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In 1912 the British Admiralty became interested in the potential of the float planes promoted by Horace Short, one of the founders of Short Brothers, and ordered the construction of several Short aircraft for the newly formed Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps RFC. In early 1913, Horace Short patented a system that allowed the wings to be folded back so that the aircraft could be stowed more easily on the deck of a ship. (The patent, however, earned Short only £15, from T. O. M. Sopwith, who used it on his Sopwith 807 and 860. Other firms didn't bother to pay.) The workshops at Eastchurch then began to concentrate on developing a floatplane with just folding wings. The first of a number of these aircraft, logically referred to as Short Folder, were the Short S.63 and S.64 machines (in the Navy as No.81 and 82). Both machines were very similar to the earlier Short S.74 type, but their wings were double-trussed with longer upper wings and were powered by a twin-star 14-cylinder Gnome rotary engine of 119 kW/160 hp. The engine cowling featured a prominent chimney, used to vent the engine exhaust fumes.
During the 1913 naval manoeuvres, Short No.81 was carried aboard the seaplane carrier Hermes, which belonged to the Red Fleet. She was equipped with a Rouzet wireless radio, with which she made two successful reconnaissance flights on 21 June 1913. On 24 July she made another flight, complicated by rough seas and fog, and two days later was damaged in a rough surface landing. However, it was operational by the next day. On 1 August No.81 took off, piloted by Cdr. Samson and observer Lt. Fitzmaurice, from Great Yarmouth and covered over 100 miles without sighting Blue Fleet when a loose section of the cowling stopped the engine. No.81 was thus forced to surface, destroying her floats and severely damaging her tail surfaces, but fortunately was within sight of the German ship Clara Mennig, which picked them up. Meanwhile, on Hermes, they recognised that there was a problem, calculated their approximate position from the radio signals that No.81 had been sending before the malfunction, and sent HMS Mermaid to search for the machine. En route to the estimated position, Mermaid met up with Clara Mennig and the damaged aircraft found its way back to Hermes. A second aircraft, No.82, entered service in 1914, and in the summer of that year was used for the first aerial search for a submerged submarine, A.7.
Both Shorts proved the usefulness of folding wings, and the building of other machines was proceeded with. The exact appearance of the No.89, 90 and 186 is not known, but they were probably not significantly different from the No.81 and 82 and shared the same engine. The most famous Shorty Folder, as they were popularly called, but there were four more, numbers 119-122. These differed from the No.81 by having larger triple truss wings and a larger rounded rudder, which later became common on other float Shorts, and modified float struts. These machines entered RNAS Isle of Grain station service between March and June 1914 and were present at the naval parade at Spithead anchorage in July 1914.
In 1911 the Italian Captain Guidoni made the first torpedo drop from an aircraft and a year later the use of aircraft for torpedo attacks was promoted by the American Admiral Fiske. By then, discussions on the subject had begun in the British Navy, where a paper on the possibilities of flying torpedo carriers was written by Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson. Captain Sueter, Commander of the Admiralty Air Section, requested his transfer to the Naval Wing of the RFC to work on its implementation, and T. O. M. Sopwith was asked to co-operate. Under his direction the Sopwith Special torpedo bomber was built, but it was the Short Folder that became the first British machine from which a torpedo was launched. It was after the show at Spithead that a debate took place between Sqn.Ldr. A. M. Longmore, Commander of the Calshot Squadron, which demonstrated one of the Folders there, and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill about the possibility of modifying Folder No.121Within a week Horace Short had designed new struts between the floats to allow the torpedo to be suspended, and on 28 July 1914 he Longmore made the first torpedo drop from a British aircraft at Calshot. (A much later account by Horace's brother, Oswald Short, claims that the actual first torpedo launch was made the evening before by company pilot Gordon Bell, but this seems unlikely.)
The Great War broke out immediately, but no Short Folder was ever used to torpedo a German ship, although at least two other machines were modified to carry it. Torpedoed naval aircraft remained a rather marginal affair for the British Navy for the time being, with priority given to conventional bombers - the rather experimental torpedoed Folder, for example, could not carry a second observer because it would not carry one. However, torpedo experiments continued during August 1914, and improvised seaplane carriers Empress, Engadine and Riviera were hastily prepared for possible deployment. Engadine and Riviera were directly intended to operate torpedo planes in the North Sea, and although their three FOlders were never used for torpedo attacks, this was more likely due to the workload of their carriers in other tasks. Folders 119 and 120 piloted by Flt. Cdr. Robert Peel and Flt.Lt. A. N. Miley aboard HMS Engadine, together with five other RNAS machines, made a raid on Cuxhaven harbour on Christmas Day 1914. Miley's No.120 failed to return to her ship and was destroyed off Nordeney Island after the crew were picked up by submarine E.11. The raid was not overly successful, with two of the nine aircraft failing to take off and four being lost, but it nevertheless made both parties involved realise the potential of naval aviation.
Three Shorty Folder, were sent to Africa in early 1915 to assist in the hunt for the German light cruiser Königsberg, which was then in the Tanganyika delta of the Rufiji River. The first aerial search for him was undertaken by the confiscated flying boat Curtiss, but it was shot down, and two Sopwith 807s, which arrived at Niororo in February 1915, were also unsuccessful. The Shorts arrived in Durban in April 1915 aboard the armed transport Laconia, and arrived at Niororo on 23 May. By then the hopelessly obsolete Folders had made several reconnaissance sorties, during which they managed to photograph the cruiser, but the humid and hot climate took a heavy toll on them (none of them, for example, were able to take off with bombs to attack the loď from the air), and one of them was shot down by the Germans; they were then replaced in the search for the German raider by the newly arrived Farmans F.27 and Caudrons G.III. This was probably the final end of the Folder career, but in the meantime the "New Generation Folder" Short 74, Short 166 and later the very successful Short 184 type, for which the nickname "Folder" was also sometimes used.
Folder No.81 je spouštěn z paluby lodi HMS Hermes.
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Jeden z prvních Folderů předvádí Shortův patentní systém skládání křídel.
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Folder No.120 na stanici RNAS Westgate, září 1914. tento stroj také mohl nést torpédo, byla na něm, údajně kvůli problémovému motoru, podvěšena jen podstatně lehčí maketa. Byl zničen osádkou po náletu na Cuxhaven.
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