Abstract
I. A SURVEY of the progress made during the last twenty five years in almost any field of engineering work would show an immense advance. Even during the past ten years very considerable progress has been made in certain branches of applied science, and in none of them to a greater extent than in the internal-combustion engine. We need not in this comparison claim the gun as a form of internal-combustion engine, though we are naturally entitled to do so. We may leave lethal weapons aside, and think only of the remarkable development of the reciprocating internal-combustion engine, and of the many changes it has brought about in our times. It has revolutionised cross-country transit. It has given us the long-deferred, but now actually achieved, victory called the “conquest of the air.” It is extraordinary to think of the numbers of men who have spent ingenious years in seeking a solution of the problem of flight. The solution has come in the unexpected form of a pair of long, sail-like arms, driven forward by a small high-speed internal-combustion engine. This simple form of design, which, owing to the relation between centre of pressure and angle of tilt, seems to be naturally stable, bids fair to be adopted in a great output of flying machines shortly to be constructed. The hardly less novel, but less interesting, dirigible balloon owes the whole of its dirigibility, whatever that may amount to, to the internal-combustion engine.
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WIMPERIS, H. Recent Improvements in the Internal-Combustion Engine . Nature 81, 171–172 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081171a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081171a0