WATER-SPEED MARVELS.

Western Star, 1 April 1920, Page 4

WATER-SPEED MARVELS.

BELL-BALDWIN BOAT

Seventy miles an hour, says th©“ Illustrated World,” is the wondejrful performance achieved by the hydrodrome, the new water-speed marvel, developed by Dr Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone inventor, and Mr F. W. Baldwin, at the former’s summer home and laboratory at Baddeck, Nova Scotia. It is one of the great facts which the United States Navy Department will consider in looking toi this new development in vessels for a- solution of some pressing naval problems. The hydrodroxn© 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 four-bladed air-propellor. The whole looks somewhat like a combination air-plane and dirigible, resting on the water. But when the craft moves, it discloses something new. It crawls up out of the water and apparently rests there on sets of stilts. These “stilts,” actually streamline struts, descend from beneath each wing-like deck and form the stern, where they hold hydro-foils, or cambered planes, which act on andi are acted upon by the water’ exactly as an airplane’s wings are acted on by the air. When H.D.4—as this craft is called—is going at twenty miles an hour she has her hull clear out out of the water. At seventy miles an hour, she is away above the water, ami her entire weight of over 11,000 pounds is supported by less than four square feet of hydro foil. “That is rather paradox,” says Dr Bell. " For the total displacement in water of the four square (feet of hydro-foil and the struts which connect them/ cannot be more than a few cubic inches. A water craft weighing over 11,000 pounds with no displacement to speak of is rather a novelty. With the hydrodrome, the Taster 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 tin’s substitution of air resistance for water resistance, while keeping the power of the relatively dense water to support the whole, which gives the H.D.4 its , speeds.” Mr Baldwin anticipates being, able to build a hydrodram,e big ’enough, strong enough, and speedy enough, to cross from New York to London in a day!