Word: pistone
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...engineers and designers, the sparkling new cars in the showrooms are history. What excites them are the radical changes soon to come. When will all cars have brakes to stop a car automatically as it nears an obstacle? Are carburetors obsolete? How soon will the gas turbine replace the piston engine...
Fuel-injection systems, which may take years to reach all cars, will probably be the last major refinement of the present piston engine. The great change will be the turbine engine. But the first engine will probably not be a true gas turbine. It may well be a "free-piston engine," a combination of the piston engine and turbine. The idea of the engine is old, but only recently have automakers been able to eliminate many of the bugs. In the present engine, the pistons turn the crankshaft as the explosions in the cylinders drive them down, thus transfer power...
...hundred years ago the art of the harpsichord was dead, victim of the piano's lower cost and wider range of expression. The twentieth century, however, has seen the harpsichord revive to the extent of attracting compositions from such modern composers as Harvard's Walter Piston. The instrument has also found a place in popular music ("Come On 'a My House"), and it is even being taught at Yale. On Sunday afternoon a Yale professor honored Harvard with a concert that illustrated the reasons for the harpsichord's revival...
...traveler, the jets will bring a new age. Both planes will be giants half again as big as today's piston-engine airliners. The Boeing will carry up to 125 passengers, the Douglas up to 131. Both planes will have Pratt & Whitney engines, will cruise at 575 m.p.h. at 30,000 ft., cut flying times dramatically, e.g., New York to Paris in 6 hr. 35 min. (against 11 hr. today), San Francisco to Tokyo in 12 hr. 45 min. (against 25 hr.). The combination of high speeds and big loads will probably bring lower fares. Boeing will begin deliveries...
...rate of climb (2,500 ft. per minute) twice as fast as the average piston-engine airliners and a maximum altitude of 50,000 ft. It is so maneuverable in approaches that it can circle an airfield at 500 ft. in a radius of less than a mile; on one occasion a Boeing test pilot put it through a slow roll at 2,000 ft. The plane will be powered by Pratt & Whitney's J57 engine, the most powerful (well over 10,000 lbs. thrust) in production in the Western world. (The J57 drives such key military planes...