Sailless Ship

Anton Flettner's Rotor Ship (TiME, Nov. 17)--or Sailless Ship, as it is more commonly called--has set the scientific world agog. Early reports were entirely misleading. There is no question of capturing the energy of the wind by means of a windmill and transmitting this energy in electrical fashion to an ordinary type of propeller. The invention is at once more simple in mechanism and more recondite in principle. Imagine the Flettner ship broadside to a natural wind, with its huge cylinders rotating in the same direction as the hands of a clock laid flat on deck, 18 with the top of the clock at the bow. The air of the broadside wind will follow the path of least resistance and move with, and in the same rotational direction as, the surface of the cylinder. When air passes rapidly over any surface, it produces suction over that surface. And this is precisely what happens in the giant revolving cylinders. They are in suction on their forward side and are pulled forward accordingly. The vessel moves with them. This principle was discovered by Heinrich G. Magnus, a German physicist, in 1853. It took more than 70 years to find a genius to apply it.