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The swinging pendulum, with connected apparatus for compressing air or, perhaps, for generating the electric current, seems to be the most controllable and therefore the safest of the various types of apparatus which are applicable to the utilisation of wave-power for propulsion.
It is strange that, while so much has been written and spoken about the possibility of turning the energy of the tides to account for power in the service of man, comparatively little attention has been paid to the problem of similarly utilising the wave-power, which goes to waste in such inconceivably huge quantities.
For each locality in which any large wave-power plant of machinery is to be installed, it will therefore be advisable to study the characteristic length of the wave, which, as observation has proved, is shorter in confined seas than in those fully open to the ocean.
A thin steel pipe offers less resistance than a wooden beam of equal strength, besides facilitating the use of a simple device for enabling the frame and buoys to slide easily up and down. The generally fatal defect of those inventions which have been designed in the past with the object of utilising wave-power has arisen from the mistake of placing too much of the machinery in the sea.
In the application of wave-power provision must be made for the utilisation of the force derived from movements of differing lengths, as well as of differing characters, in the force of impact. Every movement of the buoy which imparts motion to the pulley on top of the derrick must be converted into an additional impetus to a fly-wheel always running in the same direction.
A very simple type of the wave-power motor as applied to marine propulsion is based upon an idea taken from the mode of progression adopted by certain crustaceans, namely the possession of the means for drawing in and rapidly ejecting the water.
In the wave-power plant as described, each buoy of one hundred tons displacement when raised and depressed, say, three feet by every wave will thus be capable of giving power equal to three times 600, or 1,800 foot-tons per minute.
connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the wave-power in the sea itself, which is always expressed by the serpentine bodies either of the sea-gods or of the sea-horse; and when Athena carries, as she does often in later work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the repetition of her own ægis-snakes as the further expression of her power over the sea-wave; which, finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with her own anger, in the approach of the serpents against Laocoön from the sea; and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put forth on the ocean also, and the madness of the ægis-snake is give to the wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her beneficent and essential power on the ocean, in making navigation possible, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast of a ship.
It would be only on rare occasions that a sailing vessel, if furnished with rocking gear for using the wave-power, would be set to go nearer to the teeth of the wind than she would under present conditions of using sail-power alone.
One interesting fact, which gives to wave-power a peculiarly enhanced value as a source of stored wind-power, is that the surface of the ocean wild as it may at times appear is not moved by such extremes of agitation as the atmosphere. In a calm it is never so inertly still, and in a storm it is never so far beyond the normal condition in its agitation as is the wind.
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