Rotoring

The strange ship Baden-Baden, with a black ball at her masthead to show she is a sailing vessel but with no canvas to prove it, moved in and out of New York harbor last week with distinguished company aboard. Inventor Herr Anton Flettner of Kiel, Germany, explained as best he could to Inventor John Hays Hammond Jr., Manufacturer Walter P. Chrysler, Naval Architect Frederick Hoyt, Yachtsman Caleb Bragg, Shipbuilder Homer L. Ferguson, Financiers E. T. Irving, Harold Vanderbilt, Percy Rockefeller, and many another, what it was that drove the ship, whose Diesel motors lay idle, past harbor tugs, slow tramps and barges at an eight-knot clip. His guests scrutinized the Baden-Baden's two whirling towers of iron, 65 feet high and ten feet through, and tried to realize that, according to the Magnus principle, the quartering wind that struck the cylindrical metal sails created suction on their surfaces, the suction being greatest on the forward surfaces when they were rotated "into the wind" -- i.e., clockwise for a starboard breeze, counterclockwise for a larboard. By proper reversals of the rotors, the ship was easily made to tack and maneuver.

Herr Flettner's claim for the practicability of "rotoring" was strengthened by figures he could quote from the log of the Baden-Baden's lately completed pioneer cruise with a cargo of stone from Hamburg to Manhattan via the Canary Islands. She had used but 30% of the fuel oil any other 660-ton ship would have required without rotors. The rotors were at their best lending power auxiliary to the thrust of the motor-driven propeller, and in high winds off Gibraltar that had given the craft full headway when its motors were helpless. Herr Flettner told also of motor-driven water-pumps, lighting plants and even airships of the future.