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- Jet Engine For Your Car (Apr, 1947)Yesterday
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Jet Engine For Your Car
THE jet engine for automobiles is no idle rumor. Here is one, pictured on these pages—and it runs. The inventor is a young engineer, Robert Kafka, of the firm of Carney Associates, New York City.
Kafka has been working on his invention for ten years. His success is signalled by a report that the Army Air Forces Command at Wright Field has ordered three of the engines as soon as they can be built and delivered. The Air Forces will probably use them to start conventional turbines for airplanes, however, rather than to power automobiles.
Setting Kafka’s unit apart from all other jets and gas turbines now in use is the fact that it requires no blower or compressor unit. In most gas turbines at least half of the power extracted from expanding gases is used up in driving the compressor. Kafka says he loses only about 10 per cent of his power to the function of charging.He accomplishes t
- “Commuter” helicopter (Jul, 1947)Yesterday
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No tags for this post.“Commuter” helicopter pictured at right and below is claimed to be the world’s first successful two-place co-axial rotary wing aircraft. The all-metal blades line up fore and aft above the aluminum tear-drop fuselage and all controls are contained in a single unit. In recent public tests it performed vertical take-offs and landings and turned on its own axis while hovering. The pilot is Stanley Hiller, Jr.
- Meet Hans Krause (Apr, 1956)Yesterday
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He kinda looks like the love child of Hugh Grant and John Kerry.
Meet Hans Krause
His pocket-size sculptures are soothing to handle, sweet-scented and habit-forming.
ONE PATH to serenity, say the Buddhists, is through contemplating certain objects: the sky, a tree, a design. Not relying on sight alone, the Chinese have long used hand stones—small objects combining form and smoothness in a way that makes them delicious to handle.
Hans Krause, a German sculptor living in the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, has revived the hand stone. Playing with his dactylforms (Greek daktylos means finger) not only replaces habits like smoking but can produce calmness even in extremely disturbed mental patients. While admitting their value as medicine, sculptor Krause insists that his pocket sculptures are primarily works of art. Each is an individual form in polished Savina wood, a rare Mediterranean material that takes a thousand years to grow and yields an aro
- First Signing by television of a legally binding contract (Apr, 1947)Yesterday
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No tags for this post.First Signing by television of a legally binding contract was consummated above when executives of the Dumont Television Laboratories in New York and officials of the Chevrolet Motor Company, two hundred miles away in Washington, D. C, put their John Henry’s on the dotted line while watching each other in the television screen. This picture was snapped at the New York end. The screen shows what was going on in Washington.
- Why Wing-Flapping PLANES Won’t Fly (May, 1932)Yesterday
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Why Wing-Flapping PLANES Won’t Fly
THE odd plane described here is just another manifestation of the wing-flapping idea which has cropped up periodically ever since man first considered the conquest of the air.
There is a certain brand of inventor obsessed with the idea that the only satisfactory way to achieve flight is by a literal application of bird-flight principles. To this class of inventor all present day aircraft appear completely unsatisfactory particularly in their use of airscrews rather than wing beats as a means of propulsion.
As a matter of fact, if the wing-flapping theory is tenable it would be just as logical to throw all modern boats into discard and replace them with ships driven with some sort of fin arrangement which followed closely the fish method of propulsion.
It is true that the study of bird flight has been of great value in the development of
human flight and it is probabl
