THE EARLIEST FLYING MEN
The conquest of the air has been the dream of mankind for uncounted
centuries. As far back as we have historic records we find stories
of the attempts of men to fly. The earliest Greek mythology is full
of aeronautical legends, and the disaster which befell Icarus and
his wings of wax when exposed to the glare of the midsummer sun in
Greece, is part of the schoolboy's task in Ovid. We find like
traditions in the legendary lore of the Peruvians, the East Indians,
the Babylonians, even the savage races of darkest Africa. In the
Hebrew scriptures the chief badge of sanctity conferred on God's
angels was wings, and the ability to fly. If we come down to the
mythology of more recent times we find our pious ancestors in New
England thoroughly convinced that the witches they flogged and
hanged were perfectly able to navigate the air on a broomstick--thus
antedating the Wrights' experiments with heavier-than-air machines
by more than 250 years.
It is an interesting fact, stimulating to philosophical reflection,
that in the last decade more has been done toward the conquest of
the air, than in the twenty centuries preceding it, though during
all that period men had been dreaming, planning, and experimenting
upon contrivances for flight. Moreover when success came--or such
measure of success as has been won--it came by the application of an
entirely novel principle hardly dreamed of before the nineteenth
century.
Some of the earlier efforts to master gravity and navigate the air
are worthy of brief mention if only to show how persistent were the
efforts from the earliest historic ages to accomplish this end.
Passing over the legends of the time of mythology we find that
many-sided genius, Leonardo da Vinci, early in the sixteenth
century, not content with being a painter, architect, sculptor,
engineer and designer of forts, offering drawings and specifications
of wings which, fitted to men, he thought would enable them to fly.
The sketches are still preserved in a museum at Paris. He modelled
his wings on those of a bat and worked them with ropes passing over
pulleys, the aviator lying prone, face downward, and kicking with
both arms and legs with the vigour of a frog. There is, unhappily,
no record that the proposition ever advanced beyond the literary
stage--certainly none that Da Vinci himself thus risked his life.
History records no one who kicked his way aloft with the Da Vinci
device. But the manuscript which the projector left shows that he
recognized the modern aviator's maxim, "There's safety in altitude."
He says, in somewhat confused diction:
The bird should with the aid of the wind raise itself to a great
height, and this will be its safety; because although the
revolutions mentioned may happen there is time for it to recover
its equilibrium, provided its various parts are capable of strong
resistance so that they may safely withstand the fury and impetus
of the descent.
[Illustration: _The Fall of the Boche._
_From the painting by Lieutenant Farré._
Photo by Peter A. Juley.]
The fallacy that a man could, by the rapid flapping of wings of any
sort, overcome the force of gravity persisted up to a very recent
day, despite the complete mathematical demonstration by von
Helmholtz in 1878 that man could not possibly by his own muscular
exertions raise his own weight into the air and keep it suspended.
Time after time the "flapping wings" were resorted to by ambitious
aviators with results akin to those attained by Darius Green. One of
the earliest was a French locksmith named Besnier, who had four
collapsible planes on two rods balanced across his shoulders. These
he vigorously moved up and down with his hands and feet, the planes
opening like covers of a book as they came down, and closing as they
came up. Besnier made no attempt to raise himself from the ground,
but believed that once launched in the air from an elevation he
could maintain himself, and glide gradually to earth at a
considerable distance. It is said that he and one or two of his
students did in a way accomplish this. Others, however,
experimenting with the same method came to sorry disaster. Among
these was an Italian friar whom King James IV. of Scotland had made
Prior of Tongland. Equipped with a pair of large feather wings
operated on the Besnier principle, he launched himself from the
battlements of Stirling Castle in the presence of King James and
his court. But gravity was too much for his apparatus, and turning
over and over in mid-air he finally landed ingloriously on a manure
heap--at that period of nascent culture a very common feature of the
pleasure grounds of a palace. He had a soul above his fate however,
for he ascribed his fall not to vulgar mechanical causes, but wholly
to the fact that he had overlooked the proper dignity of flight by
pluming his wings with the feathers of common barn-yard fowl instead
of with plumes plucked from the wings of eagles!
