Word: rotors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...high-speed centrifuge man in the U. S. is Professor Jesse Wakefield Beams, of the University of Virginia, who has broken his own speed records again & again. Dr. Beams it was who invented the centrifuge rotor that floats on a cushion of the same air that drives it. Last fort night one of his graduate students, Lloyd E. MacHattie, turned up in Philadelphia to describe a new, again record-breaking Beams centrifuge whose rotor is eerily suspended in a vacuum by means of mag nets. It is driven by electrical induction (i.e., without wires). Apparently its speed is limited only...
...months over a strange, spindle-shanked machine in a corner of United Aircraft Corp.'s Vought-Sikorsky plant, across the road from the municipal airport at Bridgeport, Conn. Last week overalled mechanics trundled it on the field and a crowd gawked at its three-bladed, 14-foot overhead rotor (propeller), its spraddle-legged landing gear, its conventional airplane controls. Into the pilot's seat crawled Designer Sikorsky. The 75-h.p. engine back of the seat of his pants began to buzz, the rotor began to whirl. Three tiny propellers in an outrigger tail, used for stabilizer, rudder...
Later, sitting under the stilled rotor on Bridgeport's field, he explained his controls. For forward flight, he pushes the ship's nose down, lets gravity pull it toward the ground while the rotor pulls it into the air. The component of the forces of lift and gravity is the line of flight-which can be backward, forward or side-wise-much as a man can move forward by inclining his body and just barely prevent himself from falling by putting his feet in front of him in time...
...Neither did the second or third model. Then, according to legend, Music Lover de la Cierva and his wife were at an operatic version of Don Quixote when he noticed that the flexible blades of the stage windmill flapped slightly as they turned. He made the rotor blades of his next giro flexible. In January 1923, it flew...
...after King Alfonso was dethroned. Except for an occasional spree with his four children, he devoted himself entirely to aviation, worked out two great improvements of his original autogiro design. One was the elimination of wings and other airplane control surfaces, making the giro controlled directly by manipulating the rotor. The other improvement, perfected this year, was the jump takeoff, whereby the giro takes off straight up into the air (TIME...