Abstract
IN the June number of the National Geographic Magazine is a very interesting and instructive article by Dr. Graham Bell on the tetrahedral principle in kite structure. The article itself is so concise, and depends so much upon illustrations which are reproduced to the number of twenty in “the text and seventy in an appendix, that an effective representation of the contents in an article of smaller dimensions is scarcely possible. Still the line of thought that runs through the work which the article represents is so clear and so suggestive that even an imperfect outline of it may be useful. Dr. Bell indicates certain stages in the development of his ideas as “milestones “of progress, and since the ultimate stage of the development is the possibility of building up very large kite structures by combining unit cells in such a way that the proportion of weight to wing area in the structure is nearly the same as that of the constituent cell, the successive stages are noteworthy. They sketch out in a most interesting manner a reply to Newcomb's criticism of the limits of application of the aeroplane based upon the argument that increase of size means diminished efficiency because, for similar structures, the weight varies as the cube while the area, upon which the lifting force depends, varies as the square of the linear dimensions.
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Graham Bell's Tetrahedral Cell Kites . Nature 68, 347–349 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/068347a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/068347a0