Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano, Vol 16, No 3
Articles in this issue
- Filippo Tajani surveys the world's underground railways: London's 1863 Metropolitan and the 1,100 km of tube lines under Greater London, the Paris Métro's rise from 40.5 to 165 million passengers between 1901 and 1906, Berlin's Ringbahn and the growth of Charlottenburg, New York's Rapid Transit Subway carrying 600,000 people in a day, and Milan's 133 million tram journeys in 1909 with a Metropolitana now under study.
- Photo plate of winter sport: the Touring Club de France's motor-sledge contest at the Vosges Week with the I. de la Besse sledge, the Nivert ski-cars, Legrain's air-propelled sledge and a gendarmerie captain's ski-bicycle, plus jumps and toboggan runs at the International Ski Championship and Italian Alpini on skis at the Piccolo San Bernardo.
- Prof. G. Bedeschi traces the Niobe legend from Homer and Pherecydes to the Uffizi Niobid group dug up in Rome in 1583 and bought by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici for 1800 ducats, C. R. Cockerell's 1816 reconstruction of the figures as a temple pediment, Bernini's Maddalena in Siena cathedral, and the Niobide Sallustiana unearthed in the Banca Commerciale excavations and now the subject of a lawsuit.
- Silio Carpani's essay on Palm Sunday, from schoolboy Easter holidays to the medieval liturgy: the priest costumed as Christ, the donkey said to have walked from Palestine to die near Verona, the Moscow patriarch's horse disguised with false ears, and the carved wooden Palmesel preserved in the Historical Museum of Basel, illustrated by Giotto, Botticini and Beato Angelico's Entries into Jerusalem.
- Dopo il Centenario di Fulton. Un secolo di progresso della navigazione a vapore (opens in a new tab)Giorgio Molli continues his steam-navigation history: the surface condenser and cylindrical marine boiler, Ericsson's screw, the Cunard Umbria and Etruria of 1883, the turbine-driven Lusitania and Mauretania at 33,200 tons and 26 knots, the Olympic and Titanic then building at Belfast, and Cavour's 1857 Genoa-Rio-Montevideo line with the Genova, Torino, Vittorio Emanuele and Conte di Cavour.
- Isidoro Baroni explains Kepler's three laws, Newton's gravitation and the parabolic tables used for new comets, ahead of Halley's Comet's 29th recorded return: perihelion on 20 April 1910, Venus crossing its tail on 1-2 May and the Earth on 18-19 May, with credit claimed for Toscanelli, Fracastoro and Borelli over Regiomontanus, Apian and Doerfel.
- Notice of the T.C.I. volume describing the twelve prize-winning designs from its competition among Italian engineers and architects for small and medium hotels at alpine and seaside resorts, with plans at 1:250, an article by Renato Simoni and a summary of Bertarelli's Bergamo lecture; L. 2,50 to members, L. 10 to the public.
- The Touring will present every delegate at the VII Italian Geographical Congress in Palermo with the seven sheets of its 1:250,000 map of Sicily, and Roberto Almagià praises the club's toponymy report in the Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana.
- Plate showing the plan and the ground of the 2-km Verona aviation circuit for the meeting of 20-30 May 1910: the north-west side along the railway deviation, the east side AB, a fort to be demolished, the south side and the launching field.
- Plate of the 3-km Milan aviation circuit being levelled for the meeting of 24 September to 3 October 1910, with the west and north sides shown under construction.
- Report on the Heliopolis meeting: Metrot won the Baron Empain prize on a Voisin biplane with 85.5 km, Rougier took the Heliopolis altitude prize at 255 m and the Grand Prix d'Égypte with 220 km, Leblon and Balsan followed on Blériot monoplanes, Grade flew his own monoplane, and Mortimer Singer's machine was wrecked; nobody attempted the Heliopolis-Pyramids straight-line flight.
- Picture page of aviation and motor-boating: the hangars at Cannes aerodrome, Druiff's engineless pedal-driven monoplane, Leonino da Zara's hangar and biplane at Padua, the Peugeot Rossel monoplane, the Reed hydroplane on bitubular floats, Blériot's new pigeon-tailed machine, the Faccioli biplane built by the SPA works in Turin, and a German ski-fitted biplane used as a sledge on snow.
