THE SERVICES OF SANTOS-DUMONT
In his book _My Airships_ the distinguished aviator A. Santos-Dumont
tells this story of the ambition of his youth and its realization in
later days:
I cannot say at what age I made my first kites, but I remember
how my comrades used to tease me at our game of "pigeon flies."
All the children gather round a table and the leader calls out
"Pigeon Flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!" and so on; and
at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes,
however, he would call out "Dog flies! Fox flies!" or some other
like impossibility to catch us. If any one raised a finger then
he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to
wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called "Man
flies!" for at the word I would always raise my finger very high,
as a sign of absolute conviction, and I refused with energy to
pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me the happier I was,
hoping that some day the laugh would be on my side.
Among the thousands of letters which I received after winning the
Deutsch prize (a prize offered in 1901 for sailing around the
Eiffel Tower) there was one that gave me peculiar pleasure. I
quote from it as a matter of curiosity:
"Do you remember, my dear Alberto, when we played together
'Pigeon Flies!'? It came back to me suddenly when the news of
your success reached Rio. 'Man flies!' old fellow! You were right
to raise your finger, and you have just proved it by flying round
the Eiffel Tower.
"They play the old game now more than ever at home; but the
name has been changed, and the rules modified since October 19,
1901. They call it now 'Man flies!' and he who does not raise his
finger at the word pays the forfeit."
The story of Santos-Dumont affords a curious instance of a boy being
obsessed by an idea which as a man he carried to its successful
fruition. It offers also evidence of the service that may accrue to
society from the devotion of a dilettante to what people may call a
"fad," but what is in fact the germ of a great idea needing only an
enthusiast with enthusiasm, brains, and money for its development.
Because the efforts of Santos-Dumont always smacked of the amateur
he has been denied his real place in the history of aeronautics,
which is that of a fearless innovator, and a devoted worker in the
cause.
Born on one of those great coffee plantations of Brazil, where all
is done by machinery that possibly can be, Santos-Dumont early
developed a passion for mechanics. In childhood he made toy
airplanes. He confesses that his favourite author was Jules Verne,
that literary idol of boyhood, who while writing books as wildly
imaginative as any dime tale of redskins, or nickel novel of the
doings of "Nick Carter" had none the less the spirit of prophecy
that led him to forecast the submarine, the automobile, and the
navigation of the air. At fifteen Santos-Dumont saw his first
balloon and marked the day with red.
[Illustration: © U. & U.
_A British Kite Balloon._
(_The open sack at the lower end catches the breeze and keeps the
balloon steady._)]
I too desired to go ballooning [he writes]. In the long
sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, when the hum of insects,
punctuated by the far-off cry of some bird lulled me, I would lie
in the shade of the veranda and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil
where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their
great outstretched wings; where the clouds mount so gaily in the
pure light of day, and you have only to raise your eyes to fall
in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of
the aërial ocean, I, too, devised airships and flying-machines in
my imagination.
[Illustration: © U. & U.
_A British "Blimp" Photographed from Above._]
From dreaming, the boy's ambitions rapidly developed into actions.
Good South Americans, whatever the practice of their northern
neighbours, do not wait to die before going to Paris. At the age of
eighteen the youth found himself in the capital of the world. To his
amazement he found that the science of aeronautics, such as it was,
had stopped with Giffard's work in 1852. No dirigible was to be
heard of in all Paris. The antiquated gas ball was the only way to
approach the upper air. When the boy tried to arrange for an
ascension the balloonist he consulted put so unconscionable a price
on one ascent that he bought an automobile instead--one of the first
made, for this was in 1891--and with it returned to Brazil. It was
not until six years later that, his ambition newly fired by reading
of Andrée's plans for reaching the Pole in a balloon, Santos-Dumont
took up anew his ambition to become an aviator. His own account of
his first ascent does not bear precisely the hall-mark of the
enthusiast too rapt in ecstasy to think of common things. "I had
brought up," he notes gravely, "a substantial lunch of hard-boiled
eggs, cold roast beef and chicken, cheese, ice cream, fruits and
cakes, champagne, coffee, and chartreuse!"
