A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Argonauts of the Air’ by H. G. Wells

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Argonauts of the Air’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in Phil May’s Annual in 1895. The story is another of Wells’s prophetic tales, anticipating the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in a heavier-than-air craft eight years later, at Kitty Hawk in 1903.

The plot of ‘The Argonauts of the Air’ concerns a rather frustrated inventor and engineer, Monson, who is trying to build a flying machine. He has an assistant, Woodhouse (probably not the same Woodhouse who is attacked by a giant bat in Borneo in Wells’s story ‘In the Avu Observatory’), and a team of workmen working for him on the project.

There is much press interest in Monson’s attempts to construct this machine, but he has become a figure of fun; he is especially hurt when he overhears a young, pretty woman confiding to someone that his workmen all think he cuts a sad and pathetic figure, with his workroom being nicknamed ‘Monson’s Folly’ as a result. He has spent a great deal of money on the project, but so far has not managed to build a workable flying machine.

Determined to get the invention off the ground (literally), Monson and Woodhouse undertake a trial flight in the machine, as soon as it’s built. They fly over parts of London for a while before crashing. Monson has succeeded and failed at the same time: he has created a machine that flew, but he lost control over it and it crashed, ending work on the project.

‘The Argonauts of the Air’ is part of a series of stories Wells wrote early in his career which concern the building of a machine which can do previously impossible things: in The Time Machine (1895), the Time Traveller invents a machine for travelling into the future, while in The First Men in the Moon (1901), Cavor creates a spaceship that can escape Earth’s gravity and fly to the moon.

‘The Argonauts of the Air’ focuses on flight, too, but anticipates the modern aeroplane rather than spaceships and rockets. The title Wells gave to the story, ‘The Argonauts of the Air’, seems somewhat ironic or tongue-in-cheek (perhaps matching the public attitude towards Monson in the story): the Argonauts were Jason’s intrepid crew of sailors in the ancient Greek myth about the Golden Fleece. Jason and his men sailed in a ship named the Argo, hence ‘Argonauts’.

Although Monson and Woodhouse strictly speaking are ‘argonauts of the air’, in that they ‘sail’ through the air as Jason’s crew had sailed the sea (and here we might compare Wells’s co-opting of the seafaring ‘ironclad’ for his idea of ‘land ironclads’, his anticipation of modern tank warfare), they cut a rather feeble figure when compared with their mythic forerunners:

Though he failed, and failed disastrously, the record of Monson’s work remains a sufficient monument—to guide the next of that band of gallant experimentalists who will sooner or later master this great problem of flying. And between Worcester Park and Malden there still stands that portentous avenue of iron-work, rusting now, and dangerous here and there, to witness to the first desperate struggle for man’s right of way through the air.

The flight which is described in Wells’s story, then, might be regarded as a noble failure, rather than something more heady and optimistic. Progress has been made but the skies have not quite been conquered by man yet.

This is of a piece with the other flights and impossible journeys Wells’s characters make: the Time Traveller’s voyage into the far future only reveals human degeneration and, ultimately, the extinction of the entire species; Cavor and Bedford, in The First Men in the Moon, learn much about the moon when they fly there, but Cavor ends up being taken captive (and remaining their prisoner, indefinitely), while Bedford only narrowly makes it back to Earth.