- The monthly digest of technical and motoring news drawn from other reviews, this month covering Pullman motor coaches, an auxiliary motor wheel for bicycles, the Torpedo-Phaeton body, agricultural motors and flying schools in France.
- A French company is building luxury Pullman-type motor coaches for touring in France, Italy and Spain, fitted with restaurant and sleeping accommodation so travellers need never leave the vehicle, in direct competition with express-train wagons-lits.
- A motorcycle wheel carrying a 3/4 HP horizontal engine in a drum housing, clamped by two spring fittings alongside any bicycle's rear wheel; it runs off its own magneto and carries petrol and oil inside the mudguards, the rider pedalling only to help on steep gradients.
- The Torpedo-Phaeton shown at the Olympia Salon in London: a large touring car with small-diameter wheels and a low centre of gravity whose doors open forward instead of rearward, removing the danger of open doors when the car moves off unexpectedly.
- Two petrol-engined farm machines shown at recent motor exhibitions are illustrated as proof that the light, cheap and easily handled internal-combustion tractor has displaced the heavy and cumbersome steam engine for rural work.
- After studies begun in 1906 with the army corps commands and fresh negotiations with the Ministry of War, the Touring's 0.50 x 0.70 m dark-blue signs with white lettering, forbidding photographs and surveys in militarily supervised zones, have been adopted and will shortly be posted.
- Two ways of learning to fly without leaving the ground: Clément Bayard's trainer, a Santos Dumont aeroplane stripped of its lifting surfaces and mounted on a motor-car axle, and a 20 m2 engineless biplane on skids towed into a 7-8 m wind by a horse so the pupil can practise the elevator and ailerons.
- The department reviewing laws, taxes and trade figures affecting tourism, this month on the 1909 motor and cycle trade returns, the State airship service, the motor tax and Rome's postal vans.
- Italian car exports rose in every class in 1909 (975 to 1088 vehicles above 1000 kg, 602 to 975 in the middle class) and imports fell, but bicycle imports climbed from 7541 to 9869 machines with 13,596 quintals of parts, showing the cycle industry still unable to free itself from abroad.
- Following Arturo Mercanti's January article calling for a Ministry of the Air and the outing to Vigna di Valle with the War Minister and members of Parliament, the Prime Minister has publicly promised to organise Italy's airship service properly rather than fall behind the other great powers.
- Sonnino proposes handing the State's half of the 600,000-lire motor tax to the 69 provinces, which maintain most of the kingdom's roads; the Touring backs the transfer on condition that, as in England, the money is actually spent on road improvement.
- Rome's yellow postal motor-vans, run by a cooperative under Ministry contract, are killing women and children in the popular quarters; the Touring blames a timetable of fourteen kilometres an hour with seven stops and demands extra vans and stricter driver examinations before the backlash damages motor touring.
- The hygiene and sports-medicine department, this month on the mechanics and therapeutics of cycling, the effect of fatigue on the heart, and how the tourist should boil drinking water.
- The mechanics of riding: the load shared between saddle, handlebar and pedals (29 kg on the front wheel and 56 kg on the rear for a 64 kg rider on a 21 kg machine, 36 and 49 kg when leaning forward), crank length traded against pedal travel, and the sinusoidal line traced by the driving wheel.
- Moderate cycling burns the body's reserves and suits arthritic constitutions, but the vibration passed through the saddle to the spine and the chilling of a sweating but immobile trunk in the airstream are the chief dangers; saddles and suspensions are still imperfect.
- Orthodiagraphic Röntgen images from Dr. De Agostini's study, taken on young men after running, cycling and rapid climbs, show the cardiac shadow measurably shrinking with fatigue, a finding set alongside racing cyclists' albuminuria as a warning against excess.
- Method for the tourist with no mineral water: strip the straw from a wine flask, wash it with water and ash, half fill it, boil twenty minutes, shake the cooled water to re-aerate it and filter it through cotton wool; it keeps 48 hours in a closed bottle in a cool place.