In sharp competition with the aspiring souls who sought to fly with
wings--the forerunners of the airplane devotees of to-day--were
those who tried to find some direct lifting device for a car which
should contain the aviators. Some of their ideas were curiously
logical and at the same time comic. There was, for example, a
priest, Le Père Galien of Avignon. He observed that the rarified air
at the summit of the Alps was vastly lighter than that in the
valleys below. What then was to hinder carrying up empty sacks of
cotton or oiled silk to the mountain tops, opening them to the
lighter air of the upper ranges, and sealing them hermetically when
filled by it. When brought down into the valleys they would have
lifting power enough to carry tons up to the summits again. The good
Father's education in physics was not sufficiently advanced to warn
him that the effort to drag the balloons down into the valley would
exact precisely the force they would exert in lifting any load out
of the valley--if indeed they possessed any lifting power
whatsoever, which is exceedingly doubtful.
Another project, which sounded logical enough, was based on the
irrefutable truth that as air has some weight--to be exact 14.70
pounds for a column one inch square and the height of the earth's
atmosphere--a vacuum must be lighter, as it contains nothing, not
even air. Accordingly in the seventeenth century, one Francisco
Lana, another priest, proposed to build an airship supported by four
globes of copper, very thin and light, from which all the air had
been pumped. The globes were to be twenty feet in diameter, and were
estimated to have a lifting force of 2650 pounds. The weight of the
copper shells was put at 1030 pounds, leaving a margin of possible
weight for the car and its contents of 1620 pounds. It seemed at
first glance a perfectly reasonable and logical plan. Unhappily one
factor in the problem had been ignored. The atmospheric pressure on
each of the globes would be about 1800 tons. Something more than a
thin copper shell would be needed to resist this crushing force and
an adequate increase in the strength of the shells would so enhance
their weight as to destroy their lifting power.
[Illustration: Lana's Vacuum Balloon.]
To tell at length the stories of attempt and failure of the earliest
dabblers in aeronautics would be unprofitable and uninteresting. Not
until the eighteenth century did the experimenters with
lighter-than-air devices show any practical results. Not until the
twentieth century did the advocates of the heavier-than-air machines
show the value of their fundamental idea. The former had to discover
a gaseous substance actually lighter, and much lighter, than the
surrounding atmosphere before they could make headway. The latter
were compelled to abandon wholly the effort to imitate the flapping
of a bird's wings, and study rather the method by which the bird
adjusts the surface of its wings to the wind and soars without
apparent effort, before they could show the world any promising
results.
Nearly every step forward in applied science is accomplished because
of the observation by some thoughtful mind of some common phenomenon
of nature, and the later application of those observations to some
useful purpose.
It seems a far cry from an ancient Greek philosopher reposing
peacefully in his bath to a modern Zeppelin, but the connection is
direct. Every schoolboy knows the story of the sudden dash of
Archimedes, stark and dripping from his tub, with the triumphant cry
of "Eureka!"--"I have found it!" What he had found was the rule
which governed the partial flotation of his body in water. Most of
us observe it, but the philosophical mind alone inquired "Why?"
Archimedes' answer was this rule which has become a fundamental of
physics: "A body plunged into a fluid is subjected by this fluid to
a pressure from below to above equal to the weight of the fluid
displaced by the body." A balloon is plunged in the air--a fluid. If
it is filled with air there is no upward pressure from below, but if
it is filled with a gas lighter than air there is a pressure upward
equal to the difference between the weight of that gas and that of
an equal quantity of air. Upon that fact rests the whole theory and
practice of ballooning.
