THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent thinking and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes. The Flettner ship, which is just now filling the whole world with amazement, is an excellent example of this commonplace and, for us, far from flattering truth. It also has the special attraction in its favor that the way in which the Flettner rotors work remains a mystery to most laymen, although they only involve the application of mechanical forces which every man believes himself to understand instinctively.
The scientific basis for Flettner’s invention is really some two hundred years old. It has existed ever since Euler and Bernulli determined the fundamental laws of the frictionless motion of liquids. The practical possibility of achieving it, on the other hand, has only existed for a few decades—to be exact, since we have possessed usable small motors. Even then the discovery did not come automatically; chance and experience had to intervene several times first.
The Flettner ship is closely akin to the sailing ship in the way it works; as in the latter, the force of the wind is the only motive-power for propelling the ship, but instead of sails, the wind acts on vertical sheet-metal cylinders, which are kept rotating by small motors. These motors only have to overcome the small amount of friction which the cylinders encounter from the surrounding air and in their bearings. The motive power for the ship is, as I said, provided by the wind alone. The rotating cylinders look like ship’s funnels, only they are several times as high and thick. The area they present to the wind is some ten times smaller than that of the equivalent tackle of a sailing ship.
“But how on earth do these rotating cylinders produce motive power?”, the layman asks in despair. I will attempt to answer this question as far as it is possible to do so without using mathematical language.
In all motions of fluids (liquids or gases) where the effect of friction can be neglected, the following remarkable law holds good:—If the fluid is moving at different velocities at different points in a uniform current, the pressure is less at those points where the velocity is greater, and vice versa. This is easily understood from the primary law of the motion. If in a liquid in motion there is present a velocity with a rightward direction increasing from left to right, the individual particle of liquid is bound to undergo acceleration on its journey from left to right. In order that this acceleration may take place, a force has to act on the particle in a rightward direction. This requires that the pressure on its left edge should be stronger than that on its right. Therefore, the pressure in the liquid is greater on the left than on the right when the velocity is greater on the right than on the left.
FIG 1.
This law of the inverse ratio of the pressure to the velocity obviously makes it possible to determine the force of pressure produced by the motion of a liquid (or gas), simply by knowing the distribution of velocities in the liquid. I will now proceed to show, by a familiar example—that of the scent-spray—how the principle can be applied.
Through a pipe slightly widened at its orifice, A, air is expelled at a high velocity by means of a compressible rubber bulb. The jet of air goes on spreading uniformly in all directions as it travels, in the course of which the velocity of the current gradually sinks to zero. According to our law it is clear that there is less pressure at A, owing to the high velocity, than at a greater distance from the aperture; at A there is suction, in contrast to the more distant, stationary air. If a pipe, R, with both its ends open, is stood up with its upper end in the zone of high velocity and its lower end in a vessel filled with a liquid, the vacuum at A will draw the liquid upwards out of the vessel, and the liquid on emerging at A will be divided into tiny drops and whisked off by the current of air.
FIG 2.
After this preliminary canter let us consider the liquid motion in a Flettner cylinder. Let C be the cylinder as seen from above. Let it not rotate to begin with. Let the wind be blowing in the direction indicated by the arrows. It has to make a certain detour round the cylinder C, in the course of which it passes A and B at the same velocity. Hence the pressure will be the same at A and B and there is no dynamic effect on the cylinder. Now let the cylinder rotate in the direction of the arrow P. The result is that the current of wind as it goes past the cylinder is divided unequally between the two sides: for the motion of the wind will be aided by the rotation of the cylinder at B, and hindered at A. The rotation of the cylinders gives rise to a motion with a greater velocity at B than at A. Hence the pressure at A is greater than at B, and the cylinder is acted upon by a force from left to right, which is made use of to propel the ship.
FIG 3.
One would have thought that an inventive brain might have hit upon this idea by itself, i.e., without an extraneous cause. This, however, is what actually happened. It was observed in the course of experience that even in the absence of wind the trajectories of cannon balls exhibited considerable, irregular varying lateral deflections from the vertical plane through the initial direction of the shots. This strange phenomenon was necessarily connected, on grounds of geometry, with the rotation of the cannon balls, as there could be no other conceivable reason for a lateral asymmetry in the resistance of the air. After this phenomenon had caused a good deal of trouble to the experts, the Berlin professor of physics, Magnus, discovered the right explanation about half way through last century. It is the same as the one I have already given for the force which acts on the Flettner cylinder in the wind; only the place of the cylinder C is taken by a cannon ball rotating about the vertical axis, and that of the wind by the relative motion of the air with reference to the flying cannon ball. Magnus confirmed his explanation by experiments with a rotating cylinder which was not materially different from a Flettner cylinder. A little later the great English physicist, Lord Rayleigh, independently discovered the same phenomenon again in regard to tennis balls and also gave the correct explanation. Quite a short time ago the well known professor Prandtl has made an accurate experimental and theoretical study of fluid motion around Magnus cylinders, in the course of which he devised and carried out practically the whole of Flettner’s invention. It was seeing Prandtl’s experiments that put the idea into Flettner’s head that this device might be used to take the place of sails. Who knows if anyone else would have thought of it if he had not?