An e-Book Transcriber's Afterword

The story behind this story is almost as interesting as the story itself.

Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith had actually written the book in 1917, but had had no luck in finding a publisher. The start of Amazing Stories in 1926 finally offered a venue for this story. The magazine was immediate success even though the stories were mostly reprints by H.G.Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe & lesser authors. Stories which cost the publisher very little. Eventually Smith, Philip F. Nowlan and later Edgar Rice Burroughs would publish orginal material in it's pages, often with little or no guarantee of eventual payment. So Hugo Gernsback "bought" the story from Smith and agreed to publish it.

When the August '28 issue of Amazing Stories hit the newsstands, the cover pictured Dick Seaton testing his flying apparatus at the Crane estate. The contents page had this to say;

Our Cover this month depicts a scene from the first installment in this issue of the story entitled THE SKYLARK OF SPACE by Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby, in which the scientist, who has discovered a chemical substance for the liberation of intra-atomic energy, is making his initial tests, preparatory to his interplanetary flight by means of this liberated energy, which makes possible his interstellar space-flyer.

The cover art was drawn by Frank Rudolph Paul and attracted the attention of John Flint Dille, head of features for the National Newspaper Syndicate, who was looking for an idea for a  syndicated comic strip. He flipped through the magazine and mistaking the story "Armageddon — 2419 A.D." by Philip Francis Nowlan as the cover story (as both stories were internally illustrated by Frank R. Paul), he contacted Nowlan for the rights to publish a comic strip featuring his hero, Anthony Rogers. Dille then had artist, Richard Calkins draw the strip and thus history was made.

If not for a case of mistaken identity, the name Dick Seaton might have become as famous as the renamed, "Buck" Rogers.

— BookWurm