The balloon with its intrepid voyagers nevertheless returned to
earth in safety.
A picturesque figure, an habitué of the clubs and an eager
sportsman, Santos-Dumont at once won the liking of the French
people, and attracted attention wherever people gave thought to
aviation. Liberal in expenditure of money, and utterly fearless in
exposing his life, he pushed his experiments for the development of
a true dirigible tirelessly. Perhaps his major fault was that he
learned but slowly from the experiences of others. He clung to the
spherical balloon long after the impossibility of controlling it in
the air was accepted as unavoidable by aeronauts. But in 1898 having
become infatuated with the performances of a little sixty-six pound
tricycle motor he determined to build a cigar-shaped airship to fit
it, and with that determination won success.
Amateur he may have been, was indeed throughout the greater part of
his career as an airman. Nevertheless Santos-Dumont has to his
credit two very notable achievements.
He was the first constructor and pilot of a dirigible balloon that
made a round trip, that is to say returned to its starting place
after rounding a stake at some distance--in this instance the Eiffel
Tower, 3-1/2 miles from St. Cloud whence Santos-Dumont started and
whither he returned within half an hour, the time prescribed.
This was not, indeed, the first occasion on which a round trip,
necessitating operation against the wind on at least one course, had
been made. In 1884 Captain Renard had accomplished this feat for the
first time with the fish-shaped balloon _La France_, driven by an
electric motor of nine horse-power. But though thus antedated in his
exploit, Santos-Dumont did in fact accomplish more for the
advancement and development of dirigible balloons. To begin with he
was able to use a new and efficient form of motor destined to become
popular, and capable, as the automobile manufacturers later showed,
of almost illimitable development in the direction of power and
lightness. Except for the gasoline engine, developed by the makers
of motor cars, aviation to-day would be where it was a quarter of a
century ago.
Moreover by his personal qualities, no less than by his successful
demonstration of the possibilities inherent in the dirigible,
Santos-Dumont persuaded the French Government to take up aeronautics
again, after abandoning the subject as the mere fad of a number of
visionaries.
Turning from balloons to airplanes the Brazilian was the first
aviator to make a flight with a heavier-than-air machine before a
body of judges. This triumph was mainly technical. The Wrights had
made an equally notable flight almost a year before but not under
conditions that made it a matter of scientific record.
But setting aside for the time the work done by Santos-Dumont with
machines heavier than air, let us consider his triumphs with
balloons at the opening of his career. He had come to France about
forty years after Henry Giffard had demonstrated the practicability
of navigating a balloon 144 feet long and 34 feet in diameter with a
three-horse-power steam-engine. But no material success attended
this demonstration, important as it was, and the inventor turned his
attention to captive balloons, operating one at the Paris Exposition
of 1878 that took up forty passengers at a time. There followed
Captain Renard to whose achievement we have already referred. He had
laid down as the fundamentals of a dirigible balloon these
specifications:
A cigar, or fishlike shape.
An internal sack or ballonet into which air might be pumped to
replace any lost gas, and maintain the shape of the balloon.
A keel, or other longitudinal brace, to maintain the longitudinal
stability of the balloon and from which the car containing the
motor might be hung.
A propeller driven by a motor, the size and power of both to be
as great as permitted by the lifting power of the balloon.
A rudder capable of controlling the course of the ship.
Santos-Dumont adopted all of these specifications, but added to them
certain improvements which gave his airships--he built five of them
before taking his first prize--notable superiority over that of
Renard. To begin with he had the inestimable advantage of having the
gasoline motor. He further lightened his craft by having the
envelope made of Japanese silk, in flat defiance of all the builders
of balloons who assured him that the substance was too light and its
use would be suicidal. "All right," said the innovator to his
favourite constructor, who refused to build him a balloon of that
material, "I'll build it myself." In the face of this threat the
builder capitulated. The balloon was built, and the silk proved to
be the best fabric available at that time for the purpose. A keel
made of strips of pine banded together with aluminum wire formed the
backbone of the Santos-Dumont craft, and from it depended the car
about one quarter of the length of the balloon and hung squarely
amidships. The idea of this keel occurred to the inventor while
pleasuring at Nice. Later it saved his life.