- Book notices including Renzo Larco's Il Palio di Siena, Giotto Dainelli's In Africa on Eritrea and Dancalia, De Lorenzo's I Campi Flegrei and Carabellese's Bari in the Italia Artistica series, Forbes's History of Astronomy, the St Petersburg Guide du grand chemin de fer transsibérien and Cagnat's Carthage, Timgad, Tebessa.
- News picture page: the state of the Paris boulevards after the Seine flood, the King and Queen of Italy with Princess Elena of Serbia at the Villa Borghese horse show where Lieutenant Caffaratti won the steeplechase, a Paris express messenger's bicycle fitted with a taximeter, and the opening of a new Paris velodrome.
- The magazine's alphabetically arranged news miscellany, running from aeronautics and archaeology through exploration, railways, folklore and geography to mineralogy, navigation and tramways.
- The Aéro Club de France's airship commission studies wireless barometric reports from the Atlantic; a Zeppelin service is planned from Hamburg to Copenhagen and Malmö; Les Temps' subscription buys Zodiac and Astra airships and four aeroplanes for the government; and the racing cyclist Van der Born set a two-man duration record of 1h 48' 50" on a Farman biplane.
- Giulio Emanuele Rizzo of Turin is preparing a publication on Satricum, identified by Nibby in 1825 at the Conca farmstead between Anzio and Velletri, where the temples of Jupiter and Mater Matuta yielded rich finds; Arduino Colasanti will treat the Santa Casa of Loreto.
- C. Nordmann's stellar photometer gives the variable Algol a temperature of 23,800 absolute, and the American astronomical society asks for photographs and spectroscopic and photometric observations of Halley's Comet, sending an expedition to the Hawaiian islands from March to June.
- The third Russian Salon opens in St Petersburg from 25 May to 9 June with the club newly styled Imperial by the Czar, which is also preparing a St Petersburg-Kiev-Moscow-St Petersburg trial for June; the Automobile Club de France holds an April contest of high-power engines with Gnôme, Aster, Clerget, Chenu and De Dion Bouton entered.
- The Ligue Nationale Aérienne offers two prizes of 1000 lire before 16 June 1910, one for the first aeroplane to fly a closed kilometre from a tree-lined road and one for the smallest machine to cover a kilometre; Paul de Lesseps tests a 50 HP Gnôme monoplane of 350 kg and Roger Sommer a biplane of his own build at Monson.
- Dr Charcot returned from the Antarctic on 12 February having charted hundreds of kilometres of coast west of Graham Land beyond 70° south; a National Geographic Society commission confirmed Peary reached the Pole on 6 April 1909; Amundsen will take the Fram through Bering Strait in 1911; and Scott's Terra Nova is fitting out against a rival Peary-organised expedition.
- Progress on the Cuneo-Ventimiglia line, which crosses French soil and is due in May 1914; the Monte Bianco aerial cableway from Les Pellerins to the Aiguille du Midi, 4792 m long with a 2700 m rise and a single fare of L. 17,60; the Loetschberg tunnel nine kilometres into eleven; the Transandine Buenos Aires-Valparaíso service in 38 hours; and the new Christiania-Bergen line.
- The Scoppio del Carro at Florence, traced from Pazzo de' Pazzi's return from Palestine in 1101 with a stone of the Holy Sepulchre to the gilded Pazzi car and the dove-shaped colombina that runs down a wire from the Duomo to fire the car at the Gloria on Holy Saturday, an unbroken custom of almost ten centuries now in decline.
- The international commission for the 1:1,000,000 map of the world, meeting in London, fixed sheets of 4° latitude by 6° longitude, Greenwich as prime meridian, a polyconic projection, hypsometric tints and Latin lettering; and a three-section expedition explored the upper Pechora and the Urals, finding the region fit for agricultural colonisation.
- The Ufficio Centrale di Meteorologia e Geodinamica is reorganising the Benadir service in Italian Somaliland, with full observatories already working at Mogadishu, Brava and Giumbo, another planned at Gelib on the Juba, and thermo-pluviometric stations at Bardera and on the Uebi Scebeli staffed by the radiotelegraph personnel.
- United States gold output in 1908 was worth $94,560,000 and silver $28,050,600; the Cobalt Camp mines in Canada produced 29,968 tons of silver ore in 1909; Norway's iron deposits hold 500 million tons; and radium is on sale in Vienna at 400,000 lire a gramme.
- Official costs of Italy's new warships (Dante Alighieri L. 57,250,130 and the Conte di Cavour, Giulio Cesare and Leonardo da Vinci at L. 61,900,000 each); the State's new postal steamers Catania, Messina, Siracusa, Palermo, Terranova, Maddalena and Caprera, two of them with Parsons turbines; and the Balmoral Castle as the largest launch of 1909.
- Italy's 344 tramway lines ran 4215 km at the end of 1907 with 19,624 staff, 595 steam locomotives and 2043 electric motor cars, causing 140 deaths and 2067 injuries in the year; and the American "Pay as you enter" car, with one front entrance and the conductor stationed at it, has raised receipts 10 per cent and cut accidents in New York, Chicago and Buffalo.
- Resolutions taken by the Touring's Direzione and Consiglio at their sittings of 4 February 1910, covering the Mille caravan, the Turin road exhibition, consular appointments, the new motor regulations, insurance terms and the club's premises and accounts.
- The council authorises detailed terms for a formal agreement with deputy Barzilai, president of the national federation of Italian journalists' associations, over its share in the caravan commemorating Garibaldi's Thousand, which is also adopted as the Touring's general rally for 1910.
- Bertarelli reports that the commission set up by the executive committee of the Turin 1911 exhibition has confirmed the guiding principles of the Touring's proposed International Road Exhibition, as set out in the memorandum presented to Senator Tomaso Villa.
- The council votes a gold medal to engineer Forlanini for his work on Italian airship navigation, silver medals to his collaborators, bronze to the staff, a silver aerial-touring plaque for the dirigible's car and a bronze plaque for its hangar.
- Agreements with the Committee for Italian Exhibitions Abroad and engineer Antonio Ragnoli are approved for the Touring's stand at the 1910 International Transport Exhibition in Buenos Aires, backed by a local committee working with the consulate, the Italian chamber of commerce and the Circolo Italiano.
- The national aerial tourism commission is authorised to publish in 1910 the first Annuario Aeronautico of the Touring Club Italiano, on the model of the club's long-established Annuario dell'Automobilismo.
- Rather than buy a building, the council unanimously accepts the landlord's offer to renew the lease of the club's premises at Via Monte Napoleone 14 for a further six years, thanking engineer Achille Binda and the premises commission, since 1910-11 is too crowded a programme to add a move.
- The completely revised 1910 Annuario Generale appears this month; eight further sheets of the Carta d'Italia (Ancona, Quadro d'unione, Bergamo, S. Severo, Susa, Gargano, Domodossola, Orbetello) will be issued in twos and fours; and the Sicily regional guide will come out in two volumes.
- List, by class of membership and by town from Acquapendente to Asia and South America, of those who applied to join the Touring Club Italiano between 1 and 31 January 1910.
- The ordinary general meeting is convened for Sunday 3 April 1910 at 15:00 in the hall of the Istituto dei Ciechi, Via Vivaio 7, Milan, to approve the 1909 accounts and elect six councillors (Badini, Barutta, Belotti, Johnson, Guastalla, Moro) and three auditors (Magnocavallo, Soffredi, Turrini), all re-eligible; ballots must return by 3 July.
- Auditors Camillo Magnocavallo, Attilio Soffredi and Gino Turrini report on the balance sheet closed at 31 December 1909, noting a simple, transparent account with negligible liabilities and a carried-forward saving greater than the income of the club's own patrimony.
- Results of the draw held at the Touring's offices on 25 February for 55 extra prizes among the 116 benemeriti members, headed by Fevoli of Livorno, with U. Gagliardi of Casilda drawn eight times and C. Mauprivez of Milan four.
- The closing balance sheet at 31 December 1909, listing holdings of Italian rendita and Meridionali and Mediterranee railway bonds, stocks of guides, maps and the 1:250,000 Carta d'Italia, and subscriptions paid in advance for 1910 by 14,876 Italian renewals at L. 6 and 1546 new Italian members at L. 8, signed by vice-director general L. V. Bertarelli.