Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/511

 Popular Science Monthly

��Vol. 88

No. 4

��239 Fourth Ave., New York

April, 1916

��$1.50 Annually

��A Pigmy Zeppelin

��A PIGMY Zeppelin (pigmy as Zep- pelins go) with a basket-work frame of layered wood has been recently built for the British Govern- ment by a number of American con- structors, including T. Rutherford Mac- Mechen, president of the Aeronautical Society of America, and Walter Kamp, a prominent American aeronautical de- signer.

One of the chief efforts of the designer has been to reduce the weight of the hull

��and car without sacrificing strength, and this has been accomplished, he believes, by the substitution of laminated wood for the aluminum which composes the framework of the Zeppelin. The rings which are used to keep the hull in cylin- drical form are made of thirty-nine thin layers of mahogany, carefully glued to- gether, and covered by a steel collar. Thirty-two wooden ropes, hardly as thick as a man's thumb, wind again and again around the hull, weaving the whole

���A pigmy Zeppelin which is being built ftji iIk bntish G\ cniiiKiit by a company of American

constructors. The framework of this novel airship is made of ropes and laminated wood, so

closely woven together as to resemble a huge mesh of wood and wire

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