Science's Strangest Inventions by Tom Quinn

Author:Tom Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910232477
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2015-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

FLYING SUBMARINE

AMERICA, 1928

The arms race gives inventors unique opportunities. Few countries can resist an idea that may save lives or money or help them win a war or control their populations. No sooner has someone designed a new shell that will pierce the latest tank armour than another company (sometimes the same one) develops a new form of defence that will defeat the new form of attack, and this process continues indefinitely. The interesting thing about it all is that the arms companies themselves don’t want to produce something completely unbeatable because they would slow down the rate at which tit-for-tat products can be produced, marketed and sold, and selling products is what the arms equipment companies really want to do.

Anti-personnel mines – designed to blow a leg or a hand off – are produced by the million in many parts of the world and even apparently civilised countries such as America have refused to become signatories to an international agreement to stop making them. The Americans (and Chinese) are presumably convinced that none of their own children will ever stumble across one of these truly absurd inventions. But of course no sooner has an anti-personnel mine been designed and sold than the company that made it will offer an expensive invention designed to track and destroy harmlessly that new anti-personnel mine.

In a sense, all military inventions are mad, but even within the mad category there are degrees of insanity and at the extreme end of lunatic invention is the amphibious military aeroplane. Now, technically the idea is well within the capabilities of modern industrial design. Float planes land on and take off from water in their tens of thousands all over the world every day of the year and once a plane has landed it might well be useful to batten down the hatches and set off, to all intents and purposes like a boat. Wings could be made to fold inward, a propeller could be fitted and a conning tower (rather like that on a submarine) constructed. Such an idea has been put forward on a number of occasions but the costs of making this hybrid have always seemed to outweigh the benefits.

What you actually get for your money is a not very efficient boat and a not very efficient aeroplane.

What must the Admiralty have thought when they were offered an already patented aeroplane that doubled not just as an ordinary boat but as a submarine, too? The patent, though detailed and logical, would have required engineering effort on a huge and cripplingly expensive scale. The Admiralty wisely decided that the vast cost was not outweighed by the benefits. Indeed it was very difficult to see what possible benefits there could be, which is perhaps odd because on the face of it one might be forgiven for thinking that a plane that could land and turn itself into a submersible would give one country a definite military advantage over another. But that’s the initial reaction; when the military

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