AIRSHIPS IN WARFARE.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 14074, 4 December 1909, Page 3

AIRSHIPS IN WARFARE.

INTERESTING LECTURE. Mr Hudson Maxim, tho inventor, one of the best accredited authorities in America in tho department of high explosives, declared in a lecture to the Jirooklvn Aeronautical Association, ( that the time had arrived when trashy ideas about aeroplanes and dynamite with which the public mind in America and Europe is saturated, should be dissipated. Hudson Maxim, whose brother. Sir Hiram, is the inventor of England'* first flying machine, said that tintheory that London, Paris, Berlin, or any other city could be wrecked by explosives dropped from a flying machine was tho offspring of childish ignorance. Airships and aeroplanes would, naturally, have their place in the warfare of the future, but in the meantime, airships and aeroplanes are, he said, ''ineffective, and would require vast improvement, as regards dropping bombs or dynamite in sufficient quantities to damage a big city." "We cannot," went on Mr Hudson Maxim, "make a high explosive which shall be so powerful and destructive, when employed in aerial bombs, as to fulfill the expectations and predictions of aerial war prophets. Flying machines will never be able to work wide destruction by dropping explosives from the air. Even large quantities of high explosives dropped from an aerial fleet upon battleships, coast fortifications, or the streets of large cities, would not be widely destructive. War vessels might have their structures slightly damaged, or their decks benL a bit. Holes would be blown in the paved areas of coast fortifications, and small breeches would be blown in earthworks. Then a few soldiers happening to be in the vicinity of the explosion might be killed, both on warships and coast fortifications. Bombs carrying several hundred pounds each of high explosive which might be dropped in tho streets of large cities and on tho tSps of high buildings, would kill a few persons, break a lot of glass and damage a few roofs. "To do much damage, however," continued tho lecturer, "the dynamite requires confining. Let us assume_ for example that somebody should build a fleet- of 100 aeroplanes, each capable of carrying ono bomb containing 1001b of dynamite, and capable of making one trip a day to London, dropping its dynamite, and returning to the Continent of Europe for another load; and let us assume further that each of those bombs is capable of destroying on an average one building, which is very much more than it can possibly dn. This fleet would thus destrov 100 houses n_dny, 3000 a month, of 36,000 a year. Now, as there have been about 600.000

houses built in. London during the last ten years, or about 60,000 ]>er year, the aerial dynamite fleet would succeed in destroying little more than half the houses annually built in London."