Fishtail Drive PROPELS BOATS and MODEL PLANES
FOR ten years, Arthur D. Hill, Jr., a California commercial fisherman, has been observing and studying how the vibrating tails of fish enable them to dart through the water at great speeds. He also noted that birds, with their flapping wings, were still more efficient in flight than the most modern of airplanes with fixed wings. Puzzling out the principles involved, Hill determined to combine the methods of bird and fish, and he has finally developed an odd fishtail drive for Propelling model airplanes, and boats ranging from toy craft up to vessels thirty-five feet in length.
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Electricity May Supplant Nets in Taking Fish
Catching fish by shocking them with electricity is an experiment being tried by the Australian State Fishery Station, at Sydney Bay. A fishing boat has been fitted with charged electrical grids or electrodes of copper that are submerged in the water. Powerful electric generators force a current through the water between the electrodes, shocking all near-by fish, which then float to the surface and are picked up alive in large nets.
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Novel Rowing Car Provides Good Sport
What this country needs is an exercising’ machine that will provide good sport as well as build up muscles and tear down excess avoirdupois. At least that is the belief of the New York manufacturer of the novel whirligig car shown above.
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U.S. Navy Inventions Build Great Industries
by John Edwin Hogg, Lieut., U.S.N.R.
An amazing scientific workshop afloat —that is the peace-time function of Uncle Sam’s Navy. The discoveries made by navy engineers and scientists have been responsible for the creation of vast new industries, from which you benefit in many ways, as told here.
TO THE average person, perhaps, the American navy is a tremendous engine of destruction draining the Federal treasury of approximately $350,000,000 every year, and serving no useful purpose to the nation except in time of ‘war.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The American navy in times of peace is a great progressive institution that extends its ramifications into many fields—scientific, mechanical, social, and diplomatic.
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Denmark’s Amazing Submarine Plane
The Danish Navy recently secretly tested a successful plane which not only flies, but which can fold its wings and travel undersea—a perfect submarine!
AT LAST the flying submarine has been invented. This hybrid craft which has already undergone successful tests off the Danish coast, will travel over land, run down a beach and launch itself into the sea, and then it is able to turn itself into a submarine and continue to travel underwater. This important military invention, developed by the Danish Navy, can then rise to the surface, unfold its telescopic wings and fly away from the scene of operations.
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Torture Devices of the Old Convict Ships
By C. Moran
Methods of torture used to punish convicts, in vogue in the last century, are graphically displayed aboard the old prison ship, “Success, ” used in the 1850’s to transport British convicts to Australia. The ship is now touring various American ports.
WHEN the jails of England overflowed with prisoners nearly 130 years ago, Great Britain sought to relieve the situation by chartering a fleet of convict ships to transport the “criminals” to Australia. For fifty years this practice was continued, until public revulsion against the inhumanities to which the prisoners on these ships were subjected caused its abandonment.
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The Fighting NORTHLAND RESCUE SHIP of the Arctic
by CLARENCE EBEY
TRAPPED in a field of treacherous pack-ice twenty miles off the Alaskan coast, the freighter Anyox, two gaping holes in her ice-crushed bow, was slowly settling to her doom.
Twenty-eight hours earlier the ship’s imperative distress call had crackled through the arctic ether as desperate men had leaped to lash tarpaulins over the battered bow. The initial rush of the hungry waters had been checked; but not before the hold had partially filled and one of the engine fires had been extinguished. Doggedly the men fought the inevitable, but it was a losing battle. Slowly, inexorably, the clutching waters inched their way upward along the freighter’s hull, pulling her ever lower into the trough of the sea. It was the end. The Anyox was doomed.
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UNCLE SAM ASKED TO BUILD Floating Ocean Airports
REDESIGNED and improved since its earlier forms were described in this magazine, a new type of “seadrome” or floating airport, is proposed by its inventor, Edward R. Armstrong, as the basis of a modernized plan to bridge the Atlantic with a string of artificial islands. His project, which has attracted the interest of U. S. Government officials, is intended to provide twenty-hour airplane service between America and Europe. It calls for the anchoring of five of the seadromes between America and Spain, at about the latitude of Washington, D. C, to serve as refueling stations about three hours’ flight apart. Planes using these islands in stepping-stone fashion could transport heavy pay loads at high speed, since their loads of gasoline would be light.
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