by Joan Clark
CHAPTER IX
GROUND WORK
Before Hal Dane lay the great unknown--the three thousand parts of adissected D. C. engine.
"And I've got to get 'em together," he moaned. "Gosh, was it to assortengine-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 theRand-Elwin Field, bounded by hangars, barracks, instruction halls, hehad passed the inspection of Mr. Rand at the office, inspection ofshort, dark, imperturbable Major Weston, primary instructor, passedtest-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 wasthumped and spun and eye-tested till he began to imagine that he reallymust have some outlandish physical defects. It came as an exhilaratingshock to him when the doctor thumped him in the back and grunted,"Umph,--prime condition,--fellow with a constitution like that could flyto the moon!"
So Hal was turned over to Major Weston for training in the elementaryprinciples 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 prettylow, smudging at a lot of engine junk that didn't look like it was evermeant to fit together.
To Instructor Weston aviation was neither a sport nor an experiment. Itwas a business. Under him a student was taught an aerial groundwork assolid as a railroad rock bed.
Since the internal-combustion gasoline engine was the accepted,standardized motor power for aircraft flight, Major Weston saw to itthat his pupils knew internal-combustion gasoline engines--else theydidn't graduate into the next class.
For Hal, the lessons seemed to go on interminably about the valve, thepiston, ignition, spark, carburetor. He endured all the miseries of abrilliant pianist given to performing by "ear" who is set down in aprimer class to learn note reading and scales. He began to feel that theoutside of the ship, wing beauty, pull of propeller, soaring power, werewhat had fascinated him--not greasy, grimy intricacies of engines. Infact, heretofore engines had not entered very much into his aerialplans. He had known how to crank them, and fly them, and that had seemedenough.
But at Rand-Elwin, engines loomed large.
He had been here for weeks, and so far had not been allowed even thefeel of a ship--except the Puddle Duck, and one couldn't call that aship.
The Puddle Duck was an atrocity. It was a stubby, short-winged boat withno more grace of movement than the land-waddle of that barnyard fowl forwhich it had been named. The chunky plane, for all its ridiculous wingeffect, was merely a land ship. In it, pupils studying balance taxiedmadly across the turf, striving to keep its misshapen body at properangle--an impossibility. How could one keep such an unbalanced blobbalanced?
Hal could have shed buckets full of tears over his efforts at the joystick of the Puddle Duck. He who had flown real ships tied to thisthing!
A huge surprise to young Dane was the finding of Fuz McGinnis as anupper-classman here. There had been no chance for writing or receivingletters in the past months of Hal's track-hopping at various countryfairs. Circumstances had forced him out of touch with Old Fuz and therest 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 PuddleDuck.
He and Fuz eagerly fell back into the old jolly comradeship in thelittle 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 toreassemble their anatomies.
Only gritted teeth and the sputtering flicker of his river of the windambition held him to his bewildering task day after day. He thought hehated motors.
Then in a blinding flash of understanding, he began to "see" engines, tograsp their mechanical beauty.
It was the marvel of the piston that first got him. He began to sensesomething of the power of that driving force that man has learned toharness. It had taken man thousands of years to learn to explode amixture of gasoline vapor and air in an engine's cylinder where a pistoncaught the force to hurl forward power in a four-stroke cycle. Thatfour-stroke cycle could speed an automobile over the highway or a windship over the airways.
And he, Hal Dane, had fretted at giving a few weeks to study this masterpower! Realization came to him of how primitive were all his notions ofaircraft as compared with the perfection man had already reached. Intothe building of one airship had to go the knowledge of more than half ahundred crafts and trades.
Instead of mere rods and tubes of metal, Hal now saw pistons andcylinders as power-containers. To help his understanding, he visualizedhow a pinch of gunpowder can easily be put into a gun cartridge. Butwhen the powder is exploded it expands into gases that would fill ahouse. It is the expansion that shoots the bullet. So it was that theair-gas mixture exploded in a cylinder rushed out to force the pistoninto unbelievable speed. This speed harnessed to gear and camshaft wasthe power that was hurling the motor world forward--first on wheels, nowon wings.
Hal forgot grease and grime in the sheer wonder of mechanism. Thoseblack engines of iron, steel, aluminum and alloy became beautiful--morebeautiful 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 havedone, 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, afriendship sprang up between the blond boy and the short, heavy-setpilot trainer. Engines were their meat!
