TRAVELING AT HIGH SPEEDS HELE-SHAW. 647 



hour may be regarded as quite a feasible engineering proposition in 

 the future, though possibly a tube will be used for the uurpose, 

 without the employment of wheels, and with a modification of the 

 pneumatic system of that great genius Brunei. We should, however, 

 in doing this journey, be only traveling at half the rate we are 

 actually moving at this spot around the earth's axis, while to do it at 

 the rate we are traveling round the sun we should only occupy a 

 quarter of a minute. This latter speed, apart from the fact that it is 

 getting very near the point at which meteors fuse with the friction of 

 the earth's atmosphere, seems to be quite outside the limit of the 

 possibilities of artificial locomotion by man, but how far we shall go 

 toward it, who can tell ? 



Note. — Since delivering the above lecture, M. Andre Jager Schmidt, 

 of the Excelsior, has made a tour round the world in 39 days 19 hours 

 43 minutes 37 seconds. The cost of doing this was £242 8s. The 

 actual cost of the railway ticket round the world being £115, the rest 

 being extra payment to insure expedition. 



Further note, February 14, 1912. — Since the foregoing lecture I 

 showed that the curves of fatigue for metals coincided in a remarkable 

 way with the curves of fatigue for muscular effort given in fig. 2. 

 The following statement of my remarks on this subject appears in the 

 Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers for 1912: 



Dr. H. S. Hele-Shaw (member of council) said lie was responsible for tbe curves 

 which appeared on the diagram exhibited [fig. 7], "Endurance of Metals," and 

 there seemed to be a great deal of curiosity amongst the members as to what cycling, 

 running, and skating had to do with the subject of the paper. A short time ago he gave 

 a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution on Traveling at High Speeds, and he 

 then gave, he believed for the first time, the plotted records for muscular fatigue. The 

 records, as would be seen, consisted of plotted curves for the highest speeds, that is, the 

 greatest efforts, and the distances over which it was possible to maintain those speeds, 

 which speeds were represented by the vertical lines in the diagram. He thought every 

 engineer would at once understand without further explanation what the curves 

 showed. For instance, taking the running curves, it would be noticed that it was. 

 possible for a man to run 100 yards at the rate of about 21 miles an hour; but if he ran 

 for 100 miles he could only run at the rate of 1\ miles an hour. The same principle 

 applied to all the other records. He did not wish to enlarge upon the details of the 

 particular curves, but his assistant, Mr. T. E. Beacham, B. Sc, who drew them up, 

 pointed out to him the remarkable similarity of the curves obtained by the authors for 

 the fatigue of metals, and his own curves for muscular fatigue . One of the author's 

 curves was taken at random, and the scale altered, and it would be seen that it was 

 exactly the same kind of curve as those on the muscular fatigue diagram. The curve 

 selected happened to be figure 31 [fig. 7], which dealt with specimen No. 29, and that 

 was plotted in the dotted line shown in the diagram. Now the question arose, Was 

 there any reason for the similarity between the curve for muscular fatigue, and the 

 curve for metal fatigue? It would be noticed, in the first place, that the results from 

 the muscular testa corresponded to the breakdown in the metal tests. The curves 

 for muscular endurance were the final result of many thousands of efforts to achieve 

 the greatest possible effect for a given speed and a given distance, and when the man 