The illustration of James Watt watching the steam rattle the cover
of a teapot and from it getting the rudimentary idea of the steam
engine is another case in point. Sometimes however the application
of the hints of nature to the needs of man is rather ludicrously
indirect. Charles Lamb gravely averred that because an early
Chinaman discovered that the flesh of a pet pig, accidentally
roasted in the destruction by fire of his owner's house, proved
delicious to the palate, the Chinese for years made a practice of
burning down their houses to get roast pig with "crackling." Early
experimenters in aviation observed that birds flapped their wings
and flew. Accordingly they believed that man to fly must have wings
and flap them likewise. Not for hundreds of years did they observe
that most birds flapped their wings only to get headway, or
altitude, thereafter soaring to great heights and distances merely
by adjusting the angle of their wings to the various currents of air
they encountered.
In a similar way the earliest experimenters with balloons observed
that smoke always ascended. "Let us fill a light envelope with
smoke," said they, "and it will rise into the air bearing a burden
with it." All of which was true enough, and some of the first
balloonists cast upon their fires substances like sulphur and pitch
in order to produce a thicker smoke, which they believed had greater
lifting power than ordinary hot air.
In the race for actual accomplishment the balloonists, the advocates
of lighter-than-air machines, took the lead at first. It is
customary and reasonable to discard as fanciful the various devices
and theories put forward by the experimenters in the Middle Ages and
fix the beginning of practical aeronautical devices with the
invention of hot-air balloons by the Montgolfiers, of Paris, in
1783.
The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Jacques, were paper-makers of
Paris. The family had long been famous for its development of the
paper trade, and the many ingenious uses to which they put its
staple. Just as the tanners of the fabled town in the Middle Ages
thought there was "nothing like leather" with which to build its
walls and gates, thereby giving a useful phrase to literature, so
the Montgolfiers thought of everything in terms of paper. Sitting by
their big open fireplace one night, so runs the story, they noticed
the smoke rushing up the chimney. "Why not fill a big paper bag with
smoke and make it lift objects into the air?" cried one. The
experiment was tried next day with a small bag and proved a complete
success. A neighbouring housewife looked in, and saw the bag bumping
about the ceiling, but rapidly losing its buoyancy as the smoke
escaped.
[Illustration: Montgolfier's Experimental Balloon.]
"Why not fasten a pan below the mouth of the bag," said she, "and
put your fire in that? Its weight will keep the bag upright, and
when it rises will carry the smoke and the pan up with it."
Acting upon the hint the brothers fixed up a small bag which sailed
up into the air beyond recapture. After various experiments a bag of
mixed paper and linen thirty-five feet in diameter was inflated and
released. It soared to a height of six thousand feet, and drifted
before the wind a mile or more before descending. The ascent took
place at Avonay, the home at the time of the Montgolfiers, and as
every sort of publicity was given in advance, a huge assemblage
including many officials of high estate gathered to witness it. A
roaring fire was built in a pit over the mouth of which eight men
held the great sack, which rolled, and beat about before the wind as
it filled and took the form of a huge ball. The crowd was
unbelieving and cynical, inclined to scoff at the idea that mere
smoke would carry so huge a construction up into the sky. But when
the signal was given to cast off, the balloon rose with a swiftness
and majesty that at first struck the crowd dumb, then moved it to
cheers of amazement and admiration. It went up six thousand feet and
the Montgolfiers were at once elevated to almost an equal height of
fame. The crowd which watched the experiment was wild with
enthusiasm; the Montgolfiers elated with the first considerable
victory over the force of gravity. They had demonstrated a principle
and made their names immortal. What remained was to develop that
principle and apply it to practical ends. That development, however,
proceeded for something more than a century before anything like a
practical airship was constructed.
But for the moment the attack on the forces which had kept the air
virgin territory to man was not allowed to lag. In Paris public
subscriptions were opened to defray the cost of a new and greater
balloon. By this time it was known that hydrogen gas, or
"inflammable air" as it was then called, was lighter than air. But
its manufacture was then expensive and public aid was needed for the
new experiment which would call at the outset for a thousand pounds
of iron filings and 498 pounds of sulphuric acid wherewith to
manufacture the gas.
