United States or New Zealand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
By the two former statements man is stripped of all the grander prerogatives and characteristics of personality; by the last he is placed as freight, whether dead or alive it were hard to say, in the hold of the self-steering ship, "Society." These propositions and the reasons, or unreasons, by which they are supported, we will examine in order.
They form part of a little device of mine to render the ship self-steering, or, more correctly, to make the compass itself steer her in any given direction. Having noticed those needles, you doubtless also noticed that across the `lubber's mark' there was a small slit some six inches long in the side of the compass- box?" The lieutenant nodded. "Good!" ejaculated the professor.
I can remember him sitting on the foot of my bed, talking me to sleep more than once with some new plan he had devised for a self-steering torpedo or an absolutely reliable flying machine. He had received the sobriquet of "Mad G.," and there was some justice in it from the opposition point of view.
Whitehead torpedoes, be it known, are mechanical fish of machined steel, self-propelling and self-steering, actuated by a small air engine, and carrying in their "war heads" a charge of over two hundred pounds of guncotton, and in their blunt noses a detonating cap to explode it on contact. At Forsythe's word, Kelly turned a lever on the tube, and the contained torpedo dived gently overboard.
At the expiration of a period of twenty minutes the professor threw the self-steering apparatus out of gear for a moment, altered the course a trifle to the eastward, threw the self-steering apparatus into gear again, and waited another twenty minutes, when the same process was repeated a second time, and so on, a slight alteration of the ship's course being effected at intervals of twenty minutes.
Then the party bade each other good-night, and retired to their cabins, Mildmay only lingering behind the others long enough to raise the ship into the neutral belt, put her engines at full speed ahead, and fix her self-steering apparatus on the ascertained course.
Handing the lines over to the banker, Bob hurried after the agent, who was racing down the field so as to catch up to the tractor before it reached the corner. Then he stopped the machine until Bob came up. "Now, this is how it's done, Bob. You see this self-steering device down here in the furrow.
This ingenious piece of mechanism at once caused the ship to become self-steering.
Well, I set this lever and clamp it over fast and this self-steering device rubs along the edge of the furrow and keeps the plow following the furrow. In big fields in the West, where there's plenty of room and the ground is comparatively level, we always plow around a circle. There's where we use our big fellers," he said smiling.
It was a most lovely day, the sky without a cloud, the water smooth, and a soft but refreshing breeze was breathing out from the southward. The ship was steering herself, the self-steering apparatus having been thrown into action, as no other craft were in sight.
Word Of The Day