. American engineer and railroad journal . , and while he found greatirregularity in its action, he succeeded in obtaining anumber of fair flights among many failures. He experi-mented with superposed planes, but the result was notsatisfactory. His last model, produced in 1892. resembleshis original design, and, driven by rubber bands, succeed- ed in getting a preliminary start by running over a plat-form 12 ft. long, slightly inclined, and flying through theair above the hollyhocks and other flowers until itstruck the side of a house 30 ft. away, and 4 ft. higherthan the platform. India-rubbe
. American engineer and railroad journal . , and while he found greatirregularity in its action, he succeeded in obtaining anumber of fair flights among many failures. He experi-mented with superposed planes, but the result was notsatisfactory. His last model, produced in 1892. resembleshis original design, and, driven by rubber bands, succeed- ed in getting a preliminary start by running over a plat-form 12 ft. long, slightly inclined, and flying through theair above the hollyhocks and other flowers until itstruck the side of a house 30 ft. away, and 4 ft. higherthan the platform. India-rubber is a good reservoir ot power to experimentwith. The llighis are brief, as the power is soon spent,but they give an opportunity of testing the equilibrium,the proportions, and the adjustment of the parts, whichmay suggest themselves to an experimenter^as possiblyefficient. An apparatus patented in France by y^.Poml-s. in 1878,is represented in fig. 57. It consisted in two supportingplanes in front, together with a keel plane, and a large. POMfes—1878. vane behind, to maintain the course. Two propellingscrews on the same horizontal sha-ft were to impart mo-tion, and although they are shown as actuated by hand onthe figure, the same inventor had already patented, in 1871,in connection with M. de la Panze, a gunpowder motor, inwhich a series of charges, exploded by electricity, weremade to pass through a tube and to impinge against thebuckets of a revolving wheel, from which the motion wasto be to the propellers. Neither this motornor the aeroplane possess merit, and indeed the latter isabout as badly arranged as it can be, for as the air press-ures which are to sustain the weight act with a leverageincreasing toward the tips of the wings, or sustainingplanes, the latter should taper in plan from the center ofthe apparatus outward, instead of tapering inward asshown in the figure, in order to obtain a light and strongconstruction. It is not known whether M. Pomi-
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectrailroadengineering
