An Ordinary General Meeting- of the Society was held at the Royal Society of Arts, on Thursday, February ist, 1923, Professor L. Bairstow in the chair.The Chairman, in opening- the proceedings, said that Mr. G. S. Baker, O.B.E., of the National Physical Laboratory, would deal with flying boats and seaplanes. He would deal with the hull and its design, that part of the seaplane which differentiates it from the aeroplane. That subject had been touched on very lightly by Major Rennie at the previous meeting of the Society, in view of the present paper by Mr. Baker.Mr. Baker had begun work in 1912 on the problems of hull design, at a time when nothing of a definite nature was known; a few individual experiments had been carried out, but there was no systematised knowledge at all at that time. From that state of ignorance a great deal of experimental work had now rescued us. He did not know how far Mr. Baker would stress the point, but it was quite clear, from the investigation of certain accidents to seacraft, that there were fundamental differences in the behaviour of seaplane hulls on the water, differences which had a great deal of effect on the risk of flying-. For instance, if one type of hull was such that when the plane rose in the air it stalled, then all the aerodynamical consequences of stalling- followed, and there was difficulty. On the other hand, it appeared that we had a type of flying- boat which did not make the plane stall on getting into the air, and consequently if it came back to the water it was still controlled. For this type of development, which he believed really dated back to the C.E.i, we were mainly indebted to Mr. Baker and his associates at the National Physical Laboratory, and to the generosity of Sir Alfred Yarrow in placing such a magnificent piece of apparatus as the experimental tank at the disposal of the nation.Mr. Baker then read his paper on “ Ten Years’ Testing of Model Seaplanes.”
Newton as an experimenter