The first experiment had been made in the provinces. This one was
set for Paris, and in an era when the French capital was
intellectually more alert, more eager for novelty, more interested
in the advancement of physical science and in new inventions than
ever in its long history of hospitality to the new idea. They began
to fill the bag August 23, 1783 in the _Place des Victoires_, but
the populace so thronged that square that two days later it was
moved half filled to Paris's most historic point, the _Champ de
Mars_. The transfer was made at midnight through the narrow dark
streets of mediæval Paris. Eyewitnesses have left descriptions of
the scene. Torch-bearers lighted on its way the cortège the central
feature of which was the great bag, half filled with gas, flabby,
shapeless, monstrous, mysterious, borne along by men clutching at
its formless bulk. The state had recognized the importance of the
new device and cuirassiers in glittering breastplates on horseback,
and halbardiers in buff leather on foot guarded it in its transit
through the sleeping city. But Paris was not all asleep. An escort
of the sensation-loving rabble kept pace with the guards. The cries
of the quarters rose above the tramp of the armed men. Observers
have recorded that the passing cab drivers were so affected by
wonder that they clambered down from their boxes and with doffed
hats knelt in the highway while the procession passed.
The ascension, which occurred two days later, was another moving
spectacle. In the centre of the great square which has seen so many
historic pageants, rose the swaying, quivering balloon, now filled
to its full capacity of twenty-two thousand feet. Whether from the
art instinct indigenous to the French, or some superstitious idea
like that which impels the Chinese to paint eyes on their junks, the
balloon was lavishly decorated in water colours, with views of
rising suns, whirling planets, and other solar bodies amongst which
it was expected to mingle.
Ranks of soldiers kept the populace at a distance, while within the
sacred precincts strolled the King and the ladies and cavaliers of
his court treading all unconsciously on the brink of that red terror
soon to engulf the monarchy. The gas in the reeling bag was no more
inflammable than the air of Paris in those days just before the
Revolution. With a salvo of cannon the guy-ropes were released and
the balloon vanished in the clouds.
Benjamin Franklin, at the moment representing in France the American
colonies then struggling for liberty, witnessed this ascension! "Of
what use is a new-born child?" he remarked sententiously as the
balloon vanished. 'Twas a saying worthy of a cautious philosopher.
Had Franklin been in Paris in 1914 he would have found the child,
grown to lusty manhood, a strong factor in the city's defence. It is
worth noting by the way that so alert was the American mind at that
period that when the news of the Montgolfiers' achievement reached
Philadelphia it found David Rittenhouse and other members of the
Philosophical Society already experimenting with balloons.
[Illustration: _A Rescue at Sea._
_From the painting by Lieutenant Farré._
Photo by Peter A. Juley.]
A curious sequel attended the descent of the Montgolfier craft which
took place in a field fifteen miles from Paris. Long before the days
of newspapers, the peasants had never heard of balloons, and this
mysterious object, dropping from high heaven into their peaceful
carrot patch affrighted them. Some fled. Others approached timidly,
armed with the normal bucolic weapons--scythes and pitchforks.
Attacked with these the fainting monster, which many took for a
dragon, responded with loud hisses and emitted a gas of unfamiliar
but most pestiferous odour. It suggested brimstone, which to the
devout in turn implied the presence of Satan. With guns, flails, and
all obtainable weapons they fell upon the emissary of the Evil One,
beat him to the ground, crushed out of him the vile-smelling breath
of his nostrils, and finally hitched horses to him and dragged him
about the fields until torn to tatters and shreds.
When the public-spirited M. Charles who had contributed largely to
the cost of this experiment came in a day or two to seek his balloon
he found nothing but some shreds of cloth, and some lively legends
of the prowess of the peasants in demolishing the devil's own
dragon.
