Linfield's Unsuccessful Efforts.
In 1878 Mr. Linfield tested an apparatus in England consisting of a
cigar-shaped car, to which was attached on each side frames five feet
square, containing each twenty-five superposed planes of stretched and
varnished linen eighteen inches wide, and only two inches apart, thus
reminding one of a Spanish donkey with panniers. The whole weighed two
hundred and forty pounds. This was tested by being mounted on a flat car
behind a locomotive going 40 miles an hour. When towed by a line fifteen
feet long the apparatus rose only a little from the car and exhibited
such unstable equilibrium that the experiment was not renewed. The lift
was only about one-third of what it would have been had the planes been
properly spaced, say their full width apart, instead of one-ninth as
erroneously devised.
