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Show WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK I - I By LEMUEL F. PARTON Consolidated Features. WNU Release. NEW YORK. We get word from Detroit that Igor Sikorsky's helicopter, the rocking chair of the sky, is in production and that one . Detroit fac- Dreams to Music; toryisman. War Helicopter Is ufacturing ...... parts. The Latest Contribution army and navy have been this way and that about the helicopter, but there is no doubt that it is now a war weapon. Its uses are a military secret, but its value in spotting submarines and in reconnaissance are obvious. It can take off from any ship deck and it can hover in the air like a humming hum-ming bird while a mechanic swings down under and changes a wheel Igor Sikorsky is a shy, gentle man who dreams great dreams. His book, "The Story of the Winged S," begins with the story of a dream. At the age of 24 he was the father of Russian aviation and he was launching cardboard dinosaurs into the air before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. He built the first great air clippers and the czar's first huge bombers were of his design. With the revolution revolu-tion on, he found it difficult to keep his mind on his dreams and went to Paris to lecture before YMCA audiences on a variety of subjects. Rachmaninoff, the pianist, wanted him to keep on dreaming, and, with other musicians, gathered $100,000 to this end. In the U. S. A., he built the huge S-35. It was to take Rene Fonck to France, but it crashed on the runway and burned two men to death. Mr. Sikorsky kept on designing de-signing and building, a pioneer of multi-engined planes, in his 36-acre air plant in Connecticut. His dreams are paced to music, mu-sic, Chopin frequently, as music is somehow innate in his genius and inseparable from his aeronautical aero-nautical flights into the future which he says belongs to the air. Eight hundred classical records are a part of his work-a-day equipment. On his tidy little home farm, he raises cucumbers cu-cumbers and drives his own tractor. He loves cucumbers, perhaps on account of their nice design. He is plump, bald and hesitant, with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. His father was professor pro-fessor of psychology at the University Uni-versity of Kiev. IT WOULD BE just like the versatile versa-tile marines to unveil a sea-going truck. That's just what 'they have done, and we've been trying to find Sr. t i out whether ea- Going' J ruck ... . e it was used Just What Doctor in the Dieppe Ordered for War rai , The navy wasn't talkative about it, but there is sufficient wide open news of this jungle jallopy to justify the conclusion con-clusion that it is the most novel and exciting new fighting tool this war has yet produced and sure to score heavily in landing operations to come and it appears that they are coming fast. The marines call it their "invasion "in-vasion taxi," and its inventor, Donald Roebling, grandson of the builder of the Brooklyn bridge, calls it the "alligator." It goes about twice as fast on land as on water. Twenty-five feet long and about as wide as a box car, it can be lowered over the side of a transport or warship, take the water like a duck and, hitting the shore, keep right on mushing along. It can carry a big load of leathernecks, leather-necks, a military freight car, or plenty of fighting gear. The caterpillar cater-pillar treads have wide, diagonally placed cleats which serve as fins or paddles in the water, and nobody has to tuck them in or reset them when it reaches land. It is armed and armored, of course not heavily, but capable of resisting fairly brisk fire. On February 17 of this year, the marines ordered 200 of them at a cost of $3,200,000. They have been in forced-draft production in a big Detroit auto factory. Down in Florida, it was just a "swamp buggy" at first, or a "mercy "mer-cy tank," developed by Donald Roebling after the hurricane of 1933, to rescue storm victims marooned in the Everglades. It took him seven years to bring it through and a war to make him change the name from "mercy tank" to "alligator.". He apparently inherited in-herited the inventive and constructive construc-tive genius of his grandfather, the late Washington A. Roebling, who not only built the Brooklyn bridge, but spanned Niagara gorge in 1850. Young Roebling has been known as a sportsman, much at sea on his yacht Iorano, on which he led a Smithsonian exploration of the Caribbean Car-ibbean sea and the Gulf of Mexico in 1937. His absorbing life interests are science and invention. |
