THE COMMERCIAL ZEPPELIN
THE AMBITION OF THE AGES REALIZED—A GIANT GERMAN DIRIGIBLE—ZEPPELIN
ACCOMPLISHMENTS—HIGH COST OF ZEPPELINS—SAFETY OF TRAVEL—SOME
BRITISH PREDICTIONS—THE FUTURE OF HELIUM—THE LIFE-BLOOD OF COMMERCE
Almost daily during the winter of 1918-1919 reports were coming out of
Europe to the effect that Zeppelins were being converted into aerial
merchantmen to fly regularly between New York and Hamburg.
Because these gigantic lighter-than-air machines, measuring more
than 700 feet in length, 70 feet in diameter, buoyed up by more
than 2,000,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas, and driven by six
Maybach-Mercedes engines, generating a total of 1,400 horse-power,
had carried, in all kinds of weather and under adverse circumstances
of war, a crew of forty-eight men and a useful load of four tons from
Germany over the British fleet and the North Sea and the anti-aircraft
guns and by hostile fleets of Allied aeroplanes, and had successfully
raided England and Scotland more than a score of times, returning
safely to their home ports, often having flown a total distance of
approximately 800 miles—the eyes of the aeronautical world, like
search-lights in the night, were sweeping the heavens over the
Atlantic seaboard to discover whether these leviathans of the air or
the little dragon-flies of aeroplanes were to be the first to appear in
the firmament, aerially transnavigating the 1,195 miles of water that
separates the Old World from the New.
Indeed, ever since man has learned to fly he has become such an
exalted creature that he has ceased to regard any mechanical feat as
impossible. This is, in a measure at least, pardonable when we stop
to consider that ever since man got up off his hands and learned to
walk upright he has longed to be able to fly as a bird through the
heavens in any direction he chose, without let or hindrance, boundary
or border. Though he expended every effort to accomplish this feat, and
often lost his life in the attempt, for countless ages the privilege to
soar aloft was denied him.
In point of time it was, as we have seen, September, 1783, before
the Montgolfier brothers succeeded in sending up even a paper bag
inflated with hot air, and it was November of the same year before
two Frenchmen, the Marquis d’Arlandes and Pilâtre de Roziers, made
the world’s first trip in any kind of aerial vehicle—namely, a free
balloon.
But these and most of the attempts to navigate the air in the next
century were unsuccessful, primarily due to the lack of power adaptable
to propelling a gas-bag through the air. In 1852. Henri Gifford,
another Frenchman, made the first successful directed flight in a
dirigible 143 feet long and 39 feet in diameter. It was inflated
with hydrogen and driven by a three-horse-power steam-engine, an
eleven-foot screw propeller, and it made six miles an hour relative to
the wind. Owing to the fuel, fire, and weight problems the steam-engine
was then impractical as a means of propulsion for lighter-than-air
machines.
In 1884 Captain Charles Renard went a step farther in the right
direction by installing a 200-pound electric motor, generating nine
horse-power. The battery, composed of chlorochromic salts, delivered
one shaft horse-power for each eighty-eight pounds of weight, but in
spite of such a handicap he flew over Paris at fourteen and a half
miles an hour. Nevertheless, the electric motor was also impractical,
even for a rigid dirigible. As a matter of fact, every gas-bag was at
the mercy of the winds, and could not steer a direct course, until the
gasoline motor was invented and developed to generate more than a dozen
horse-power.
The first man to build a rigid dirigible with an aluminum framework
and drive it with a gasoline motor was an Austrian named Schwartz, but
the first man to build, equip, and perform the necessary evolutions
with a rigid dirigible was Santos-Dumont, the famous Brazilian. He
accomplished this feat in September, 1898, when he set out from
the Zoological Gardens at Paris and in the face of a gentle wind
steered his airship in nearly every point of the compass. In 1901 he
circumnavigated the Eiffel Tower, thus demonstrating the feasibility of
the lighter-than-air ship as a practical means of locomotion through
the air.
The world’s first successful flight in a man-carrying heavier-than-air
machine, made by the Wright brothers two years later at Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina, only went further to confirm man’s belief that the
conquest of the air and the age of aerial navigation were at hand.
