AMAZING TWO-WHEEL AUTO
The Bi-Autogo’s designer was only 24 when he conceived this sleek and powerful vehicle intended for early car connoisseurs.
BACK in 1908, James Scripps Booth, well-known artist-engineer of Detroit, felt that the standard auto was somewhat prosaic. He believed something should be done toward instilling novelty and new sporting enthusiasm into motoring for hobbyists attracted by more costly cars.
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I’m not that great at physics, but this seems to violate the conservation of momentum…
Strange Lifting Force Used in Novel Airship
How does this airship keep aloft with neither propellers nor lifting gas? It’s the strangest craft yet designed to cruise the skies and represents as far a departure from conventional types of aircraft as can be imagined. You’ll find this description of the ship fascinating.
WHAT is certainly the most unique airship in the world is now under construction in the form of an experimental model in the factory of its inventor in Denver, Colorado. As depicted on these pages, the extraordinary ship will use neither propellers nor gas to keep it in the air, but will depend on a mechanism which its inventor, Edgar R. Holmes, calls the “gyradoscope”.
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Our New B-1 Bomber-High, Low, Fast, and Slow
This big swing-wing bird is designed with a unique combination of talents
By BEN KOCIVAR
PS Consulting Editor, Flying To swing or not to swing, that was the question. In the competition for the new B-1 manned bomber, the answers were the same. All three giant aerospace companies presented swing-wing designs.
The winner? North American Rockwell, voted by the Air Force best and cheapest over entries by Boeing and General Dynamics. (The latter two also hedged their bets with fixed-wing designs, which are cheaper.) General Electric will make the engines for the B-1.
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If that lady isn’t careful I’ll bet the coach would run fine on her as well.
Coach Runs on Roads or Rails
WHAT might be termed a land amphibian capable of traveling on road or rail has been developed by railroad engineers to put forth competition to the buses which now ply the highways, cutting heavily into railroad revenues.
For traveling on ordinary roads the coach has the regular pneumatic tire equipment of a bus, but for taking to the rails it is provided with four sets (one for each wheel) of small flanged wheels which engage the rails and keep the car on the track. A special mechanism permits the driver to raise the flanged wheels when he desires to return to the highway.
Ball-Shaped TRAIN Pulled By Magnets
THE “bullet-flash,” most radical idea in railroad design since the recent advent of streamlining, has just been conceived by a Swiss engineer. Based on electro-magnetic principles, the new ball-shaped iron horse is expected to roll on standard-size rails at a speed as high as 300 m.p.h.
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Prism Glare Shield Reduces Night Driving Hazards
CONSISTING of two finely polished optical glass prisms set in a metal mounting, this device is designed to serve as a glare eliminator for automobiles. Fastened over the windshield, it is perfectly transparent so that the driver can clearly see the road. Startling as it may seem, however, on the approach of another car with glaring headlights the device immediately lowers an “optical curtain” so that the oncoming car and lights vanish and the driver can see as clearly as ever.
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CAN WE CRASH THE DEADLY FLAME BARRIER?
Fly a plane fast enough and friction will melt it. Can we “put out the fire?”
By David W. Barclay
ENGINEERS, who sometimes get pretty irritated when writers dream up catch phrases for their scientific findings, are not exactly happy with the term Flame Barrier or Heat Barrier which has been applied to hypersonic flight. (A barrier, say the engineers, is something you can climb over, sneak around or bull your way through. None of these work when an air-breathing, wing-lifted vehicle is trying to go faster and faster in the envelope of air which surrounds the earth.) But regardless of what you call it, the obstacle—air friction—is there and gets worse with each extra mile per hour of speed. Eventually you wind up as a glowing ember, blob of molten metal, or a cloud of superheated dust.
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Spinning Wing Airliner
More wing lift and less drag are the major aims of aviation’s researchers. Maybe the Magnus Wing will supply the answers.
ENGLAND’S aeronautical scientists may have a surprise in store for the rest of the flying world. Some years ago a prominent investigator, Anton Flettner, formulated the Magnus Effect—the strange behavior of a drum spinning in an airflow. Today with modern materials, equipment and wind tunnels, interest is once more directed toward this strange phenomenon.
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