Word: hangars
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Staff men pumping ratchet levers jacked the trucks slowly apart until the air gap between the fulminating balls approached 40 ft. Blue, green, violet and lavender lightning lapped hungrily around the bases of the columns, licked the steel roof-beams overhead, searched the walls of the hangar, crashed from ball to ball. At last the designer cried...
...strode into the cavernous metal hangar in which was no dirigible but M. I. T.'s giant electrostatic generator (TIME, March 7, 1932). There they joined newsmen and M. I. T. engineers and miscellaneous scientists. In the gloom loomed the generator- two gleaming 15-ft. hollow aluminum balls, each atop a 25-ft. column of textolite, each column mounted on a massive four-wheel truck. The two trucks were on a single track which ran the length of the hangar and beyond. Small manholes opened into both aluminum balls which were rigged up inside as compact laboratories...
...rising hum filled the still darkness of the hangar. Small motors were driving endless paper belts which, riding on pulleys and whizzing invisibly up & down within the columns, picked up electrical charges from the exciters below and piled them up on the balls above. One belt carried negative electricity, the other positive. In the galvanized atmosphere the hair of the watchers stood straight up, their elbows tingled, their fingertips glowed. Luminous halos began to fringe the balls...
...made lightning.* But to him the test, though spectacular and successful, was simply another step toward a final objective. If unfavorable weather had not forced him to hold his show indoors, he would have had the trucks moved outside where, with none of the stored electricity sparking into hangar walls and beams, he could have counted on 10,000,000 volts...
...Yearly operating cost of the five dromes, including overhead: $2,250,000. ¶ Yearly income after the fifth year would total $11.418,000, to be derived as follows: mail, $6,000,000; express, $105,000; passengers, $4,538,000; hotels, shops, concessions, hangar space, fuel & oil, $775.000. The system would collect $70 from each transatlantic fare (estimated at $350), $25 from each traveller to Bermuda, $10 from each week-end drome visitor...