Inflation Hits Coll

It will doubtless come as something of a surprise to many to learn that the old school building formerly occupied by Hebridean Herbals has now been acquired by the London Rubber Company. This is apparently part of their continuing programme of diversification in that they will shortly be launching an entirely original and, it has to be said, highly speculative product at the coming Paris Motor Show. As a spokesman for the company is reported as saying. ‘What we've been developing represents an extraordinary innovation in cartography which can either prove to be of lasting benefit or may possibly be dismissed as an absurd gimmick. We simply can't tell at this stage but the Company has the unique technology to support it and we're prepared to back it for an initial period at least.'

The product in question bears the acronym 'F.I.R.M.’, standing for the Fully Inflatable Route Map, and looks much like an ordincry Ordnance Survey map but with a number of fine tubes feeding into one edge, and a hand-held control console with digital display. To 'operate' the map, the area of interest is entered on the handset - by the use of simplified grid references - a magtification factor is also selected and the PROCEED button is pressed. This activates one or more micro-compressors serving to inflate the fine membrane of the map in the chosen area to the pre-set magnification. In this way, the basic' 1" to the mile' layout can be enhanced to, say, 4 or 6” to the mile.

It sounds very strange but the product has to be seen for the beauty of it to be fully appreciated. Not only is the original map so highly detailed that expansion really does reveal an increasingly faithful representation of the terrain but it is additionally three dimensional, so that hills and valleys appear before the user's eyes as inflation proceeds.

The early prototypes used a maximum magnification factor of 12X - surely more than adequate for most users – but, the raw material used for the membranes has proved to be of such high quality that an unbelievable scale of 1 : 1 is theoretically achievable and has actually been reached in the Company's research laboratories on at least two occasions. The result is the same sort of 'Virtual Reality' phenomenon that is currently available as a complex computor/video product. Apparently, the latest maps inflated to give life-sized environments offer surprisingly convincing simulations of reality except of course for the absence of other living things and that buildings of any sort cannot be entered. Indeed. the Company have even made the light-hearted claim that, in principle, it could even simulate a lifesized version of the whole planet but that, even with their largest compressors, it would take about six days to inflate. The inevitable dark response from one reporter for the Sunday Observer was that he believed this to already have happened and that the Big Bang theory of creation wasn't far wrong after all!

Anyway, it will be interesting to have this sort of technology on Coll perhaps one of the Company's scientists can explain a local farmer's report of a low hissing sound that came from the ground when he was lifting his potatoes earlier in the year. A methane pocket perhaps?