Word: airfoils
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most rigid part of the ship. To protect the instruments from as much motion as possible, the Compass Island is equipped with wing-shaped gyrofins, which cut down roll from 7½° to a barely perceptible .4°. Among the ship's other refinements: a giant, airfoil-shaped sonar dome beneath the keel that will measure ship's speed (and which has already earned the nickname "droop snoot...
...planes to fly faster, it was found that their life and control surfaces had to be thinner, in order to out down the drag offsets of air resistance. As these structures became thinner, it was seen that at certain speeds, they developed a noticeable flutter. When wings flutter, their airfoil shapes are distorted, and they sometimes lose all their lifting ability...
Once he had learned that air, moving over a still airfoil, also generates lift, Custer went on to investigate the principle of the Venturi tube. He learned that the faster air flows through a tube with a narrow throat and flaring ends, the lower goes the pressure within the tube. With that primitive knowledge in hand, he decided that he could build a plane that would combine the advantages, of a helicopter with the speed of normal, fixed-wing aircraft. After some 20 years of tinkering, Custer completed a crude, full scale, flying model of a "Custer Channel Wing" airplane...