One novel and exceedingly simple device bore witness to the
ingenuity of the inventor. He had noticed in his days of free
ballooning that to rise the aeronaut had to throw out sand-ballast;
to descend he had to open the valves and let out gas. As his supply
of both gas and sand was limited it was clear that the time of his
flight was necessarily curtailed every time he ascended or
descended. Santos-Dumont thought to husband his supplies of lifting
force and of ballast, and make the motor raise and lower the ship.
It was obvious that the craft would go whichever way the bow might
be pointed, whether up or down. But how to shift the bow? The
solution seems so simple that one wonders it ever perplexed
aviators. From the peak of the bow and stern of his craft
Santos-Dumont hung long ropes caught in the centre by lighter ropes
by which they could be dragged into the car. In the car was carried
a heavy bag of sand, which so long as it was there held the ship in
a horizontal plane. Was it needful to depress the bow? Then the bow
rope was hauled in, the bag attached, and swung out to a position
where it would pull the forward tip of the delicately adjusted gas
bag toward the earth. If only a gentle inclination was desired the
bag was not allowed to hang directly under the bow, but was held at
a point somewhere between the car and the bow so that the pull would
be diagonal and the great cylinder would be diverted but little from
the horizontal. If it were desired to ascend, a like manipulation of
the ballast on the stern rope would depress the stern and point the
bow upwards. For slight changes in direction it was not necessary
even to attach the sand bag. Merely drawing the rope into the car
and thus changing the line of its "pull" was sufficient.
The Deutsch prize which stimulated Santos-Dumont to his greatest
achievements with dirigibles was a purse of twenty thousand dollars,
offered by Mr. Henry Deutsch, a wealthy patron of the art of
aviation. Not himself an aviator, M. Deutsch greatly aided the
progress of the air's conquest. Convinced that the true solution of
the problem lay in development of the gasoline engine, he expended
large sums in developing and perfecting it. When he believed it was
sufficiently developed to solve the problem of directing the flight
of balloons he offered his prize for the circuit of the Eiffel
Tower. The conditions of the contest were not easy. The competitor
had to sail from the Aero Club at St. Cloud, pass twice over the
Seine which at that point makes an abrupt bend, sail over the Bois
de Boulogne, circle the Tower, and return to the stopping place
within a half an hour. The distance was about seven miles, and it is
noteworthy that in his own comment on the test Santos-Dumont
complains that that required an average speed of fifteen miles an
hour of which he could not be sure with his balloon. To-day
dirigibles make sixty miles an hour, and airplanes not infrequently
reach 130 miles. Moreover there could be no picking of a day on
which atmospheric conditions were especially good. Mr. Deutsch had
stipulated that the test must be made in the presence of a
Scientific Commission whose members must be notified twenty-four
hours in advance. None could tell twenty-four hours ahead what the
air might be like, and as for utilizing the aviator's most
favourable hour, the calm of the dawn, M. Santos-Dumont remarked:
"The duellist may call out his friends at that sacred hour, but not
the airship captain."
The craft with which the Brazilian first strove to win the Deutsch
prize he called _Santos-Dumont No. V._ It was a cylinder, sharp at
both ends, 109 feet long and driven by a 12-horse-power motor. A new
feature was the use of piano wire for the support of the car, thus
greatly reducing the resistance of the air which in the case of the
old cord suspensions was almost as great as that of the balloon
itself. Another novel feature was water ballast tanks forward and
aft on the balloon itself and holding together twelve gallons. By
pulling steel wires in the car the aviator could open the
stop-cocks. The layman scarcely appreciates the very slight shift in
ballast which will affect the stability of a dirigible. The shifting
of a rope a few feet from its normal position, the dropping of two
handfuls of sand, or release of a cup of water will do it. A
humorous writer describing a lunch with Santos-Dumont in the air
says: "Nothing must be thrown overboard, be it a bottle, an empty
box or a chicken bone without the pilot's permission."
