"I hope you'll excuse me interrupting," said a very beautiful young lady, "my name is Efficiency, and, while, no doubt, all you have said is quite true, and that, as my young man the Designer says, 'You can make a tea-tray fly if you slap on Power enough,' I can assure you that I'm not to be won quite so easily."
"Well," eagerly replied the Lift and the Thrust, "let's be friends. Do tell us what we can do to help you to overcome Gravity and Drift with the least possible Power. That obviously seems the game to play, for more Power means heavier engines, and that in a way plays into the hands of our enemy, Gravity, besides necessitating a larger Surface or Angle to lift the Weight, and that increases the Drift."
"Very well," from Efficiency, "I'll do my best, though I'm so shy, and I've just had such a bad time at the Factory, and I'm terribly afraid you'll find it awfully dry."
"Buck up, old dear!" This from several new-comers, who had just appeared. "We'll help you," and one of them, so lean and long that he took up the whole height of the lecture room, introduced himself.
"I'm the High Aspect Ratio," he said, "and what we have got to do to help this young lady is to improve the proportion of Lift to Drift. The more Lift we can get for a certain area of Surface, the greater the Weight the latter can carry; and the less the Drift, then the less Thrust and Power required to overcome it. Now it is a fact that, if the Surface is shaped to have the greatest possible span, i.e., distance from wing-tip to wing-tip, it then engages more air and produces both a maximum Reaction and a better proportion of Lift to Drift.
"That being so, we can then well afford to lose a little Reaction by reducing the Angle of Incidence to a degree giving a still better proportion of Lift to Drift than would otherwise be the case; for you must understand that the Lift-Drift Ratio depends very much upon the size of the Angle of Incidence, which should be as small as possible within certain limits. So what I say is, make the surface of Infinite Span with no width or chord, as they call it. That's all I require, I assure you, to make me quite perfect and of infinite service to Miss Efficiency."
