Viewing page 297 of 404

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[column 1]]
is about 24,000 square feet, or more than half an acre. The weight of this envelope, together with its interior balloon or balloonet, as the French call it, its valves, and the stout part on its sides to which the car is suspended by steel cables, is over two tons - 4100 pounds. The material is in three thicknesses of strong cotton, each coated with an emulsion of pure rubber, and all three stuck together in one piece of cloth. The cotton is for tensile strength, which runs as high as 500 pounds per square foot. The rubber is to hold the gas, to prevent its leaking out. This is the first airship to be built of three thicknesses of material, so far as I know. The best up to this time was of two thicknesses, in addition to great tensile strength, is great gas tightness, Should there be an imperfection at the same spot in one layer it is highly improbable there would be another imperfection in the same place in the second layer. And, in the third layer, almost impossible The volume of this reservoir is 265,500 cubic feet. Reckoning the air within it at the temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit (the normal temperature in the Arctic regions in July and August). and at the average barometric pressure of 760 millimeters

[[column 2]]
[[top half of words cut off at top of page]], like the car itself, is divided into fourteen sections, and each section of the gasolene reservoir is a compartment by itself, so that if there should be leakage from one the adjacent sections need not be affected. 
The weight of the combined car and tank is a little more than a ton, and the capacity of the tank is 1200 gallons of gasolene. 
This long, V-shaped steel car is suspended from the gas reservoirs by steel cables - not wires, but steel ropes of the highest tensile strength, the best English makers coud give us. The cables vary from one-quarter inch to one-eighth inch diameter, according to the work put upon them. The gas reservoir lifts much more in its central part than at the ends, and, of course, the cables must be stronger amidship. Throughout there is a factor of safety 10 to 1. The top of the car is only six feet from the bottom of the gas reservoir. We have put it close up for two reasons. One, because in that way it is easier to bind up the gas bag and the car more firmly together - and the more closely they resemble a solid block the better, the less likelihood of accident, the smaller the resistance of the whole is passing through the air. Second, with the two so near together a man standing on the top of the car

[[column 3]]
ing 600 pounds of [[?]], and this car can be run the whole length of the structure, 115 feet - so much ballast movable at our will by working a cord from the engine room. On top of the fuel tank is a board platform or runway, two and half feet wide and extending the whole length of the steel car 115 feet, giving the crew access to every part of the structure. 

Combines Aeroplane and Balloon
Features of Both in the Flying Machine of George Byron, a Chicago Inventor
"Aeroplanes are having a great deal said about them in papers now, but for the life of me," says George West Byron, a Chicago inventor, "I cannot discover wherein they see enough good points in a 'heavier-than-air' flying machine to justify one-half they say of them. From the time of Leonardo Da Vinci down to Santos Dumont all the thousands of aeronauts have employed one or the other of two

[[column 4]]
Mr. Byron claims for his airship, when built with the capacity of his twelve balloons f 33,375 cubic feet, a lifting power of 2362 pounds. Bu the arrangement of his gas bags Mr. Byron expects to obtain some of the aeroplane characteristics as well as some of the box-kite qualities with which Professor Bell has been experimenting for some years. Both sets of his balloons are flat on the bottom, placed one above the other, and being wedge-shaped avoid the resistance of the old round-sided affairs. 
The engine itself is to be a twenty-five-horse-power gasolene, with four cylinders to avoid any vibration, and must be capable of a speed of 150 to 2000 R.P.M. 

Transcription Notes:
All 4 columns appear to be part of the same article, but there is text missing in between each column.