Читать книгу Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery - George Iles - Страница 76

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Now we begin to realize how great is the boon of cheap steel, much stronger than iron, of which ships and engines may be built bigger than at any earlier period. Steel of great strength has made feasible, too, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, nearly a thousand feet tall, the office-buildings of New York thirty stories in height, and steel will soon cross the St. Lawrence near Quebec with a single span of 1,800 feet. In 1904, at Schenectady, N. Y., the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad Company began comparisons between an electric locomotive of 201,000 pounds, shown opposite page 476, and a steam locomotive so huge that with its tender it weighed no less than 342,000 pounds. Steel, as the material of engines and tools of all sorts enables us to build in dimensions bolder than ever before; or, if old dimensions are not surpassed, we are free to employ velocities quite out of the question with iron.

It is a long time since adventurers first entrusted themselves to floating logs, afterward tied together as rafts, and slowly improved until they became boats moved by paddles or oars. Thus far little else than failure has attended the inventors who have sought to navigate the air as easily as river, lake or sea. A stride toward success was however distinctly taken when the strongest known alloys, those of steel and nickel, gave the aeronaut a stronger boiler, pound for pound, than he ever had before, with wings lighter in proportion to their power than those of earlier experiments. Let the burden of his apparatus be further reduced, and by one-half; then we may expect him to reign in the air as securely as the sea-gull. The original resource of the aeronaut, his balloon, suffers from a permanent disability. Air has but ¹⁄₇₇₀ the specific gravity of water, so that a balloon must be enormous to have any carrying capacity worth while. And what would become of a balloon, its rudder and ropes, if caught in a hurricane of eighty miles an hour?