“ARROW BULLETS” AND AERIAL TORPEDOES
The “arrow bullet” shown in [Fig. 3] is a French device; though weighing only three-quarters of an ounce, its peculiar shape enables it to acquire a high velocity, so that it will kill a man when dropped from a height of six hundred yards. An aerial torpedo carried by French aeroplanes for the destruction of Zeppelins is shown in [Fig. 4]; it contains a powerful charge of explosive and a fuse, to which the suspending-wire is connected. When dropped on a Zeppelin, the needle-pointed torpedo pierces the envelope and gas-chamber, but the wooden cross is arrested and the sudden jerk on the suspending-wire sets the fuse in action, causing the certain destruction of the airship. The torpedo would be too dangerous to handle, but the French have an ingenious device which renders it perfectly safe until it is dropped.
MACHINE GUNS IN AIRCRAFT
Various attempts have been made to mount machine guns on aeroplanes, but the operator, in his narrow seat, has hardly space to point a machine gun in any direction except straight to his front. The American Curtis machine gun exhibited at Olympia is the most efficient form yet produced, but at present the airman seems to prefer an automatic rifle. Even in the early days of the war, Sir John French was able to report that British airmen had disposed of no less than five of the enemy’s aircraft with this weapon.
The Zeppelins are well armed with machine guns, carrying one in each of the two cars, and one on top of the structure. Access is had to the latter by means of a shaft and ladder which passes up through the gas-chambers.
ACCURACY IN DROPPING BOMBS
The Zeppelins have elaborate bomb-dropping apparatus with which it should be theoretically possible to drop a bomb with great accuracy, but on the occasion when it was tried at Antwerp, the Germans met with no great success. The principle of the bomb-dropping device is as follows: A sort of camera, pointed vertically downwards, is used, and an observer notes the speed with which an object on the ground passes across the field, and the direction in which it appears to move. He then reads the height of the airship from the barometer, which gives the time taken by the bomb to fall, say fifteen seconds for 3,500 feet. He has now to calculate, from the data given by the camera-observation, the allowance to be made for speed and leeway for fifteen seconds of fall, and to point his sighting-tube accordingly. The air-ship is steered to windward of the target, and at the moment when the target (say, the second funnel of a dreadnaught) appears on the cross wires, the nine hundred-pound bomb is dropped, and the ship goes to the bottom.
Scene of Air Raid on England.
Leigh, shown on the map, is only twenty-five miles from the British capital, and South End just five miles further on. The fleet of Zeppelins, or aeroplanes, or both, it will be seen, got uncomfortably close to the British metropolis.