Since then in a heavier-than-air machine man has climbed to 30,500
feet and has flown 920 miles without stopping. In a free balloon man
has drifted 1,503 miles through the air—from Paris to Kharkoff,
Russia—and to an altitude of over 38,000 feet. In a rigid dirigible
the Germans have transported machinery for making munitions all the
way from Austria-Hungary over Bulgaria—while that country was still
neutral—to Constantinople, a distance of 500 miles; within a radius of
350 miles of Germany, despite all military and naval opposition on land
and sea, the Huns have flown with tons of high explosives and dropped
them on London, Paris, and Bucharest. In the last days of the war a
super-Zeppelin flew from Jamboli, in Bulgaria, to Khartum, in Egypt,
and back, a distance of more than 6,000 miles each way, carrying a crew
of twenty-two men and twenty-five tons of medicine and munitions. It
was intended to transport the supplies to General Lettow-Vorbeck in
German East Africa, but a wireless received when the Zeppelin was over
Khartum notified its commander to return, for Lettow-Vorbeck had been
captured.
On March 22, 1919, the British Government officially announced that the
US-11, a non-rigid type of dirigible, had flown 1,285 miles over the
North Sea without stopping, the actual flying time being forty and a
half hours. The voyage took the form of a circuit, embracing the coast
of Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Heligoland, North Germany, and Holland.
The trip was characterized by extremely unfavorable weather, and
therefore is regarded as ranking as perhaps the most notable flight
of the kind ever undertaken. The airship started from the Firth of
Forth, laying a straight course toward Denmark. There was a northwest
wind of fifteen to twenty miles an hour, and the night was dark, but
the airship was only a mile from her course when she passed the Dogger
Bank Lighthouse. After passing the lighthouse the velocity of the wind
increased, and calcium flares were dropped into the sea frequently to
determine the location.
The airship’s troubles began on the return journey. The wind became
stronger and more tempestuous. At midnight one engine became useless
and the ship was forced a considerable distance to leeward.
The captain contemplated landing in France, but finally decided to hold
on in the hope that the wind would abate. The wind abating somewhat, a
“land fall” was made at North Forel. At this time the gasoline supply
was running low.
In two radically different types of flying-machines man has in the last
decade aerially transnavigated great natural and geographic barriers
in the form of the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Taurus Mountains, and
the North, the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Mediterranean Seas. He has
made these flights in all kinds of winds, weather, and atmospheric and
polemic conditions.
At last he has ascended higher than the lark and flown faster than the
eagle and farther than the mightiest bird of prey. Small wonder then
that he should consider the flight across the Atlantic by either the
aeroplane or the Zeppelin as nothing but a question of time.
As a matter of fact, man does not doubt that eventually not only the
Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Seven Seas, but even the globe itself
will be aerially transnavigated. His only concern is how soon these
feats will be accomplished facts.
Several preparations—but only one real attempt—to fly across the
Atlantic had been made up to January, 1919. The first effort to cross
the ocean from America to Europe by air was made by Walter Wellman and
a crew of five men in the dirigible _America_ on October 15, 1910. The
airship measured 228 feet in length and 52 feet in diameter, with a
lifting capacity of twelve tons. The envelope carrying the gas weighed
approximately two tons. Attached to the bag was a car 156 feet long.
The nine thousand pounds of gasoline necessary for the trip were
stored under the floor of the car. The _America_ carried three eighty
horse-power gasoline engines, one of which was a donkey, the two others
being used to drive the propellers. Beneath the car hung a 27-foot
lifeboat that was to be used in case they had to abandon the airship.
A 330-foot equilibrator, consisting of a long steel cable on which
were strung thirty spool-like steel tanks each carrying 75 pounds of
gasoline, and forty wooden blocks, trailed from the cabin. The blocks
were about twenty inches long.
The object of the equilibrator was to eliminate ballast. It was
intended that the balloon should sail along at a height of about two
hundred feet; if it settled close to the water the wooden blocks and
the tanks would float on the water and relieve it of some of its
weight. The _America_ was also equipped with sextants, compasses, and
other instruments for locating its position, the same as an ocean-liner.
