Reflect for a moment on the horrible possibilities of the airship carrying a light machine gun with a good supply of ammunition, or carrying 1,000 or 1,500 pounds of dynamite aloft over an army, a city, or a fleet. The airship, though still very new, is already sufficiently developed to make it practicable to work wholesale ruin in this way. In March, 1909, Count Zeppelin’s dirigible airship, 445 feet long, 50 feet in diameter, carrying three motors, a searchlight, and twenty-five people, fifteen of them soldiers, made a hundred-and-fifty-mile trip at the rate of almost forty miles an hour. Hudson Maxim, the inventor and expert in high explosives, torpedo boat-destroyers, noiseless gun attachments, and the like, speaks thus of the airship as a fighting machine:[90] “The great field for operations with high explosives carried in airships will be the raiders’ outfit. Aerial raiders would be able to do wide destruction on unprotected inland cities and towns, destroying railroads, blowing up bridges, arsenals, public stores, powder magazines and powder mills, and in levying ransom on moneyed institutions.... In future wars, the fronts of battle will be skyline and opposing skyline, and over the stupendous arena missiles of death will shriek and roar, while sharp-shooters with silent rifles will make ambush in copse and every hedge and highway.” Now let us look for a moment at the greater cannon. “A day will come,” said Victor Hugo,[91] “when a cannon will be exhibited in the public museums, just as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be astonished how such thing could have been.” The new 14–inch gun fires a 1,600–pound projectile. Used at its maximum capacity it puts itself out of commission in six and one-half hours because of the frightful wear of the gun’s heavy charges upon itself.[92] The 16–inch seacoast gun exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1904 is officially described as having a “muzzle energy of projectile ... 76,904 foot tons.” “The Masonic Temple in Chicago, until recently the largest office building in the world, weighs 30,000 tons. In firing a 14–inch gun, sufficient energy is developed to lift the Masonic Temple two feet in one second. The force behind a single eight-gun broadside from 14–inch guns would raise that building sixteen feet in a single second.”[93] The United States Government has a 16–inch cannon; it can throw a shot weighing 2,000 pounds to an extreme range of twenty-one miles, and has an effective range of twelve miles. It has been fired four times.