The government, far-sightedly, recognizing that there would be more
balloons and useful ones, thereupon issued this proclamation for the
discouragement of such bucolic valour:
A discovery has been made which the government deems it wise to
make known so that alarm may not be occasioned to the people. On
calculating the different weights of inflammable and common air
it has been found that a balloon filled with inflammable air will
rise toward heaven until it is in equilibrium with the
surrounding air; which may not happen till it has attained to a
great height. Anyone who should see such a globe,
resembling the moon in an eclipse, should be aware that far from
being an alarming phenomenon it is only a machine made of
taffetas, or light canvas covered with paper, that cannot
possibly cause any harm and which will some day prove serviceable
to the wants of society.
Came now the next great step in the progress of aeronautics. It had
been demonstrated that balloons could lift themselves. They had even
been made to lift dumb animals and restore them to earth unhurt. But
if the conquest of the air was to amount to anything, men must go
aloft in these new machines. Lives must be risked to demonstrate a
theory, or to justify a calculation. Aeronautics is no science for
laboratory or library prosecution. Its battles must be fought in the
sky, and its devotees must be willing to offer their lives to the
cause. In that respect the science of aviation has been different
from almost any subject of inquiry that has ever engaged the
restless intellect of man, unless perhaps submarine navigation, or
the invention of explosives. It cannot be prosecuted except with a
perfect willingness to risk life. No doubt this is one of the
reasons why practical results seemed so long in the coming. Nor have
men been niggardly in this enforced sacrifice. Though no records of
assured accuracy are available, the names of forty-eight aeronauts
who gave up their lives in the century following the Montgolfiers'
invention are recorded. That record ended in 1890. How many have
since perished, particularly on the battlefields of Europe where
aircraft are as commonplace as cannon, it is too early yet to
estimate.
[Illustration: Montgolfier's Passenger Balloon.]
After the success of the ascension from the _Champ de Mars_, the
demand at once arose for an ascension by a human being. It was a
case of calling for volunteers. The experiments already made showed
clearly enough that the balloon would rise high in air. Who would
risk his life soaring one thousand feet or more above the earth, in
a flimsy bag, filled with hot air, or inflammable gas, without means
of directing its course or bringing it with certainty and safety
back to a landing place? It was a hard question, and it is
interesting to note that it was answered not by a soldier or sailor,
not by an adventurer, or devil-may-care spirit, but by a grave and
learned professor of physical science, Pilatre de Rozier. Presently
he was joined in his enterprise by a young man of the fashionable
world and sporting tastes, the Marquis d'Arlandes. Aristocratic
Paris took up aviation in the last days of the eighteenth century,
precisely as the American leisure class is taking it up in the first
days of the twentieth.
The balloon for this adventure was bigger than its predecessors and
for the first time a departure was taken from the spherical
variety--the gas bag being seventy-four feet high, and forty-eight
feet in diameter. Like the first Montgolfier balloons it was to be
inflated with hot air, and the car was well packed with bundles of
fuel with which the two aeronauts were to fill the iron brazier when
its fires went down. The instinct for art and decoration, so strong
in the French mind, had been given full play by the constructors of
this balloon and it was painted with something of the gorgeousness
of a circus poster.
A tremendous crowd packed the park near Paris whence the ascent was
made. Always the spectacle of human lives in danger has a morbid
attraction for curiosity seekers, and we have seen in our own days
throngs attracted to aviation congresses quite as much in the
expectation of witnessing some fatal disaster, as to observe the
progress made in man's latest conquest over nature. But in this
instance the occasion justified the widest interest. It was an
historic moment--more epoch-making than those who gathered in that
field in the environs of Paris could have possibly imagined. For in
the clumsy, gaudy bag, rolling and tossing above a smoky fire lay
the fundamentals of those great airships that, perfected by the
persistence of Count Zeppelin, have crossed angry seas, breasted
fierce winds, defied alike the blackest nights and the thickest fogs
to rain their messages of death on the capital of a foe.
