Word: hovercrafts
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...Although hovercraft are still a novelty in North America and in most other parts of the world, they are becoming familiar in Britain, where they work as ferries between coastal resort towns and ply the cross-Channel route between England and France. Experimental military and civilian hovercraft skim along waterways and across marshes in Britain. And the hovercraft principle of using a thin layer of air to move heavy loads is finding increasing applications in British industry and transportation...
...Curtain. Hovercraft were born in the fertile mind of British Aeronautical Engineer Christopher Cockerell in 1954. Testing his notion in true pioneer-inventor fashion, he attached a hose to the exhaust of an ordinary vacuum cleaner, stuck it through a hole in the top of an open-bottomed tin can, and watched fascinated as the can floated off the floor; the increased air pressure inside the can had pushed against the floor through the open end, lifting the can. Recognizing that the unhindered escape of air from the bottom of the can-and from the bottom of early experimental craft...
Before long, several British firms had produced working prototypes of the peripheral-air-wall hovercraft, lifted by pressure produced by the air stream from horizontally mounted fans and driven laterally by aircraft-type propellers. Although the ingenious craft could skim almost effortlessly along smooth highways and waterways at automobile speeds, even the most powerful could not rise more than a foot above the sur face; the air curtain could not effectively contain pressurized air above this height. As a result, hovercraft could not operate over choppy seas or rough ground, where they might smash into jutting rocks or wave tops...
Transatlantic? By 1963, British engineers had solved the clearance problem by equipping hovercraft with rubberized canvas skirts several feet long. Although the skirts were strong enough to contain the pressurized air-enabling hovercraft to rise several feet above the ground-they were flexible enough to brush over solid obstacles and high waves. The development of skirts converted the hovercraft from an experimental device into a practical means of transportation. The British Hovercraft Corp. has already built and sold seven-ton, 18-passenger hovercraft and nine-ton, 38-passenger models like those in operation at Expo 67. Both have...
Bell Aerosystems, British Hovercraft's licensee in the U.S., has manufactured hovercraft that have been used success fully in an experimental ferry run across San Francisco Bay and as high-speed gunboats to hunt down Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. It has just sold its first two commercial craft to an Alaska firm that will use them to supply offshore drilling operations. Using the hover principle on land, a French hover train, suspended above a monorail by a thin cushion of air, has already reached speeds of 190 m.p.h...