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Aviation History
1912
1912 - 0139.PDF
FEBRUARY 17, 1912. gyssg THE PAULHAN.TATIN AERO-TORPEDO. IT is a universally recognised fact that, among the various machines that have come to light during the past year, none can lay claim to a greater measure of real sound originality than can the Aero- Torpedo of M. Victor Tatin. Throughout the whole machine there is an atmosphere indicating the extent of painstaking thought that must have been devoted to the development of each individual part and to the embodiment in sound constructional form of those purely aero-dynamical desiderata which up to the present constructors have avoided in view of the complications involved. Having faith in his convictions and ignoring the comments of " Freak," which arrangement of the propeller is much more easily attainable, some few attempts have been made to effect this disposition in the past in connection with monoplane design, but as these experiments were in every case soon abandoned, it may be assumed that to Tatin belongs the credit of being the first to obtain any measure of success with this system. In England the enterprising Petre Brothers exhibited a monoplane incorporating this feature at the Olympia Aero Show in 1910, but the tests which followed had to be brought to a conclusion in view of the difficulties in the way of its successful application. At about the same time another monoplane of the canard type, but ' Aero Torpedo No. 1," the first experimental machine of this type, with which 88 miles per hour was obtained, with Gaudart at the lever. greeted his enterprise when the rough details of the new machine he was constructing leaked out for the first time, he has proceeded with his experiments and produced a machine, which, by virtue of its excellent performances and extreme novelty, was the centre of interest at the last Paris Salon. Although the machine expresses so many novel ideas in aeroplane design, it is nevertheless a fact that its .whole conception, excepting as regards the arrangement of the propeller, was established in the brain of M. Tatin as long ago as 33 years- o The most notable feature that becomes evident on first inspection is that, opposed to conventional monoplane practice the propeller, such in the true sense of the word, is arranged at the extreme rear end of the torpedo shaped body, where driven by a shaft some 20 ft. long, it revolves in the region of air disturbance that follows the passage of the machine and is so enabled to work with greater efficiency. The notion of placing the propeller at the rear occurred •to Tatin something like twenty years since. Apart from the number of craft of the genus canard in which this THE FORERUNNER OF THE '* AERO-TORPEDO."— The model, driven by compressed air, with which Tatin experimented at Cbalals-Meudon in 1870. The Paulhan-Tatin monoplane at the Paris Aero Show. 139
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