GROUND WORK
Before Hal Dane lay the great unknown--the three thousand parts of a
dissected D. C. engine.
"And I've got to get 'em together," he moaned. "Gosh, was it to assort
engine-hash that I went through all I've stood lately?"
Hal Dane had been on a strain, of a sort.
As soon as he landed at the far-stretching, smooth acres of the
Rand-Elwin Field, bounded by hangars, barracks, instruction halls, he
had passed the inspection of Mr. Rand at the office, inspection of
short, dark, imperturbable Major Weston, primary instructor, passed
test-inspection for every ailment in the world--or so it had seemed.
Hal had to undergo examination for heart action, and short-sightedness,
and color blindness, and sense of balance and equilibrium. He was
thumped and spun and eye-tested till he began to imagine that he really
must have some outlandish physical defects. It came as an exhilarating
shock to him when the doctor thumped him in the back and grunted,
"Umph,--prime condition,--fellow with a constitution like that could fly
to the moon!"
So Hal was turned over to Major Weston for training in the elementary
principles of flying.
In relief at his acceptance, Hal's hopes flew high.
But hopes were all that flew high. Hal Dane in person was kept pretty
low, smudging at a lot of engine junk that didn't look like it was ever
meant to fit together.
To Instructor Weston aviation was neither a sport nor an experiment. It
was a business. Under him a student was taught an aerial groundwork as
solid as a railroad rock bed.
Since the internal-combustion gasoline engine was the accepted,
standardized motor power for aircraft flight, Major Weston saw to it
that his pupils knew internal-combustion gasoline engines--else they
didn't graduate into the next class.
For Hal, the lessons seemed to go on interminably about the valve, the
piston, ignition, spark, carburetor. He endured all the miseries of a
brilliant pianist given to performing by "ear" who is set down in a
primer class to learn note reading and scales. He began to feel that the
outside of the ship, wing beauty, pull of propeller, soaring power, were
what had fascinated him--not greasy, grimy intricacies of engines. In
fact, heretofore engines had not entered very much into his aerial
plans. He had known how to crank them, and fly them, and that had seemed
enough.
But at Rand-Elwin, engines loomed large.
He had been here for weeks, and so far had not been allowed even the
feel of a ship--except the Puddle Duck, and one couldn't call that a
ship.
The Puddle Duck was an atrocity. It was a stubby, short-winged boat with
no more grace of movement than the land-waddle of that barnyard fowl for
which it had been named. The chunky plane, for all its ridiculous wing
effect, was merely a land ship. In it, pupils studying balance taxied
madly across the turf, striving to keep its misshapen body at proper
angle--an impossibility. How could one keep such an unbalanced blob
balanced?
Hal could have shed buckets full of tears over his efforts at the joy
stick of the Puddle Duck. He who had flown real ships tied to this
thing!
A huge surprise to young Dane was the finding of Fuz McGinnis as an
upper-classman here. There had been no chance for writing or receiving
letters in the past months of Hal's track-hopping at various country
fairs. Circumstances had forced him out of touch with Old Fuz and the
rest of the home gang. And now here was McGinnis grades ahead of him,
doing flights in a late model sky ship while he wrestled with the Puddle
Duck.
He and Fuz eagerly fell back into the old jolly comradeship in the
little time school duties allowed.
For Hal, time seemed forever filled with motors,--motors in sections,
motors in mixed masses waiting for him to learn their functions and to
reassemble their anatomies.
Only gritted teeth and the sputtering flicker of his river of the wind
ambition held him to his bewildering task day after day. He thought he
hated motors.
Then in a blinding flash of understanding, he began to "see" engines, to
grasp their mechanical beauty.
It was the marvel of the piston that first got him. He began to sense
something of the power of that driving force that man has learned to
harness. It had taken man thousands of years to learn to explode a
mixture of gasoline vapor and air in an engine's cylinder where a piston
caught the force to hurl forward power in a four-stroke cycle. That
four-stroke cycle could speed an automobile over the highway or a wind
ship over the airways.
And he, Hal Dane, had fretted at giving a few weeks to study this master
power! Realization came to him of how primitive were all his notions of
aircraft as compared with the perfection man had already reached. Into
the building of one airship had to go the knowledge of more than half a
hundred crafts and trades.
Instead of mere rods and tubes of metal, Hal now saw pistons and
cylinders as power-containers. To help his understanding, he visualized
how a pinch of gunpowder can easily be put into a gun cartridge. But
when the powder is exploded it expands into gases that would fill a
house. It is the expansion that shoots the bullet. So it was that the
air-gas mixture exploded in a cylinder rushed out to force the piston
into unbelievable speed. This speed harnessed to gear and camshaft was
the power that was hurling the motor world forward--first on wheels, now
on wings.
Hal forgot grease and grime in the sheer wonder of mechanism. Those
black engines of iron, steel, aluminum and alloy became beautiful--more
beautiful than the spread wings that had once fascinated him entirely.
For motors gave power to those wings.
Instead of hastening from ground work into flying, as he could have
done, Hal went back into classes for a second course in engine work.
Because Hal showed promise, Major Weston laid the work on him,
uncompromisingly made him dig for what he got. But after class hours, a
friendship sprang up between the blond boy and the short, heavy-set
pilot trainer. Engines were their meat!
Hal was beginning to master the intricacies of motors, from the old
seven thousand part Spano Motor down through its more modern descendant,
the three thousand part D. C. Motor.