After unofficial tests of his "No. 5" in one of which he circled the
Tower without difficulty, Santos-Dumont summoned the Scientific
Commission for a test. In ten minutes he had turned the Tower, and
started back against a fierce head-wind, which made him ten minutes
late in reaching the time-keepers. Just as he did so his engine
failed, and after drifting for a time his ship perched in the top of
a chestnut tree on the estate of M. Edmond Rothschild. Philosophical
as ever the aeronaut clung to his craft, dispatched an excellent
lunch which the Princess Isabel, Comtesse d'Eu, daughter of Dom
Pedro, the deposed Emperor of Brazil, sent to his eyrie in the
branches, and finally extricated himself and his balloon--neither
much the worse for the accident. He had failed but his determination
to win was only whetted.
The second trial for the Deutsch prize like the first ended in
failure, but that failure was so much more dramatic even than the
success which attended the third effort that it is worth telling and
can best be told in M. Santos-Dumont's own words. The quotation is
from his memoir, _My Airships_:
And now I come to a terrible day--8th of August, 1901. At 6:30
A.M. in presence of the Scientific Commission of the Aero Club, I
started again for the Eiffel Tower.
I turned the tower at the end of nine minutes and took my way
back to St. Cloud; but my balloon was losing hydrogen through one
of its two automatic gas valves whose spring had been
accidentally weakened.
I had perceived the beginning of this loss of gas even before
reaching the Eiffel Tower, and ordinarily, in such an event, I
should have come at once to earth to examine the lesion. But here
I was competing for a prize of great honour and my speed had been
good. Therefore I risked going on.
The balloon now shrunk visibly. By the time I had got back to the
fortifications of Paris, near La Muette, it caused the suspension
wires to sag so much that those nearest to the screw-propeller
caught in it as it revolved.
I saw the propeller cutting and tearing at the wires. I stopped
the motor instantly. Then, as a consequence, the airship was at
once driven back toward the tower by the wind which was strong.
[Illustration: Photo by International Film Service Co.
_A Kite Balloon Rising from the Hold of a Ship._]
At the same time I was falling. The balloon had lost much gas. I
might have thrown out ballast and greatly diminished the fall,
but then the wind would have time to blow me back on the Eiffel
Tower. I therefore preferred to let the airship go down as it was
going. It may have seemed a terrific fall to those who watched it
from the ground but to me the worst detail was the airship's lack
of equilibrium. The half-empty balloon, fluttering its empty end
as an elephant waves his trunk, caused the airship's stern to
point upward at an alarming angle. What I most feared therefore
was that the unequal strain on the suspension wires would break
them one by one and so precipitate me to the ground.
Why was the balloon fluttering an empty end causing all this
extra danger? How was it that the rotary ventilator was not
fulfilling its purpose in feeding the interior air balloon and in
this manner swelling out the gas balloon around it? The answer
must be looked for in the nature of the accident. The rotary
ventilator stopped working when the motor itself stopped, and I
had been obliged to stop the motor to prevent the propeller from
tearing the suspension wires near it when the balloon first began
to sag from loss of gas. It is true that the ventilator which was
working at that moment had not proved sufficient to prevent the
first sagging. It may have been that the interior balloon refused
to fill out properly. The day after the accident when my balloon
constructor's man came to me for the plans of a "No. 6" balloon
envelope I gathered from something he said that the interior
balloon of "No. 5," not having been given time for its varnish to
dry before being adjusted, might have stuck together or stuck to
the sides or bottom of the outer balloon. Such are the rewards of
haste.
I was falling. At the same time the wind was carrying me toward
the Eiffel Tower. It had already carried me so far that I was
expecting to land on the Seine embankment beyond the Trocadero.
My basket and the whole of the keel had already passed the
Trocadero hotels, and had my balloon been a spherical one it
would have cleared the building. But now at the last critical
moment, the end of the long balloon that was still full of gas
came slapping down on the roof just before clearing it. It
exploded with a great noise; struck after being blown up. This
was the terrific explosion described in the newspaper of the day.
