Speed Limits bene "cen, with attempts ts Re: Committee, states the
to foresee some of the problems of the future, said Prof. L. Bairstow recently. Two items of general interest relate to speed—in one case to very high speeds and in the other to the lower speeds associated with landing. The present high speed for an aeroplane is nearly 440 miles an hour, and the question naturally arises as to whether there is a foreseeable upper limit. This problem can be examined in the laboratory and it is possible to say that with aeroplane wings and aero engines as we now know them there is little hope of long distance flights at speeds over 550 miles per hour, For many years now it has been known that bullets and shells send off very intense pressure waves called shock waves, and these lead to high resistance. Shock waves arise from high speed flight. The National Physical Laboratory has a small wind tunnel capable of a speed of' about 600 miles an hour, and in it shock waves have been observed and the resistance of wings measured. At low speed this resistance increases, but so does the lift of the wing, and up to about 350 miles an hour the two increase proportionately, But at 500-550 miles per hour the law of proportionality breaks down, the lift falling quickly and the resistance increasing extremely rapidly. Both effects are adverse to high speed and both arise from the compress sibility of the air as the speed approaches that of sound—about 750 miles an hour. Odd though it may seem, air at speeds up to 300 miles an hour behaves as though it were incompressible, Roosevelt Roosevelt has "gone conserva-Conservative tive." believes "Barron's." Those who speak fcr business in the capital have not "gone New Deal." The present "campaign for ce-operation" is so delicately poised that one half-baked blast, such as have on occasion emitted from high sources to their own later regret, would undoubtedly kick over the whole works. But the President, without retreating from his bigger-national-income-better-distributed objective, is at last realizing, if he didn't before, that pump-priming alone never watered an army. And conservatives seem to be beginning to get the idea that he's going to be President for two more years anyway, and if he shows a disposition to get together, even if they don't agree with much of what he does, it's plain common sense to do it, If that idea seeps round the country, and if the Skipper doesn't rock the boat, we'll have something, notwithstanding the die-hards who int, in effect, they "wouldn't have anything to do with him under any circumstances."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.