Contemporary accounts of this first ascension are but few, and those
that have survived have come down to us in but fragmentary form. It
was thought needful for two to make the ascent, for the car, or
basket, which held the fire hung below the open mouth of the bag,
and the weight of a man on one side would disturb the perfect
equilibrium which it was believed would be essential to a successful
flight. The Marquis d'Arlandes in a published account of the brief
flight, which sounds rather as if the two explorers of an unknown
element were not free from nervousness, writes:
"Our departure was at fifty-four minutes past one, and occasioned
little stir among the spectators. Thinking they might be frightened
and stand in need of encouragement I waved my arm."
This solicitude for the fears of the spectators, standing safely on
solid earth while the first aeronauts sailed skywards, is
characteristically Gallic. The Marquis continues:
M. de Rozier cried: "You are doing nothing, and we are not
rising." I stirred the fire and then began to scan the river,
but Pilatre again cried: "See the river. We are dropping into
it!" We again urged the fire, but still clung to the river bed.
Presently I heard a noise in the upper part of the balloon,
which gave a shock as though it had burst. I called to my
companion: "Are you dancing?" The balloon by this time had many
holes burnt in it and using my sponge I cried that we must
descend. My companion however explained that we were over Paris
and must now cross it; therefore raising the fire once more we
turned south till we passed the Luxembourg, when,
extinguishing the flames, the balloon came down spent and
empty.
If poor Pilatre played the part of a rather nervous man in this
narrative he had the nerve still to go on with his aeronautical
experiments to the point of death. In 1785 he essayed the crossing
of the English Channel in a balloon of his own design, in which he
sought to combine the principles of the gas and hot-air balloons. It
appears to have been something like an effort to combine
nitro-glycerine with an electric spark. At any rate the dense crowds
that thronged the coast near Boulogne to see the start of the
"Charles--Montgolfier"--as the balloon was named after the
originators of the rival systems--saw it, after half an hour's drift
out to sea, suddenly explode in a burst of flame. De Rozier and a
friend who accompanied him were killed. A monument still recalls
their fate, which however is more picturesquely recorded in the
signs of sundry inns and cafés of the neighbourhood which offer
refreshment in the name of _Les Aviateurs Perdus_.
Thereafter experimenters with balloons multiplied amazingly. The
world thought the solution of the problem of flight had been found
in the gas bag. Within two months a balloon capable of lifting
eighteen tons and carrying seven passengers ascended three thousand
feet at Lyons, and, though sustaining a huge rent in the envelope,
because of the expansion of the gas at that height, returned to
earth in safety. The fever ran from France to England and in 1784,
only a year after the first Montgolfier experiments, Lunardi, an
Italian aeronaut made an ascension from London which was viewed by
King George III. and his ministers, among them William Pitt. But the
early enthusiasm for ballooning quickly died down to mere curiosity.
It became apparent to all that merely to rise into the air, there to
be the helpless plaything of the wind, was but a useless and futile
accomplishment. Pleasure seekers and mountebanks used balloons for
their own purposes, but serious experimenters at once saw that if
the invention of the balloon was to be of the slightest practical
value some method must be devised for controlling and directing its
flight. To this end some of the brightest intellects of the world
directed their efforts, but it is hardly overstating the case to say
that more than a century passed without any considerable progress
toward the development of a dirigible balloon.
[Illustration: Charles's Balloon.]
But even at the earlier time it was evident enough that the Quaker
philosopher, from the American Colonies, not yet the United States,
whose shrewd and inquiring disposition made him intellectually one
of the foremost figures of his day, foresaw clearly the great
possibilities of this new invention. In letters to Sir Joseph Banks,
then President of the Royal Society of London, Franklin gave a
lively account of the first three ascensions, together with some
comments, at once suggestive and humorous, which are worth quoting:
Some think [he wrote of the balloon] Progressive Motion on the
Earth may be advanc'd by it, and that a Running Footman or a
Horse slung and suspended under such a Globe so as to have no
more of Weight pressing the Earth with their Feet than Perhaps
8 or 10 Pounds, might with a fair Wind run in a straight Line
across Countries as fast as that Wind, and over Hedges, Ditches
and even Waters. It has been even fancied that in time People
will keep such Globes anchored in the Air to which by Pullies
they may draw up Game to be preserved in the Cool and Water to
be frozen when Ice is wanted. And that to get Money it will be
contriv'd, by running them up in an Elbow Chair a Mile high for
a guinea, etc., etc.
