right, in 1932 the Brock Astroshell 1 was the craft in which Pilar Desoto became the first person to orbit the earth. Brock-Sudeste Aero is proud to have had a hand in reaching this important milestone for all of humanity. Of course, we only provided the equipment; it wouldn’t have happened without her well-honed flying skills, or the skills of the six other fliers who powered the boosters.
These flights did more than just set records; they proved to the world, and to the sadly backward legislators in Washington, that combining sigilry and aeronautic engineering results in a technology that is faster, safer, and more efficient, than either discipline can produce on its own. During the 1930s, Brock-Sudeste designed, prototyped, and tested hybrid “sigilplanes” optimized for cargo, passengers, and eventually for military use. If you look at the planning sketches, blueprints, and photographs on the walls, you’ll see the wide variety of designs our engineers considered. While many of them never made it to production, the Boeing-Brock S249 and Boeing-Brock S315, introduced in 1934 and 1935 respectively, began a new era of hybrid aviation for cargo and passenger travel. Cutaway models of these early sigilplanes are on the far side of the Brocketship—be sure to look at the cockpit configuration, as due to this era’s stringent regulations on both mechanical aircraft and sigilry, these required four pilot-engineers and four pilot-sigilrists on every commercial flight—a large crew, considering that the S315 only carried 18 passengers. By the way, if any of you flew on a sigilplane to get here, there were at most two pilot-engineers and two pilot-sigilrists in the cockpit, and possibly only one of each—but I can assure you, you were just as safe, or even more so. Especially if you were on a Brock-Sudeste-designed sigilplane!
The requirement for four pilot-sigilrists on every flight also limited the number of sigilplanes that were put into service, since there were very few philosophical fliers left in the United States at this time. This meant that hybrid aviation stalled out, as it were, until the Second World War. Please follow me into the next room, where I’ll show you how Brock-Sudeste’s military sigilplanes played a crucial role in not just ending the war, but in restoring the practice of empirical philosophy to the United States.
Though our own government had slashed the Army Philosophical Service to its bare bones in 1919, not all countries followed suit. Japan and Russia continued to train and enlist sigilwomen in their military. England had somewhat more modest cutbacks than we did here, both in their militaries and in civilian service, but the new German Republic was forced to completely eliminate their Korps des Philosophs as part of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, the same intent focus that had led to their devastatingly effective smokecarving units was turned to aeronautic technology, with a predictable outcome. By the late 1930s, German aeroplanes and aviators were the finest in the world.
And this became a problem. Humiliated by the Berlin Transport and the conditions of the war-ending treaty, the Germans were spoiling for a fight. As the British Royal Air Force became aware of the threat they posed, they looked to their allies. It was General Sarah Stewart of the Army Philosophical Service, a veteran of the First World War who had been one of Janet Brock’s students at Radcliffe, who put them in touch with Brock-Sudeste.
The sigilplane on the left is the 1936 Hawker-Brock Eupheus, a light single-woman fighter aircraft used for reconnaissance and air defense. The curved nose protects the flier and provides a protected space for the hover sigil to be drawn with the nozzle protruding from the integral powder tank, while the wings provide lift and glide, as well as light guns for defense. On the right is a 1939 Vickers-Brock Cadwallader bomber. This heavier sigilcraft is operated by a sigilwoman and a navigator in the cockpit, and a bombardier and gunner in the waist. This was also the first sigilplane designed under the leadership of Steven Brock’s son Michael, who became CEO of Brock-Sudeste in 1938. Both Steven and Janet continued to work in the research division until they passed on; Steven in 1943, and Janet just last year, at the age of 87.
These and other military sigilplanes, designed by Brock-Sudeste and built by British aviation companies, decisively turned the tide in the European theater of war. But as you know, that was not the only conflict.
After protracted American-Japanese negotiations over the future of the Pacific stalled, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. As I mentioned before, Japan had an army corps of sigilwomen; they also had a well-developed aeronautics arm of the Imperial Japanese Navy. However, owing to the more traditional role women played in Japanese society, these were not combined, though they had used British-built aircraft to jump-start their naval air force. But even with conventional mechanical aircraft, this surprise attack devastated the American air and naval assets on Oahu, and brought our formerly-neutral country into the Second World War.
During the first half of 1942, the Japanese racked up one success after another as the Americans raced to rebuild. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Royal Air Force’s sigilcraft were successfully bombing German military targets and protecting coastal shipping. The United States was finally forced to confront the fact that the weapon they had turned their back on after the first war the was the one that could win the second.
Boeing’s military division quickly prepared for production of the Boeing-Brock XC-29, which used much the same design as the Cadwallader, and a larger, heavier bomber called the XR-29, which had a crew of seven, including two sigilwomen, and used both engine-driven propellers and the hover sigil for propulsion. You can see a cutaway model in the center of the room. By the end of 1942, nearly 10,000 combat sigilcraft had been built—of which only 130 were in the skies over the Pacific. The problem, of course, was that between the reduction of the Army Philosophical Service, and the anti-sigilry laws that had decimated our hover-training programs, there were not enough fliers.
But there would be. To his credit, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the problem, and moved quickly to solve it by issuing a series of executive orders which granted wide exceptions to the anti-sigilry laws for military training. Federal funds were allocated to Radcliffe, Detroit, and other colleges around the country to train new fliers for the revitalized Army Philosophical Service, both its traditional Rescue and Evacuation Department and its new Strategic Sigilry Wing.
With the surrender of both Germany and Japan in early 1944 marking the end of the Second World War, President Roosevelt knew that he owed a great debt to the women and men who had stepped up to save a country that had treated them poorly. The Philosophers’ Registration Act was repealed by Congress that spring, and most states quickly rescinded or watered down their laws as well. While many sigilrists opted to remain in Matamoros, where they had built their lives and created a community, in 1946 Brock-Sudeste moved their operations to this new building here in Houston, and since then, we’ve continued to expand and prosper.
So, what’s next for Brock-Sudeste? Let’s head into the last room of our museum, where you’ll see what we’ve been working on, and where our course is set as we head into the future. Afterward, feel free to wander back through the exhibits and look at anything you might have missed. I’ll be here to answer any questions you might have, and don’t forget to stop by our gift shop on the way out.
All right—to the future. With the support, finally, of the United States government, Brock-Sudeste Aerospace was able to return to the skies—and make plans to head for the stars. In the past decades, commercial aviation, like its military counterpart, had largely relied on internal combustion engines. But with the practice of sigilry restored, aircraft companies returned to engine-assisted sigilcraft, as these are considerably less expensive to operate, as well as quieter and more comfortable for passengers.
In this room, you’ll see models and schematic drawings of the passenger aircraft that Brock-Sudeste’s had a hand in developing. Some have been built by Boeing, and others by the Martin Company and Douglas; some are pure sigilcraft, while others are engine-assisted. They are flown by airlines all over the world, but their designs started right here at Brock-Sudeste Aero.
But don’t forget the full name of our company: Brock-Sudeste Aerospace. Ever since Pilar Desoto’s orbital flight, we’ve been itching to get back up to the boundary of our planet—and beyond. Our research division is improving and refining the sigils used for life support and maintenance of an air supply for the next generation of fliers into space—what we call “astronauts”. We’re working with the brand-new National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which has been launching autonomous satellites into space using Brock-Sudeste boosters for a few years now. Soon we hope to send a crew of sigilrists following in these mechanical footsteps.
Will there be a woman on the moon before the end of the decade? We can’t say for sure. But we are confident of one thing: when she gets there, she’ll be flying a Brock-Sudeste space-sigilcraft.