Engine mechanism was marvelous, was complicated--too complicated. Even
after he understood the wondrous power and pull in unison of the D. C.,
Hal's brain rebelled somewhat at the involvement of even this latest
build of motors. Man was smart to have made so complicated a thing--but
man would have been more of a marvel to have made a simple thing that
would perform the same work.
"But," questioned Hal of his instructor-friend, "for the air motor,
every ounce of weight removed means power saved; now what--what could be
taken from such an engine, and still leave efficiency?"
"But what? But why?"
In their after-school confabs, Weston's experience and Hal's theory and
hopes fought many an acrimonious friendly battle. Raynor, who as
advanced-flying pilot was for the present out of Hal's school sector,
sometimes of a night joined in these air battles fought out on the
ground. All manner of past and modern experiments came under the fire of
their discussions. Aeronautical engine builders seemed to have tried out
many varieties of motors. There were the long ago experiments with steam
engines for airplanes. The engine itself could be made much lighter than
the gasoline engine, but the fuel and water added so much weight that
the whole combination was far too heavy for air purposes. Mercury and
other liquids were tried out without much success. Then came gasoline
and mercury-vapor turbines, fine in principle but somehow unsuccessful.
There was a flaw that needed some genius to find it.
"The turbine principle is the coming change," argued Weston. "If the
turbine principle could be applied to an aeronautical engine, it would
eradicate many of the present troubles."
"But engine makers can't seem to apply it," contended Hal. "Seems to
me," he hazarded his next thought gingerly, "that the engine without
batteries is going to be the thing. Batteries weigh an awful lot. How
about this high-degree compressed fuel and the way it explodes under
pressure in the cylinder--without the ordinary explosion by electric
spark? That would cut out batteries and save weight--"
"Save battery weight, yes!" countered Weston out of his deeper
knowledge, "but how about the five hundred pound pressure to the square
inch needed to explode such engine fuel?"
And so the arguments ran on. But for all the seeming impracticability,
Hal's mind was focused on the experiments with the new type engine with
which certain inventors were struggling. It appeared to the boy so much
simpler and safer an engine, with its few parts, its more flying hours
per given weight of fuel. Not now, but some day--perhaps.
Fuz McGinnis was specializing in wings, not engines. Engines as they
were suited him well enough. Quite often though he came in to take
silent part in these nightly symposiums held over the ills and blessings
of motors. He sat in the discussion for love of the companionship of
this oddly assorted trio of thinkers.
As spring came on, Hal went from ground work back again into air flight.
He found the routine of flying tests easy, because the inner workings of
engine mechanics seemed etched on his very brain. The feel of wings
stirred him, roused all the old wild exhilaration of flight. And yet he
was more critical of air machinery than in the past. Where before he had
been vastly satisfied with the mechanisms of man-flight, he now caught
himself wondering continually why man had not made his machines the
better to withstand certain shocks that were bound to come in any flying
routine. Flying gear had made progress, but landing gear was still
crude, still based on land-moving machinery, instead of machinery of the
air.
Pondering these things, Hal found his mind working back to the
piston-and-cylinder that gave engines their power, their thrust. Why
couldn't this same piston-and-cylinder principle be used to lessen power
for a landing gear? His thoughts hung to this strange idea, revolved the
thing continually in his mind.
Then one night he set before Weston and Raynor his ponderings and plans.
"It's the crack and crash of quick landings that break up so many
planes." The boy spread his ideas gingerly before these two experienced
old heads, fearing the laugh over some ridiculous flaw that his
reasoning might have passed up. "Seems to me man hasn't got so far in
what he lands on! Oh, of course he's gone a little way, passed from a
sled base to wheels, then made the wheels larger and put pneumatic tires
on 'em! But at that, any kind of speed landing bangs a fellow with a
recoil like a rammed cannon. Now suppose between the ship and the
landing gear we had a new kind of shock absorbers--sort of buffers made
up of long cylinders with pistons in them, containing oil or glycerine,
or some fluid like that, wouldn't they--"
"Hum--say--yes--"
Raynor and Weston were leaning forward, all absorbed in following this
young fellow's reasoning, this radical plunge into something far out of
the ordinary rounds of mechanisms. One piston-and-cylinder principle had
been harnessed to a gasoline vapor explosion to hurl a motor forward.
Now here was this fellow's futuristic brain seeing another
piston-and-cylinder principle harnessed in oil or glycerin to gentle
power and ease a speed plane to the ground in a shockless landing!
Long into the night the three of them discussed the idea from all
angles. It was his friends' advice that he keep his plans to
himself--for a while anyway. Then if the right backing ever came along,
something worth while might be developed out of the thing. Any dabblings
in invention needed money to back them.
Out on the field, Hal went from week to week through the different
grades of flying. Although he had done a deal of actual flying before he
ever entered the school, the precise, thorough routine training of the
Rand-Elwin took no account of this. With flight, as with engine study,
he was made to start at the bottom and was then given the "whole works."
He had to begin with learning the controls, pass from that to their
application, then to straight and even flying, climbs, banks.
One day out on the flying field, Hal stood, neck cracked back, eyes
glued to the sky, watching a plane that seemed to have gone mad in the
heights. He was sure it was Raynor. He had seen Raynor take off just
before. Must be his ship. Yet he had never seen Raynor double-daring
death like that before.