With his New England lineage Franklin could hardly have failed of
this comparison: "A few Months since the Idea of Witches riding
through the Air upon a broomstick, and that of Philosophers upon a
Bag of Smoke would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous."
To-day when aircraft are the eyes of the armies in the greatest war
of history, and when it appears that, with the return of peace, the
conquest of the air for the ordinary uses of man will be swiftly
completed, Franklin's good-humoured plea for the fullest
experimentation is worth recalling. And the touch of piety with
which he concludes his argument is a delightful example of the
whimsical fashion in which he often undertook to bolster up a
mundane theory with a reference to things supernatural.
[Illustration: _A French Observation Balloon on Fire._
© U. & U.]
I am sorry this Experiment is totally neglected in England, where
mechanic Genius is so strong. I wish I could see the same
Emulation between the two Nations as I see between the two
Parties here. Your Philosophy seems to be too bashful. In this
Country we are not so much afraid of being laught at. If we do a
foolish thing, we are the first to laugh at it ourselves, and are
almost as much pleased with a _Bon Mot_ or a _Chanson_, that
ridicules well the Disappointment of a Project, as we might have
been with its success. It does not seem to me a good reason to
decline prosecuting a new Experiment which apparently increases
the power of Man over Matter, till we can see to what Use that
Power may be applied. When we have learnt to manage it, we may
hope some time or other to find Uses for it, as men have done for
Magnetism and Electricity, of which the first Experiments were
mere Matters of Amusement.
This Experience is by no means a trifling one. It may be attended
with important Consequences that no one can foresee. We should
not suffer Pride to prevent our progress in Science.
Beings of a Rank and Nature far superior to ours have not
disdained to amuse themselves with making and launching Balloons,
otherwise we should never have enjoyed the Light of those
glorious objects that rule our Day & Night, nor have had the
Pleasure of riding round the Sun ourselves upon the Balloon we
now inhabit.
B. FRANKLIN.
The earliest experimenters thought that oars might be employed to
propel and direct a balloon. The immediate failure of all endeavours
of this sort, led them, still pursuing the analogy between a balloon
and a ship at sea, to try to navigate the air with sails. This again
proved futile. It is impossible for a balloon, or airship to "tack"
or manoeuvre in any way by sail power. It is in fact a monster sail
itself, needing some other power than the wind to make headway or
steerage way against the wind. The sail device was tested only to be
abandoned. Only when a trail rope dragging along the ground or sea
is employed does the sail offer sufficient resistance to the wind to
sway the balloon's course this way or that. And a trailer is
impracticable when navigating great heights.
[Illustration: Roberts Brothers' Dirigible.]
For these reasons the development of the balloon lagged, until Count
Zeppelin and M. Santos-Dumont consecrated their fortunes, their
inventive minds, and their amazing courage to the task of perfecting
a dirigible. In a book, necessarily packed with information
concerning the rapid development of aircraft which began in the last
decade of the nineteenth century and was enormously stimulated
during the war of all the world, the long series of early
experiments with balloons must be passed over hastily. Though
interesting historically these experiments were futile. Beyond
having discovered what could _not_ be done with a balloon the
practitioners of that form of aeronautics were little further along
in 1898 when Count Zeppelin came along with the first plan for a
rigid dirigible than they were when Blanchard in 1786, seizing a
favourable gale drifted across the English Channel to the French
shore, together with Dr. Jefferies, an American. It was just 124
years later that Bleriot, a Frenchman, made the crossing in an
airplane independently of favouring winds. It had taken a century
and a quarter to attain this independence.
