Many strange new means of transport have been developed in our century, the strangest of them being
perhaps the hovercraft. In 1953, a former electronics engineer in his fifties, Christopher
Cockerell, who had turned to boat-building on the Norfolk Broads, suggested an idea on which he had
been working for many years to the British Government and industrial circles. It was the idea of
supporting a craft on a 'pad', or cushion, of low-pressure air, ringed with a curtain of
higher-pressure air. Ever since, people have had difficulty in deciding whether the craft should be
ranged among ships, planes, or land vehicles -- for it is something in between a boat and an
aircraft. As a shipbuilder, Cockerell was trying to find a solution to the problem of the wave
resistance which wastes a good deal of a surface ship's power and limits its speed. His answer was
to lift the vessel out of the water by making it ride on a cushion of air, no more than one or two
feet thick. This is done by a great number of ring-shaped air jets on the bottom of the craft.
It 'flies', therefore, but it cannot fly higher -- its action depends on the surface, water or
ground, over which it rides.
The first tests on the Solent in 1959 caused a sensation. The hovercraft travelled first over the
water, then mounted the beach, climbed up the dunes, and sat down on a road. Later it crossed the
Channel, riding smoothly over the waves, which presented no problem.
Since that time, various types of hovercraft have appeared and taken up regular service. The
hovercraft is particularly useful in large areas with poor communications such as Africa or
Australia; it can become a 'flying fruit-bowl', carrying bananas from the plantations to the ports;
giant hovercraft liners could span the Atlantic; and the railway of the future may well be the
'hovertrain', riding on its air cushion over a single rail, which it never touches, at speeds up to
300 m.p.h. -- the possibilities appear unlimited.