Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/535

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with tail planes to make it fly straight—a tail which has the same effect on the bomb as the tail feathers have on an arrow. In addition there is a "propeller" to sensitize the percussion fuse during the bomb's fall.

Particular attention is directed to the extraordinary photograph which shows seven bombs flying through the air after having been released nearly simultaneously. They do not drop. They literally rush through the air like naval torpedoes, thereby to a certain extent justifying their alias. Released from a machine which is traveling at a speed of ninety miles an hour, they necessarily have, for a time, the forward motion of that machine and actually travel horizontally. Realizing all this, their designers gave them an ideal streamline form. In the picture only the lowest bombs have begun to turn downward