I had made a mistake in my estimate of the wind's force, by a few
yards. Instead of being carried on to fall on the Seine
embankment, I now found myself hanging in my wicker basket high
up in the courtyard of the Trocadero hotels, supported by my
airship's keel, that stood braced at an angle of about forty-five
degrees between the courtyard wall above and the roof of a lower
construction farther down. The keel, in spite of my weight, that
of the motor and machinery, and the shock it had received in
falling, resisted wonderfully. The thin pine scantlings and piano
wires of Nice (the town where the idea of a keel first suggested
itself) had saved my life!
After what seemed tedious waiting, I saw a rope being lowered to
me from the roof above. I held to it and was hauled up, when I
perceived my rescuers to be the brave firemen of Paris. From
their station at Passy they had been watching the flight of the
airship. They had seen my fall and immediately hastened to the
spot. Then, having rescued me, they proceeded to rescue the
airship.
The operation was painful. The remains of the balloon envelope
and the suspension wires hung lamentably; and it was impossible
to disengage them except in strips and fragments!
The later balloon "No. VI." with which Santos-Dumont won the Deutsch
prize may fairly be taken as his conception of the finished type of
dirigible for one man. In fact his aspirations never soared as high
as those of Count Zeppelin, and the largest airship he ever
planned--called "the _Omnibus_"--carried only four men. It is
probable that the diversion of his interest from dirigibles to
airplanes had most to do with his failure to carry his development
further than he did. "No. VI." was 108 feet long, and 20 feet in
diameter with an eighteen-horse-power gasoline engine which could
drive it at about nineteen miles an hour. Naturally the aeronaut's
first thought in his new construction was of the valves. The memory
of the anxious minutes spent perched on the window-sill of the
Trocadero Hotel or dangling like a spider at the end of the
firemen's rope were still fresh. The ballonet which had failed him
in "No. V." was perfected in its successor. Notwithstanding the care
with which she was constructed the prize-winner turned out to be a
rather unlucky ship. On her trial voyage she ran into a tree and was
damaged, and even on the day of her greatest conquest she behaved
badly. The test was made on October 1, 1901. The aeronaut had
rounded the Tower finely and was making for home when the motor
began to miss and threatened to stop altogether. While Santos-Dumont
was tinkering with the engine, leaving the steering wheel to itself,
the balloon drifted over the Bois de Boulogne. As usual the cool air
from the wood caused the hydrogen in the balloon to contract and the
craft dropped until it appeared the voyage would end in the tree
tops. Hastily shifting his weights the aeronaut forced the prow of
the ship upwards to a sharp angle with the earth. Just at this
moment the reluctant engine started up again with such vigour that
for a moment the ship threatened to assume a perpendicular position,
pointing straight up in the sky. A cry went up from the spectators
below who feared a dire catastrophe was about to end a voyage which
promised success. But with incomparable _sang-froid_ the young
Brazilian manipulated the weights, restored the ship to the
horizontal again without stopping the engines, and reached the
finishing stake in time to win the prize. Soon after it was awarded
him the Brazilian Government presented him with another substantial
prize, together with a gold medal bearing the words: _Por ceos nunca
d'antes navegados_ ("Through heavens hitherto unsailed").
In a sense the reference to the heavens is a trifle over-rhetorical.
Santos-Dumont differed from all aviators (or pilots of airplanes)
and most navigators of dirigibles in always advocating the strategy
of staying near the ground. In his flights he barely topped the
roofs of the houses, and in his writings he repeatedly refers to the
sense of safety that came to him when he knew he was close to the
tree tops of a forest. This may have been due to the fact that in
his very first flight in a dirigible he narrowly escaped a fatal
accident due to flying too high. As he descended, the gas which had
expanded now contracted. The balloon began to collapse in the
middle. Cords subjected to unusual stress began to snap. The air
pump, which should have pumped the ballonet full of air to keep the
balloon rigid failed to work. Seeing that he was about to fall into
a field in which his drag rope was already trailing the imperilled
airman had a happy thought. Some boys were there flying kites. He
shouted to them to seize his rope and run against the wind. The
balloon responded to the new force like a kite. The rapidity of its
fall was checked, and its pilot landed with only a serious shaking.
But thereafter Santos-Dumont preached the maxim--rare among
airmen--"Keep near the ground. That way lies safety!" Most aviators
however, prefer the heights of the atmosphere, as the sailor prefers
the wide and open sea to a course near land.
