was laid and he took his place at it. Within reach of his hand was placed a series of taps and before him was the curved surface of a phonotelephote, on which appeared the dining room of his home in Paris. Mr and Mrs Bennett had arranged to have lunch at the same time – nothing could be more pleasant than to be face to face in spite of the distance, to see one another and talk by means of the phonotelephotic apparatus. Like everybody else in easy circumstances nowadays, Francis Bennett, having abandoned domestic cooking, is one of the subscribers to the Society for Supplying Food to the Home, which distributes dishes of a thousand types through a network of pneumatic tubes.
This system is expensive, no doubt, but the cooking is better. So, not without some regret, Francis Bennett was lunching in solitude. He was finishing his coffee when Mrs Bennett, having got back home, appeared in the telephote screen. 10th - - When he had finished his lunch, he went across to the window, where his aero-car was waiting.
‘Where are we going, Sir?’ asked the aero-coachman. ‘Let’s see. I’ve got time…’ Francis Bennett replied. ‘Take me to my accumulator works at Niagara.’ The aero-car shot across space at a speed of about four hundred miles an hour.
Below him were spread out the towns with their moving pavements which carry the wayfarers along the streets, and the countryside, covered, as though by an immense spider’s web, by the network of electric wires. Within half an hour, Francis Bennett had reached his works at Niagara, where, after using the force of the cataracts to produce energy, he sold or hired it out to the consumers. Then he returned, by way of Philadelphia, Boston and New York, to Centropolis , where his aero-car put him down about five o’clock. The waiting-room of the Earth Herald was crowded.
A careful lookout was being kept for Francis Bennett to return for the daily audience he gave to his petitioners. Among their different proposals he had to make