Word: hovercrafts
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...aspect or another of transportation-safety devices becoming standard equipment on American cars, a Soviet attempt to emulate capitalist mass production of autos, the huge freighters of the future, and a set of far-out projects reported on in The Magnificent Men in Their Whooshing Machines. These include monorails, hovercraft, aero-trains, and just about every other form of transport save the flying carpet and the broomstick-some of which are superspeed realities, others still in blueprint...
...ideas come down-to-earth breakthroughs. It was only ten years ago that Christopher Cockerell, an English engineer, reversed the suction on a household vacuum cleaner, stuck the hose through the bottom of an open-ended tin can, watched the can float-and got the idea for the hovercraft. Today's hovercraft are amphibious vessels that glide across land or sea a few inches above the surface, supported on jets of air around the perimeter of the hull. Two weeks ago, Swedish Lloyd and the Swedish American lines signed a deal to put hovercraft into big-league passenger service...
...French government has just put up $600,000 to develop a high-speed hybrid combining elements of the hovercraft and the monorail. Called the aerotrain, it will be designed to glide over a T-shaped rail at up to 240 m.p.h. on a cushion of air, provide rapid transportation between cities that are too close for economic air travel. Berlin & Co. expects to test the first no-wheel experimental model by year's end. If it works well, it could be the first to break through the 200-m.p.h. barrier beyond which conventional trains encounter such friction...
...Saab to take off in another direction. In the past two years, it has sold Saab-designed commercial computers at prices ranging from $300,000 to $1,000,000, built others for use in its own plants. Other Saab sidelines: trucks and trailers, aircraft ejection seats, weapons training systems, hovercraft and helicopters...
...some of these same bugs have already been worked out of smaller air-cushion vehicles, such as the 40-ft. British-made Hovercraft that Bell was demonstrating last week for oil company executives in Galveston Bay. Wearing a rubber skirt around its waist to prevent leakage of the air cushion and to ward off obstacles, this vehicle even cleared a 4½-ft. fence to show off its agility. In what may be the first military use of an air-cushion vehicle, the British plan to send a pair of armed Hovercraft to Borneo late this month for use against...