I roamed about over the great artificial island, looking over the wonderful oscillators, condensers, transformers, and so on. I knew their office but vaguely, knowing only that they transmitted the power to operate the gravity deflector. Their number and size were bewildering surrounded as they were by divers other machinery whose nature I could not guess.

('Islands in the Air' by Lowell Howard Morrow)

At each corner and in its center the island rested on a solid copper pier ten feet in height and about a foot in diameter, and at the points of contact on the island itself were magnet-like apparatus. On the ground near each pier was a dynamo whose current was supplied by a central power-house. There were also many amplifiers and projectors of peculiar construction. The whole fabric beneath my feet with its network of wires and steel and machinery was so heavy that the idea of projecting it into the sky and holding it there suspended like a great captive balloon without the aid of gas or lifting wings appalled me. Only my faith in the Professor’s uncanny power made me hope it might succeed.

Then he put a whistle to his lips and blew shrilly. For the fraction of a second nothing happened, then the fabric beneath us trembled. There was a hiss, a sputter, an upward flash of fire, a shower of sparks through the frame-work, a drone of the dynamos, like the hum of a million bees, and we began to move. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then we shot upward with sickening suddenness. Up, up we went on a level keel. I felt but a slight tremor and only the rush of air proclaimed that we were rushing heavenward with terrible speed.