Hal was beginning to master the intricacies of motors, from the oldseven 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. Evenafter he understood the wondrous power and pull in unison of the D. C.,Hal's brain rebelled somewhat at the involvement of even this latestbuild of motors. Man was smart to have made so complicated a thing--butman would have been more of a marvel to have made a simple thing thatwould 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 betaken from such an engine, and still leave efficiency?"
"But what? But why?"
In their after-school confabs, Weston's experience and Hal's theory andhopes fought many an acrimonious friendly battle. Raynor, who asadvanced-flying pilot was for the present out of Hal's school sector,sometimes of a night joined in these air battles fought out on theground. All manner of past and modern experiments came under the fire oftheir discussions. Aeronautical engine builders seemed to have tried outmany varieties of motors. There were the long ago experiments with steamengines for airplanes. The engine itself could be made much lighter thanthe gasoline engine, but the fuel and water added so much weight thatthe whole combination was far too heavy for air purposes. Mercury andother liquids were tried out without much success. Then came gasolineand 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 theturbine principle could be applied to an aeronautical engine, it woulderadicate many of the present troubles."
"But engine makers can't seem to apply it," contended Hal. "Seems tome," he hazarded his next thought gingerly, "that the engine withoutbatteries is going to be the thing. Batteries weigh an awful lot. Howabout this high-degree compressed fuel and the way it explodes underpressure in the cylinder--without the ordinary explosion by electricspark? That would cut out batteries and save weight--"
"Save battery weight, yes!" countered Weston out of his deeperknowledg
e, "but how about the five hundred pound pressure to the squareinch 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 withwhich certain inventors were struggling. It appeared to the boy so muchsimpler and safer an engine, with its few parts, its more flying hoursper given weight of fuel. Not now, but some day--perhaps.
Fuz McGinnis was specializing in wings, not engines. Engines as theywere suited him well enough. Quite often though he came in to takesilent part in these nightly symposiums held over the ills and blessingsof motors. He sat in the discussion for love of the companionship ofthis 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 ofengine mechanics seemed etched on his very brain. The feel of wingsstirred him, roused all the old wild exhilaration of flight. And yet hewas more critical of air machinery than in the past. Where before he hadbeen vastly satisfied with the mechanisms of man-flight, he now caughthimself wondering continually why man had not made his machines thebetter to withstand certain shocks that were bound to come in any flyingroutine. Flying gear had made progress, but landing gear was stillcrude, still based on land-moving machinery, instead of machinery of theair.
Pondering these things, Hal found his mind working back to thepiston-and-cylinder that gave engines their power, their thrust. Whycouldn't this same piston-and-cylinder principle be used to lessen powerfor a landing gear? His thoughts hung to this strange idea, revolved thething 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 manyplanes." The boy spread his ideas gingerly before these two experiencedold heads, fearing the laugh over some ridiculous flaw that hisreasoning might have passed up. "Seems to me man hasn't got so far inwhat he lands on! Oh, of course he's gone a little way, passed from asled base to wheels, then made the wheels larger and put pneumatic tireson 'em! But at that, any kind of speed landing bangs a fellow with arecoil like a rammed cannon. Now suppose between the ship and thelanding gear we had a new kind of shock absorbers--sort of buffers madeup 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 thisyoung fellow's reasoning, this radical plunge into something far out ofthe ordinary rounds of mechanisms. One piston-and-cylinder principle hadbeen harnessed to a gasoline vapor explosion to hurl a motor forward.Now here was this fellow's futuristic brain seeing anotherpiston-and-cylinder principle harnessed in oil or glycerin to gentlepower and ease a speed plane to the ground in a shockless landing!
Long into the night the three of them discussed the idea from allangles. It was his friends' advice that he keep his plans tohimself--for a while anyway. Then if the right backing ever came along,something worth while might be developed out of the thing. Any dabblingsin invention needed money to back them.
Out on the field, Hal went from week to week through the differentgrades of flying. Although he had done a deal of actual flying before heever entered the school, the precise, thorough routine training of theRand-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 theirapplication, then to straight and even flying, climbs, banks.
One day out on the flying field, Hal stood, neck cracked back, eyesglued to the sky, watching a plane that seemed to have gone mad in theheights. He was sure it was Raynor. He had seen Raynor take off justbefore. Must be his ship. Yet he had never seen Raynor double-daringdeath like that before.