Besides Walter Wellman, the explorer and writer, were Melvin Vaniman,
chief engineer; F. Murray Vaniman, navigator of airships; J. K. Irwin,
wireless operator; Albert L. Loud and John Aubert, assistant engineers.
They left Atlantic City in a dead calm and were towed out to sea by a
motor-boat. Three days later, on October 18, after many vicissitudes
the engines broke down and the huge gas-bag was at the mercy of the
winds. Wellman and his crew were picked up by the steamer _Trent_ 375
miles east of Cape Hatteras. The dirigible had been carried out of its
course because of insufficient power to navigate against the winds and
had to be abandoned, a total loss.
A year later, financed by the Chamber of Commerce of Akron, Ohio, and
one of the large rubber companies, a balloon called the _Akron_, 268
feet long and 47 feet in diameter, with a gas capacity of 350,000 cubic
feet, was built to be flown across the Atlantic by Melvin Vaniman. It
had two 105 horse-power engines.
Unfortunately, on July 2, 1912, while making a trial flight over
Absecon Inlet, near Atlantic City, the balloon took fire and exploded,
killing Melvin Vaniman and the four members of his crew. This disaster
put an end to building dirigibles in this country for transatlantic
flight.
The preparation for another attempt to cross the Atlantic was made
by Glenn H. Curtiss through the generosity of Rodman Wanamaker, who
financed the building of the flying-boat _America_. Owing to the
breaking out of the war this project was abandoned.
Neither of these two American-built lighter-than-air ships could be
compared in size, engine power, lifting capacity, or flying radius
with the dirigibles constructed by the German Government and people
under the direction of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Indeed, his first
airship, constructed in 1900, measured 410 feet and contained 400,000
cubic feet of hydrogen, whereas the super-Zeppelins were many times
larger than either Wellman’s or Vaniman’s airship.
A description of the giant dirigible brought down in the summer of
1916 in Essex, England, will give an excellent idea of the gigantic
proportions, the buoyancy, the engine power, and the accommodations of
these leviathans of the air.
The airship measured 650 feet to 680 feet in length and 72 feet in
diameter. The vessel was of cigar-shaped stream-line form, with a
blunt rounded nose and a tail that tapered off to a sharp point. The
framework was made of longitudinal latticework girders, connected
together at intervals by circumferential latticework tires, all made
of aluminum alloy resembling duraluminum. The whole was braced and
stiffened by a system of wires. The weight of the framework was about
nine tons, or barely a fifth of the total of fifty tons attributed to
the airship complete with engines, fuel, guns, and crew. There were
twenty-four balloonets arranged within the framework, and the hydrogen
capacity was 2,000,000 cubic feet.
A cat walk—an arched passage with a footway nine inches wide—running
along the keel enabled the crew, which consisted of twenty-two men, to
move about the ship and get from one gondola to another. The gondolas,
made of aluminum alloy, were four in number: one was placed forward on
the centre line; two were amidships, one on each side, and the fourth
was aft, again on the centre line.
The vessel was propelled at 60 miles an hour in still air—by means
of six Maybach-Mercedes gasoline engines of 240 horse-power each,
or 1,440 horse-power in all. Each had six vertical cylinders with
overhead valves and water cooling, and weighed about a thousand
pounds. They were connected each to a propeller shaft and also to a
dynamo used either in lighting or for furnishing power to the wireless
installation. One of these engines with its propeller was placed at
the back of the large forward gondola; two were in the amidships
gondolas, and three were in the after gondola. In the last case one of
the propellers was in the centre line of the ship, and the shafts of
the two others were stayed out, one on either side. The gasoline-tanks
had a capacity of two thousand gallons, and the propeller shafts were
carried in ball bearings.
Forward of the engine-room of the front gondola, but separated from
it by a small air space, was first the wireless-operator’s cabin and
then the commander’s room. The latter was the navigating platform, and
in it were concentrated the controls of the elevators and rudder at
the stern, the arrangement for equalizing the levels in the gasoline
and water tanks, the engine-room telegraphs, and the switchboards
of electrical gear for releasing the bombs. Nine machine-guns were
carried. Two of these, of half-inch bore, were mounted on the top of
the vessel, and six of small caliber were placed in the gondolas—two
in the forward, one each in the amidships ones, and two in the aft one.
