Word: rotors
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Physicist Vernon Rossow likens a tornado to the rotor of an electrostatic motor, which turns as it transfers electric charges between a positive and a negative electrode. Much the same happens, he theorizes, when a region of positively charged water droplets form near another region of negatively charged droplets in storm clouds...
...magnetic field. The current generates a magnetic field around the wire that pushes against the field of the magnet. In an electric motor, current flowing through the armature reacts in the same way against a magnetic field generated by electromagnets. The resulting push, or torque, turns the rotor...
...Church Steeples. The aerial patrol symbolizes the proliferating use of helicopters (see following color pages). The machines remain costly to buy (minimum: $23,750) and tricky to fly, but coptermakers at last have overcome most of the bugs that for 25 years gave their industry more promise than progress. Rotor craft have not only changed the whole nature of the Viet Nam war but now stand on the threshold of a huge market at home...
Drunken Ducks. The problems inherent in helicopters make such prowess the more remarkable. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a rudimentary rotor craft in 1483, but even after Russian-born Igor Sikorsky introduced the U.S.'s first successful commercial version 25 years ago, copters remained so cantankerous as to be largely experimental. The indispensable element of a copter is the rotor, which enables it to take off and land on a dime, hover, fly in any direction, land on a dead engine. Spinning, a rotor not only tends to whirl the body of the machine in the opposite direction but makes...
...dramatic case in point occurred during last week's flyin. Rex Evatt, a veteran Santa Clara gyrocopter pilot flying a borrowed craft, banked too steeply in the 30-m.p.h. wind, crashed onto the dry-lake floor. The craft crumpled, the rotor snapped to pieces, but Evatt stepped out unhurt, apologized to his friend for cracking up his $2,000 machine, and the next day was back flying again...