WATER-SPEED MARVEL.

Colonist, Volume LXII, Issue 15317, 4 March 1920, Page 3

WATER-SPEED MARVEL.

- BELL-BALDWIN BOAT.

ACHIEVES 70 MILES AN HOUli.

Several miles an hour, says the :'lllustrated World," is the wonderful Serf ormance achieved by the hydrorome, the new water-speed marvel, developed by Dr Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone inventor, and Mr F. W. Baldwin, at the.former's summer hozne and laboratory atßaddeck, Nova Scotia. It is one of the great facts which the United States Navy Department will consider in looking to this new development in vessels for a solution to some pressing naval problems. The hydrodrome consists of a cigar-shaped hull sixty feet long, with outrigger pontoons, sixteen feet long, decked to the main structure. On top are two Liberty (motors, each with a foui^bladed air-pro-Ipeller. The wTioie looks somewhat like !a combination airplane and dirigible, j resting on the water. But when the ciaft moves, it discloses something new. It crawls up out of the water and appar- , 1 ontly rests thereon upon, sets of stilts. i These "stilts," actually steamline struts, descend from beneath each winglike deck, and form the stern, where they hold hydro-foils, or cambered planes, which act on and. are acted upon hy the water exactly as an airplane's wings are acted on by the air. When H.lX4—as this craft is called—is going at twenty miles an hour she has her hull ' clear out of the water. At seventy miles ap. hour, she is away above the water, and her entire weight of over 11,000 pounds is supported by less than four square feet of hydro-foil. ■ "That is rather a paradox," says 13r 'Bell. "For the total displacement in water of the four square feet of hydrofoil and the struts which connect them cannot' be more than a lew cubic inches. A Avater craft weighing over 11,000 pounds with no displacement to speak of is rather a. novelty. . . . With the hydrodrome, the faster it goes the greater the resistance on the hydro-foils; but, the faster it goes, the less hydro-foil there is in the water to cause resistance. It is this substitution of air resistance for water resistance, while keeping the power of the relatively dense water to support the whole, which gives D.EL.4 its speed." Mr Baldwin anticipates heing able to build a "hydrodrome big enough, strong enought, and speedy enough to cross from New York to London in a day!