After winning the Deutsch prize, Santos-Dumont continued for a time
to amuse himself with dirigibles. I say "amuse" purposely, for never
did serious aeronaut get so much fun out of a rather perilous
pastime as he. In his "No. IX." he built the smallest dirigible
ever known. The balloon had just power enough to raise her pilot and
sixty-six pounds more beside a three-horse-power motor. But she
attained a speed of twelve miles an hour, was readily handled, and
it was her owner's dearest delight to use her for a taxicab, calling
for lunch at the cafés in the Bois, and paying visits to friends
upon whom he looked in, literally, at their second-story windows. He
ran her in and out of her hangar as one would a motor-car from its
garage. One day he sailed down the Avenue des Champs Élysées at the
level of the second-and third-story windows of the palaces that line
that stately street. Coming to his own house he descended, made
fast, and went in to _déjeuner_, leaving his aërial cab without. In
the city streets he steered mainly by aid of a guide rope trailing
behind him. With this he turned sharp corners, went round the Arc de
Triomphe, and said: "I might have guide-roped under it had I thought
myself worthy." On occasion he picked up children in the streets and
gave them a ride.
Though before losing his interest in dirigibles Santos-Dumont
carried the number of his construction up to ten, he cannot be said
to have devised any new and useful improvements after his "No. VI."
The largest of his ships was "No. X.," which had a capacity of
eighty thousand cubic feet--about ten times the size of the little
runabout with which he played pranks in Paris streets. In this
balloon he placed partitions to prevent the gas shifting to one part
of the envelope, and to guard against losing it all in the event of
a tear. The same principle was fundamental in Count Zeppelin's
airships. In 1904 he brought a dirigible to the United States
expecting to compete for a prize at the St. Louis Exposition. But
while suffering exasperating delay from the red-tape which
enveloped the exposition authorities, he discovered one morning that
his craft had been mutilated almost beyond repair in its storage
place. In high dudgeon he left at once for Paris. The explanation of
the malicious act has never been made clear, though many Americans
had an uneasy feeling that the gallant and sportsman-like Brazilian
had been badly treated in our land. On his return to Paris he at
once began experimenting with heavier-than-air machines. Of his work
with them we shall give some account later.
Despite his great personal popularity the airship built by
Santos-Dumont never appealed to the French military authorities.
Probably this was largely due to the fact that he never built one of
a sufficient size to meet military tests. The amateur in him was
unconquerable. While von Zeppelin's first ship was big enough to
take the air in actual war the Frenchman went on building craft for
one or two men--good models for others to seize and build upon, but
nothing which a war office could actually adopt. But he served his
country well by stimulating the creation of great companies who
built largely upon the foundations he had laid.
First and greatest of these was the company formed by the Lebaudy
Brothers, wealthy sugar manufacturers. Their model was semi-rigid,
that is, provided with an inflexible keel or floor to the gas bag,
which was cigar shaped. The most successful of the earlier ships was
190 feet long, with a car suspended by cables ten feet below the
balloon and carrying the twin motors, together with passengers and
supplies. Although it made many voyages without accident, it finally
encountered what seems to be the chief peril of dirigible balloons,
being torn from its moorings at Châlons and dashed against trees to
the complete demolition of its envelope. Repaired in eleven weeks
she was taken over by the French Department of War, and was in
active service at the beginning of the war. Her two successors on
the company's building ways were less fortunate. _La Patrie_, after
many successful trips, and manoeuvres with the troops, was
insecurely moored at Verdun, the famous fortress where she was to
have been permanently stationed. Came up a heavy gale. Her anchors
began to drag. The bugles sounded and the soldiers by hundreds
rushed from the fort to aid. Hurled along by the wind she dragged
the soldiers after her. Fearing disaster to the men the commandant
reluctantly ordered them to let go. The ship leaped into the black
upper air and disappeared. All across France, across that very
country where in 1916 the trenches cut their ugly zigzags from the
Channel to the Vosges, she drifted unseen. By morning she was flying
over England and Wales. Ireland caught a glimpse of her and days
thereafter sailors coming into port told of a curious yellow mass,
seemingly flabby and disintegrating like the carcass of a whale,
floating far out at sea.
