Louis Brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration.  He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson.  He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows.  He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice.  There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five.  As a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet.

The technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately.  All his life he has been concerned with machines.  He is the inventor of the Brennan steerable torpedo, whose adoption by the Admiralty made him rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that went to the making of the mono-rail car.  He has a touch of the rich man’s complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humor and his single-hearted pride in his life work.

It is characteristic, I think, of his honesty of purpose and of the genius that is his driving force that hitherto he has concerned himself with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial aspects of his contrivance.  He has had help in money and men from the British Government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his disposal; and the governments of India and—­of all places—­Kashmir have granted him subsidies.  Railroad men from all parts of the world have seen his model; but he has not been ardent in the hunt for customers.  Perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail car should be its own salesman; but, in the meantime, it is not amiss that a great inventor should stand aloof from commerce.

But, for all the cheerful matter-of-factness of the man, he, too, has seen visions.  There are times when he talks of the future as he hopes it will be, as he means it to be, when “transportation is civilization.”  Men are to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents at two hundred miles an hour—­from New York to San Francisco between dawn and dawn.

Travel will no longer be uncomfortable.  These cars, equipped like a hotel, will sweep along with the motion of an ice-yacht.  They will not jolt over uneven places, or strain to mount the track at curves; in each one, the weariless gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium.  Trustful Kashmir will advance from its remoteness to a place accessible from anywhere.  Streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush with