"
"Go it, Joe," said Harry Corwin. "You spent a good time listening
to what that French pilot said about Garros the other day."
"The Frenchman told me that a very well known pilot of the early days
of the war, named Garros, invented the arrangement whereby a gun could
be so mounted that the bullets went through the arc of the
revolving propeller blades," answered Joe. "He said, too, that
Garros had the bad luck to be taken prisoner, and the Germans got
his machine before he had any chance to destroy it. That was the
way the Germans got hold of the idea. Garros simply designed a bit
of mechanism that automatically stops the gun from firing when the
propeller blade is passing directly in front of the gun-barrel. He
placed the gun-barrel directly behind the propeller. He then made a
cam device so regulated as to fire the gun with a delay not exceeding
one five-hundredth of a second. As soon as the blade of the
propeller passes the barrel the system liberates the firing mechanism
of the gun until another blade passes, or is about to pass, when
the bullets that would pierce it are held up, just for that
fraction of a second, again.
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