Her partner ship _La République_ had a like tragic end. She too made
many successful trips, and proved her stability and worth. But one
day while manoeuvring near Paris one of her propellers broke and
tore a great rent in her envelope. As the _Titanic_, her hull ripped
open by an iceberg, sunk with more than a thousand of her people, so
this airship, wounded in a more unstable element, fell to the ground
killing all on board.
Two airships were built in France for England in 1909. One, the
_Clement-Bayard II._, was of the rigid type and built for the
government; the other, a _Lebaudy_, was non-rigid and paid for by
popular subscriptions raised in England by the _Morning Post_. Both
were safely delivered near London having made their voyages of
approximately 242 miles each at a speed exceeding forty miles an
hour. These were the first airships acquired for British use.
In the United States the only serious effort to develop the
dirigible prior to the war, and to apply it to some definite
purpose, was made not by the government but by an individual. Mr.
Walter Wellman, a distinguished journalist, fired by the effort of
Andrée to reach the North Pole in a drifting balloon, undertook a
similar expedition with a dirigible in 1907. A balloon was built 184
feet in length and 52 feet in diameter, and was driven by a
seventy-to eighty-horse-power motor. A curious feature of this craft
was the guide rope or, as Wellman called it, the equilibrator, which
was made of steel, jointed and hollow. At the lower end were four
steel cylinders carrying wheels and so arranged that they would
float on water or trundle along over the roughest ice. The idea was
that the equilibrator would serve like a guide rope, trailing on the
water or ice when the balloon hung low, and increasing the power of
its drag if the balloon, rising higher, lifted a greater part of its
length into the air. Wellman had every possible appliance to
contribute to the safety of the airship, and many believe that had
fortune favoured him the glory of the discovery of the Pole would
have been his. Unhappily he encountered only ill luck. One season he
spent at Dane's Island, near Spitzenberg whence Andrée had set sail,
waiting vainly for favourable weather conditions. The following
summer, just as he was about to start, a fierce storm destroyed his
balloon shed and injured the balloon. Before necessary repairs could
be accomplished Admiral Peary discovered the Pole and the purpose
of the expedition was at an end. Wellman, however, had become deeply
interested in aeronautics and, balked in one ambition, set out to
accomplish another. With the same balloon somewhat remodelled he
tried to cross the Atlantic, setting sail from Atlantic City, N. J.,
October 16, 1911. But the device on which the aeronaut most prided
himself proved his undoing. The equilibrator, relied upon both for
storage room and as a regulator of the altitude of the ship, proved
a fatal attachment. In even moderate weather it bumped over the
waves and racked the structure of the balloon with its savage
tugging until the machinery broke down and the adventurers were at
the mercy of the elements. Luckily for them after they had been
adrift for seventy-two hours, and travelled several hundred miles
they were rescued by the British steamer _Trent_. Not long after
Wellman's chief engineer Vanniman sought to cross the Atlantic in a
similar craft but from some unexplained cause she blew up in mid-air
and all aboard were lost.
Neither Great Britain nor the United States has reason to be proud
of the attitude of its government towards the inventors who were
struggling to subdue the air to the uses of man. Nor has either
reason to boast much of its action in utterly ignoring up to the
very day war broke that aid to military service of which Lord
Kitchener said, "One aviator is worth a corps of cavalry." It will
be noted that to get its first effective dirigible Great Britain had
to rely upon popular subscriptions drummed up by a newspaper. That
was in 1909. To-day, in 1917, the United States has only one
dirigible of a type to be considered effective in the light of
modern standards, though our entrance upon the war has caused the
beginning of a considerable fleet. In aviation no less than in
aerostatics the record of the United States is negligible. Our
country did indeed produce the Wright Brothers, pioneers and true
conquerors of the air with airplanes. But even they were forced to
go to France for support and indeed for respectful attention.
So far as the development of dirigible balloons is concerned there
is no more need to devote space to what was done in England and the
United States than there was for the famous chapter on Snakes in
Iceland.