TRAVELING AT HIGH SPEEDS—HELE-SHAW. 643 
With regard to the question of vibration and oscillation, these are 
gradually being diminished as machinery is perfected, and you will 
see from the model illustration that they are important and may 
become very serious. They have, for instance, given Mr. Brennan 
much trouble in perfecting his wonderful monorail, with which we 
shall yet perhaps see every record broken; and you will remember 
Mr. Parsons’s statement in this hall a week or two ago that an ounce 
out of balance on the Laval turbine represents an actual pull at the 
axle of no less than a ton. 
There are many other features which I have not time to enter 
into. There is one, however, which I will briefly touch upon, as it 
is the secret of our safe railway traveling. I will illustrate the mat- 
ter by an experiment in which a pair of wheels connected by an 
axle keyed firmly to both are made to run along a pair of rails. You 
will notice that the wheels are ‘‘coned”’ instead of having cylindrical 
rims, and it is easy to see that any movement sidewise is at once 
corrected automatically, and within certain limits no rim at all is 
required for the flanges in order to keep the wheels upon the rails. 
The same model illustrates the important property of ‘‘super-eleva- 
tion’’ applied to the outer rail of a curve. You wil see, with proper 
super-elevation, the wheels run safely around this sharp curve even at 
a high speed. Time does not permit me to enter at any length on 
the question of development of power or the nature of resistance to 
-motion. I will content myself with saying that with regard to the 
former we have already seen that the power of flight has been made 
possible by the invention of the small high-power internal-combustion 
engine, and it is to the same invention that the marvelous speeds 
obtained with small boats is due. We can scarcely realize what will 
be the result when the internal-combustion engine has been developed 
further for the purpose of locomotion. Our prospects of a further 
great advance in speed record breaking appears to lie in this direction, 
and we already hear of a new car of 250 horsepower with which a 
speed of 140 miles per hour is confidently expected. 
On water, as on land, our actual speed of traveling falls far below 
maximum speed records, and we do not commercially travel at much 
more than half the possible speed, as you see from figure 3, where 
the speed of the Mauretania is shown graphically. Figure 6 is a 
chart of the progress of Atlantic shipping, taking the Cunard Line as 
an example, and these curves indicate that the rate of increase of 
horsepower and tonnage is rising far faster than the rate of speed 
and indicates how relatively highly the rate of power has increased 
for the gain of speed. 
We have now passed briefly in review the nature of the problems 
which confront us in our continuous efforts to increase the safe and 
practical speeds of mechanical locomotion, We see that at the root 
