Your ShelfYour Projects

WALKING ON THE WATER

20%

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 21, 1880

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 6, No. 39.

Read the full edition

WALKING ON THE WATER.

A YOUNG man named W. C. Soule a short time since walked across Harlem river on the face of the water, at a spot about one hundred yards above High Bridge. His feet were shod with what he calls "water skates" an invention of his own, and he was dressed in a suit of ordinary summer clothing, and wore a straw hat. The skate is an air vessel, made of zinc, and hermetically sealed. The contrivance is about five feet in length, ten inches broad, and five inches deep, with vertical sides, and tapers off fore and aft, or at the toe and heel, like a steamboat. On the deck, or upper surface, there is a socket, shoe-shaped, and about four and a half inches deep, into which the foot is set, the opening being guarded by a rim of metal one inch and a half high, to keep the water from washing into the socket. The bottom of the skate is fitted with a double gang of automatic paddles, one gang forward and the other aft, with five blades in each gang. The blades are set on swivels in a frame ten inches square, that hangs vertically from the bottom of the skate. As the skate is pushed forward through the water, the blades are opened and offer no resistance, but when the foot rests so as to begin a forward movement with the other foot, the pressure backwards closes the blades and gives a purchase on the water that materially aids in propulsion. Each skate weighs actually about eight pounds, but in the water, owing to its buoyancy, it has no perceptible weight on the foot.
Mr. Soule weighs about 125 pounds, and when he stands on his skates in the water they sink about three and a half inches, leaving the deck and one inch and a half of the sides above the water.
Mr. Soule put the skates in the water alongside a boating float, and without any support stepped into one, then into the other, and started off on his walk. The tide was running out at the rate of perhaps two miles an hour, but he made his way directly across the stream, and turned and came back to his starting-point. The total distance traveled was perhaps 500 yards. The movement in walking is a sort of gliding step, the skate being at no time lifted out of the water. The progress, of course, is necessarily slow, as there is a recoil or retardation at every step, notwithstanding the resistance offered by the paddles.—New York Letter.

JUST SUCH NEIGHBORS.