August 23, 19 17] 



NATURE 



507 



but of a real machine strong- and light enough 

 to raise itself in the air with a man astride. This 

 was the gift ready-made by the motor-car, of the 

 petrol eng^ine and no boiler. Twenty-two years 

 ago a valiant attack was launched by Maxim 

 (Nature, August, 1895J, but he was obliged to 

 make his machine big enough to take up a boiler 

 in it, and here he was beaten. If Maxim failed 

 then, it was certain no one else had a chance of 

 success in a flying machine — 



He that it wroghte couth ful many a gin. 



The committee is well provided with the 

 imaginative element, ready to g^o one better than 

 Jules Verne and Peter Wilkins ; and the historian 

 of it must take in hand an adequate account of 

 artificial flight before it came to birth less than 

 ten years ago. A beg^inning has been made in 

 ' Flugprobleme in Mythus Sage und Dichtung, " 

 published by the I.L.A. in 1910, and produced 

 under Government encouragement years before we 

 made a start. But the most important epoch in 

 actual history was July 25, 1909, when Bleriot 

 made the Channel passage, about the time Chavez 

 Avas unfortunate in meeting- his death in the 

 moment of victory of crossing the Simplon in the 

 air. 



The imaginative talent of the committee must 

 be supplemented and checked by a Lardner 

 gfenius, to work out the sober arithmetical details 

 as a guide in the actual design, similar to those 

 required by the Committee on Steam Communica- 

 tion with India, 1830, and entrusted to the 

 original Lardner. 



The reckless optimism of a Brunei and Scott 

 Russell must be discounted to its true value by th»^ 

 ^criticism of sober figures, as in Lardner's report 

 to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, 1835, in 

 pointings out the commercial fallacies of wild-cat 

 schemes, and the need for a Government subven- 

 tion, demanded already for aerial transport to 

 make a start in the commercial aeronautics dis- 

 cussed by Mr. Holt Thomas before the Aero- 

 nautical Society, and reported in the Morning 



st of May 31 last. 



However learned he may be in Geometry, the 

 poet and artist has never studied so far as into 

 Mechanical Similitude. The artist paints his 

 angel Michael with graceful wings in full flight, 

 and invites us to imagine his diminutive figure, 

 of dragon-fly scale in the picture, as enlarged to 

 life-size. On the small scale of the picture, flight 

 may be possible with the wing- and horse-power 

 available. But when the linear scale is enlarged 

 tenfold the weight mounts up a thousandfold, but 

 only a hundredfold in wing area, and the lift is 

 ten times too small at the same speed, or, say, 

 three times too small if the speed is increased on 

 Froude's law. 



In the airship design, for a given diameter of 



action, say, across the Atlantic, or radius of 



action, as in a joy ride to the North Pole and 



I back, an immediate application can be made of 



I Froude's law, as in the Engineer for May 



'", igi6. 



I he laws of mechanical similitude are not 

 XO. 2495,- VOL. 99] 



quite so simple for a flying machine heavier 

 than air, but a calculation can be made 

 on the basis that in a given flight the horse- 

 power-hours and petrol will vary inversely as 

 the square of the speed, so that half the petrol 

 will serve if the speed is increased 40 per cent., 

 or that the same supply will carry over a double 

 flight. 



Xo difficulty will be felt of tide or draught of 

 water at the terminal port, and the height of 

 the course can be varied so as to choose the 

 favourable current of air. But we must not 

 anticipate further the labours of the scientific mem- 

 bers of the committee, as they will prefer to carry 

 out these calculations unassisted. 



An aerial postal service between Italy, Sicily, 

 and Sardinia has already been established, as 

 we read in the Journal of the Society of Arts, 

 August 3 (see Nature for August 16, p. 490). 



The commercial success of an Atlantic airship 

 service is well within sight. Meanwhile, to begin 

 with, a pleasure trip to the North Pole may be 

 contemplated here, as likely to attract the patron- 

 age of the enterprising traveller and give confidence 

 to the public. Advertised to leave Bergen in 

 latitude 60° early on a Saturday morning, the 

 airship, at fifty-knot speed, would be over the 

 North Pole at midday lunch on Sunday, and back 

 again to land the passengers on Monday night. 



How does the pilot know when he is over the 

 Pole ; and when there, how can he find his \vay 

 back by compass? These are questions for the 

 new navigation required in aerial transport, still 

 to be written. 



An important course, such as that to America or 

 Japan, taken on the great circle, will pass very 

 close to the Pole, so that a slight detour to please 

 the passengers need not add appreciably to the 

 mileage. Here the old method of Lunars will 

 come to the front again, displaced in ordinary- 

 low latitude by the superiority of the chronometer. 



Nansen lost his way back from the Arctic 

 Circle when his chronometer had run down, 

 although the moon stared him in the face, inviting 

 a lunar distance observation, which he could 

 have taken with accuracy enough by a piece of 

 string and the assistance of the nautical almanac, 

 -as described in Lord Kelvin's lectures- — a revival 

 of ancient methods of navigation such as were 

 employed by Ulysses. G. Greenhill. 



THE "ISLE OF WIGHT" BEE DISEASE. 



' I "HE mortality among bees which passes by the 

 -■- name of '* Isle of Wight " disease continues 

 with unabated severity, and has now spread to 

 nearly every district in England, destroying in- 

 numerable colonies in its progress and threatening 

 to annihilate, or at least reduce to insignificant 

 proportions, the bee-keeping industry in this 

 country. Even in time of peace and unrestricted 

 import, this would be a grave misfortune ; at the 

 present time, when sugar in every form is needed 

 for human food and is steadily becoming scarcer, 

 it is a national disaster which for some unaccount- 



