High Speed With Low Power Boat Has Pontoons for Hull
A NEW JERSEY inventor has introduced a novel type boat with which he expects to attain highest speed with smallest output of power. Five double cone-shaped welded steel drums which may be seen in the photo above support the craft on the water. It is pushed along by a 65 horsepower airplane engine mounted on the steel framework above the after floats.
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What Tomorrow’s Cars Will Look Like
By Donald Gray
The automobile industry, always one of the country’s most progressive, is today on the verge of astonishing changes in engineering design which are likely to make your next automobile so radically different in appearance that you’ll hardly recognize it. Probable lines of development of tomorrow’s car are here authoritatively presented.
PROFILES of automobiles, like profiles of women’s hats, have a habit of changing swiftly and drastically in response to the whims of fashion.
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A RAILWAY that FALLS Down Hill
GERMAN engineers have recently proposed the building of novel “roller coaster” railways for use on short runs between cities and suburbs. The ingenious yet simple construction of this railway, which literally gets its power from falling down hill, is well shown in the accompanying drawing.
Each waiting station is elevated forty or more feet in the air, and passengers are lifted to the platform in an elevator. The train, consisting of two or three cars, awaits them on a level stretch of track beside the station.
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Gasless DIRIGIBLE for Safe Air Travel
EVEN the most rabid enthusiast cannot defend the weakness of the hydrogen-fill dirigible. Death and destruction lurk in every cubic foot of it. Human ingenuity has failed to devise a means of making it safe and the prospect of riding the air with 2,000,000 cubic feet of a violent explosive over one’s head is not alluring, at least to those who have had laboratory experience with the energetic hydrogen atom.
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Man-Made Gales Help Airplanes Land
HUGE fans which can whip up a 65-mile gale that will act as a brake on landing airplanes will be the next piece of equipment installed in the modern airport, according to experimenters.
Aviators have long known that it is easier to land in a stiff breeze than in still air, and it is proposed to take advantage of this fact by arranging twelve to twenty fans on the landing field to supply an artificial gale. The fans would be arranged at the end of the field to cover a section 200 ft. wide and 90 ft. high. The air would be driven through a screen of steel bars one inch wide and two feet apart. This screen would serve to break up the eddies of the air.
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Hewing Jungles and Mountains for World’s Greatest Highway
Triumphing over nature’s grim and forbidding barriers, engineers are building a super highway linking Alaska and the Argentine. Here is the story of the greatest road project in history.
by PETRIE MONDELL
HACKING their way through tangled jungles, braving the quicksands of treacherous streams, hauling equipment by sheer man power up towering cliffs and over once impassable mountain ranges, dauntless engineers are bending every effort to bring the mightiest highway in all history to completion. The finished project will link two continents—a Pan-American roadway extending from northern Alaska to the southern Argentine.
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Boeing’s 490-Passenger Jetliner
By Wayne Thorns
BOEING engineers call their 747 the gee-whiz airplane. The reason: everyone who walks onto the assembly line at Everett, Wash., and sees his first 747 in shining aluminum is a cinch to utter at least one gee whiz (or its equivalent) while registering stupefaction at the craft’s size.
MI’s author was no exception. We recently got a preview look at the world’s biggest commerical passenger bird. After being appropriately overwhelmed by the aircraft’s size and technical virtues we can report with some authority on what flying will be like in the Superjet era almost upon us. It’s closer than most folks realize. The 747 is scheduled to be airborne in test flights this month or next, and should open its doors to as many as 490 passengers per flight in scheduled service by late 1969.
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