In a vague way the earliest balloonists recognized that power,
independent of wind, was necessary to give balloons steerage way and
direction. Steam was in its infancy during the early days of
ballooning, but the efforts to devise some sort of an engine light
enough to be carried into the air were untiring. Within a year after
the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers, the suggestion was made
that the explosion of small quantities of gun-cotton and the
expulsion of the resulting gases might be utilized in some fashion
to operate propelling machinery. Though the suggestion was not
developed to any useful point it was of interest as forecasting the
fundamental idea of the gas engines of to-day which have made
aviation possible--that is, the creation of power by a series of
explosions within the motor.
In the effort to make balloons dirigible one of the first steps was
to change the form from the spherical or pear-shaped bag to a
cylindrical, or cigar-shape. This device was adopted by the brothers
Robert in France as early as 1784. Their balloon further had a
double skin or envelope, its purpose being partly to save the gas
which percolated through the inner skin, partly to maintain the
rigidity of the structure. As gas escapes from an ordinary balloon
it becomes flabby, and can be driven through the air only with
extreme difficulty. In the balloon of the Robert brothers air could
from time to time be pumped into the space between the two skins,
keeping the outer envelope always fully distended and rigid. In
later years this idea has been modified by incorporating in the
envelope one large or a number of smaller balloons or "balloonets,"
into which air may be pumped as needed.
The shape too has come to approximate that of a fish rather than a
bird, in the case of balloons at least. "The head of a cod and the
tail of a mackerel," was the way Marey-Monge, the French aeronaut
described it. Though most apparent in dirigible balloons, this will
be seen to be the favourite design for airplanes if the wings be
stripped off, and the body and tail alone considered. Complete,
these machines are not unlike a flying fish.
In England, Sir George Cayley, as early as 1810 studied and wrote
largely on the subject of dirigibles but, though the English call
him the "father of British aeronautics," his work seems to have been
rather theoretical than practical. He did indeed demonstrate
mathematically that no lifting power existed that would support the
cumbrous steam-engine of that date, and tried to solve this dilemma
by devising a gas engine, and an explosive engine. With one of the
latter, driven by a series of explosions of gunpowder, each in a
separate cell set off by a detonator, he equipped a flying machine
which attained a sufficient height to frighten Cayley's coachman,
whom he had persuaded to act as pilot. The rather unwilling aviator,
fearing a loftier flight, jumped out and broke his leg. Though by
virtue of this martyrdom his name should surely have descended to
fame with that of Cayley it has been lost, together with all record
of any later performances of the machine, which unquestionably
embodied some of the basic principles of our modern aircraft, though
it antedated the first of these by nearly a century.
[Illustration: Giffard's Dirigible.]
We may pass over hastily some of the later experiments with dirigibles
that failed. In 1834 the Count de Lennox built an airship 130 feet
long to be driven by oars worked by man power. When the crowd that
gathered to watch the ascent found that the machine was too heavy to
ascend even without the men, they expressed their lively contempt for
the inventor by tearing his clothes to tatters and smashing his
luckless airship. In 1852, another Frenchman, Henry Giffard, built a
cigar-shaped balloon 150 feet long by 40 feet in diameter, driven by
steam. The engine weighed three hundred pounds and generated about 3
H.-P.--about 1/200 as much power as a gas engine of equal weight would
produce. Even with this slender power, however, Giffard attained a
speed, independent of the wind, of from five to seven miles an
hour--enough at least for steerage way. This was really the first
practical demonstration of the possibilities of the mechanical
propulsion of balloons. Several adaptations of the Giffard idea
followed, and in 1883 Renard and Krebs, in a fusiform ship, driven by
an electric motor, attained a speed of fifteen miles an hour. By this
time inventive genius in all countries--save the United States which
lagged in interest in dirigibles--was stimulated. Germany and France
became the great protagonists in the struggle for precedence and in
the struggle two figures stand out with commanding prominence--the
Count von Zeppelin and Santos-Dumont, a young Brazilian resident in
Paris who without official countenance consecrated his fortune to, and
risked his life in, the service of aviation.