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 winch 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 winch 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 will 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 



