Читать книгу Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery - George Iles - Страница 33

Table of Contents

While ships are much the largest structures built for motion, and therefore meet resistances which the designer must lessen as best he may, other moving bodies, small as compared with ships, encounter resistances so extreme that their reduction enlists the utmost skill and the most careful study. Speeds vastly higher than those of ships are given to projectiles. A ball leaving a gun muzzle with a velocity of 3,410 feet a second, as at Sandy Hook in January, 1906, suffers great atmospheric resistance, overcome in part by the shot having a tapering or conoidal form. Indians long ago stuck feathers obliquely into arrows so as to keep flight true to its aim by giving shafts a spiral motion; an attendant advantage being to lengthen flight. The same principle appears in rifling, that is, in cutting spiral grooves in the barrels of firearms large and small, a missile receiving a spinning motion through its base, a thin protruding disk of soft metal, forced into the grooves by the explosive. At first the grooves in firearms were straight with intent to preclude fouling; spiral grooves were introduced by Koster of Birmingham about 1620. Delvigne, a Frenchman, devised a lengthened bullet narrower than the bore so as to enter freely, under the pressure of firing it completely filled the bore, rotating with great velocity as it sped forth.

Racing automobile. Wedge front and spokeless wheels.

Now that railroad speeds are approaching those of projectiles, the outlines of trains are resembling those of shot and shell. In the experiments with very fast trains at Zossen, in Germany, October, 1903, each car had a paraboloidal front, much diminishing the resistance of the air. Racing automobiles are usually encased in a pointed shell which parts the air like a wedge; their wheels, too, are supported not by spokes, but by disks having no projections. As electric traction becomes more and more rapid in its interurban services, the cars will undoubtedly be shaped to lessen atmospheric resistance. Especially is this desirable in a tunnel service, such as that of the New York Subway, where the resistances are extreme for the same reason that a boat in a canal is harder to draw than if in water both broad and deep. Just as in ship-design, it is in sharpening the front and rear of a car or a train that most economy is feasible; the friction at the sides cannot be much lessened except, in the case of a train, by joining each car to the next by a vestibule such as that of the Pullman Company.

Electric traction finds gain in a track having in places a decided inclination. In the monorail line between Liverpool and Manchester a downward dip in the line at each terminal quickens departure, and in arrival aids the brakes by checking speed on the up-grade. In the swift motion of ordinary machinery the resistance of the air is a source of considerable loss. By encasing a heavy flywheel in sheet iron so as to present a smooth surface to the atmosphere, M. Ingliss has saved 4.8 per cent. of the energy of a 630 horse power engine.

Bilgram skew gearing.