[00:00.49]Many strange new means of transport have been developed in our century,
[00:05.22]the strangest of them being perhaps the hovercraft.
[00:09.63]In 1953, a former electronics engineer in his fifties, Christopher Cockerell,
[00:17.16]who had turned to boat-building on the Norfolk Broads,
[00:20.99]suggested an idea on which he had been working for many years to the British Government and industrial circles.
[00:28.66]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.
[00:39.95]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.
[00:53.97]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.
[01:06.20]His answer was to lift the vessel out of the water by a great number of ring-shaped air jets on the bottom of the craft.
[01:22.76]It 'flies', therefore, but it cannot fly higher -- its action depends on the surface, water or ground, over which it rides.
[01:33.59]The first tests on the Solent in 1959 caused a sensation.
[01:39.57]The hovercraft travelled first over the water, then mounted the beach, climbed up the dunes, and sat down on a road.
[01:48.71]Later it crossed the Channel, riding smoothly over the waves, which presented no problem.
[01:55.56]Since that time, various types of hovercraft have appeared and taken up regular service.
[02:01.97]The hovercraft is particularly useful in large areas with poor communications such as Africa or Australia;
[02:11.01]it can become a 'flying fruit-bowl', carrying bananas from the plantations to the ports;
[02:17.64]giant hovercraft liners could span the Atlantic;
[02:22.12]and the railway of the future may well be the 'hovertrain',
[02:27.17]riding on its air cushion over a single rail, which it never touches, at speeds up to 300 m.p.h.
