Strange Things in the Sky Department: Floating Ships, Cities, Airports

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is a  continuation of a  series of posts in the Strange Things in the Sky Department. 

This image of St. Augustine's City of God shows the Primum Mobile holding the walled city (Rome, or Romish) aloft, the artist distinguishing it from the earthly city:

Perspective drawing apparatus, from  John Bates' encyclopedic The Mysteryes of Nature and Art : Conteined in foure severall Tretises, the first of Water Workes, the Second of Fyer Workes, the third of Drawing, Colouring, Painting, and Engraving, The fourth of divers Experiments, as wel serviceable as delightful: partly collected, and partly of the Authors Peculiar Practice, and Invention, printed in London " for Ralph Mab and are to be sold by Iohn Jackson and Francis Church at the Kings armes in Cheapside 1634".   [Source: the fabulous Bibliodyssey blogsite.]   This was a book that Isaac Newton owned and worked from when he was a teenager, using its useful recipes and instructions to build a number of bits, prankish and practical.  (This city isn't actually floating, of course--it just looks that way.)

 

Here's a semi-famous illustration that appeared earlier in this blog--perfect here to offset the older "floating cities".  This one depicts a floating or hovering or anti-gravity-something installation of a future Manhattan, existing peacefully above its former Earth-bound base, now overgrown with nature.  The New Manhattan Air Island is many square miles of buildings, and reminds me of the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

 I just don't know the story behind this image, though perhaps it is...well, I don't know.  There's a whole lot of things that it could be, but then there's the Tall Ships on the top of mountains of ice and the air-breathing skaters in the foreground...I don't know: 

 

[Source: http://pulpcovers.com/tag/sciencewonderstories/]

 And this in a sort-of opposite way to the above, a disembodied sitter in a very articulated space:

 I'm not sure what to make of these buggers, though it is very creepy looking...,perhaps its the bad-blue sky that just sets everything off badly:

This image from yet another ubiquitous Gernsback publication and shows (another!)  floating airpad/port for whatever sort of hovering vehicle that approaches.  Interestingly there are a number of skydivers using unisuitwhich probably seems pretty attractive to skydivers today.  Also the roof decorations are unexpected!

 

 

[Source: http://thatsmyskull.blogspot.com/2007/11/ocean-liners-in-sky.html]