Edward Robert Armstrong
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Edward Robert Armstrong (1876-1955) was a Canadian born engineer and inventor who in 1927 proposed a series of "seadromes" for airplanes to land on and refuel, for transatlantic flights.
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[edit] Early career
He was born in 1876 in Guelph, Ontario, and he moved to the United States and worked in Texas in the early 1900s, developing oil-well-drilling machinery. In 1909 he went to St. Louis, Missouri as an automotive and aviation engineer, and in 1916 he went to DuPont to work on the construction of their nitrocellulose plant in Hopewell, Virginia. He was then promoted to chief of the plant’s mechanical research department. In 1924 he quit DuPont to work fulltime on his "seadrome" project. In 1926 he incorporated the "Armstrong Seadrome Development Company", of Wilmington, Delaware.....
[edit] Seadrome
A seadrome was to be a floating steel landing strip, the size of an aircraft carrier, anchored to the ocean floor by steel cables. It would be rise 70 feet (21 m) or more above the surface of the ocean by tubular columns that would allow waves to pass underneath. The columns would terminate in ballast tanks 100 feet (30 m) below the surface. Each seadrome would be about 350 miles (560 km) apart, to allow for refueling of airplanes. The dromes would have restaurants and hotel accommodations. He had been thinking of the idea as early as 1913. In 1915 he completed the first design, and in 1922 he built a 1/300 scale model. In 1926 he performed a test that he filmed, with scale models of his seadrome and the ocean liner Majestic in a tank of water. He used a fan to create the equivalent of 40-foot (12 m) waves, and the seadrome was stable. In 1927 when the first transatlantic flights were made, newspapers started running stories of his concept. He had financial backing until The Depression in 1929. The last time he made the proposal was in 1943, during World War II. By that time long range aircraft had already been designed for the war effort, and aircraft carriers were already in use.
Time magazine wrote on November 27, 1933:
A perennial gift to Sunday feature editors for the last five years has been the Armstrong Seadrome, vividly imaginative project for a chain of floating airports across the Atlantic. The perfect publicity subject, it offered serious readers masses of data on construction of huge platforms, stabilized high above the waves by means of weighted pillars, on problems of anchorage, navigation, operation, economics. For gumchewers there were exciting pictures of a seadrome at night, in midocean position, with flags flying, floodlights blazing, beacons stabbing the dark sky, gorgeous express planes gliding down to safe landings. Even the windows of the drome's elegant hotel underlying the deck were pricked out with cozy lights.
[edit] Publications
- Edward Robert Armstrong; America-Europe via North Atlantic airways over the Armstrong seadrome system of commercial ocean transit by airplane (1927)
- Edward Robert Armstrong; The seadrome project for transatlantic airways (1943)
- Leonard H. Quick; Seadrome: phase 1 report