The ninth was carried in the tail.
The separate gas-bags were a decided advantage over the free balloon
and earlier airships, which carried all the gas in one compartment;
for if the latter sprung a leak for any reason it had to descend,
whereas the Zeppelin could keep afloat with several of the separate
compartments in a complete state of collapse.
Since the Zeppelin, like all airships, is buoyed up by hydrogen
gas—which weighs one and one-tenth pounds per two hundred cubic
feet as compared with sixteen pounds which the same amount of air
weighs—the dirigible is sent up by the simple expedient of increasing
the volume of gas in the envelopes until the vessel rises. This was
done by releasing the gas for storage-tanks into the gas-bags. In order
to head the nose up, air was kept in certain of the rear bags, thus
making the tail heavier than the forward part, which naturally rose
first. Steering was done by means of rudder or the engines, or both,
and the airship was kept on an even keel by use of lateral planes. The
airship could be brought down by forcing the gas out of the bags into
the gas-tanks, thus decreasing the volume, and by increasing the air in
the various compartments.
This airship had a flying radius of 800 miles, could climb to 12,000
feet, could carry a useful load of 30 tons, and could remain in the air
for 50 hours.
Because so many Zeppelins were lost to Germany and because so much
time and money were necessary to construct the enormous airships, many
people have jumped to the conclusion that the rigid dirigible was an
absolute failure even as an offensive war weapon. Yet despite its bulk
and the fact that it could not fly faster than seventy miles an hour,
and though more than a hundred Zeppelins raided England at some time or
another during the war, only two were shot down by aeroplanes and only
a few by antiaircraft guns. Most of them were destroyed because they
ran out of fuel and consequently became unmanageable and were blown out
of their course and forced to land or had to descend so low that they
came within easy range of aircraft guns of the land batteries or the
naval guns.
This record is truly surprising when we stop to consider that the
Zeppelin had to navigate entirely by compass and mostly at night over
hundreds of miles of hostile sea and land, opposed by the guns of a
huge Allied fleet and thousands of antiaircraft guns, without lights or
landmarks to aid them and often with untrained and inexperienced pilots
to guide them! No wonder that some of these airships met disaster—like
the L-49, which had to land in France; or the L-20, which was forced to
land on the Norwegian coast near Stavanger; or others, which came down
so low over the North Sea that they became easy targets for the British
torpedo-boat guns.
But this is judging the Zeppelins purely as offensive weapons of
war. Even as such they forced the British Empire to maintain a large
standing army and a huge armament of guns and aeroplanes in England
by threatening to land a mammoth army of invasion there from Belgium.
What they did to spread terror in Belgium and to keep the German army
informed by wireless of the conditions behind the British and French
and Belgian lines in the first advance to the Marne is a matter of
history. Also what they performed in disorganizing the armies and in
disconcerting the people of Antwerp and Bucharest, not to mention many
Russian cities and Paris itself, during the Hun advance against those
cities, is almost too horrible to relate. Over the Rumanian capital
alone they descended so low—because there were no antiaircraft guns
to defend the city—that they scarcely flew clear of the buildings as
they rained down hundreds of tons of high explosives on the frightened
inhabitants, and even bombed a part of the imperial palace, where the
Queen was nursing the Crown Prince.
This unlawful use of these giant aircraft does not detract from what
they demonstrated could be done in the way of aerial navigation and
transportation under the frightful opposition of war, and it is only
an augury of what will be accomplished when the same vessels of the
air will be put to carrying man up and down the aerial highways of the
heavens, which know no barriers, obstructions, or hostile opposition.
Their greatest service to the Germans was as aerial scouts rather than
as ethereal battleships or cruisers; and if these rigid dirigibles had
performed no other feats for the Huns, from the Teutonic point of view
at least, their work in planning and directing every move of the German
high-seas fleet in the great naval battle off Jutland amply repaid
Germany for the time and money and effort expended in building those
air cruisers.
On May 30 in the first stage of that battle it will be recalled that
Admiral Sir David Beatty was cruising with his scout fleet looking for
the Germans several hundred miles east of the British grand fleet,
which was under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, somewhere off the Orkney
Islands. Flying out under the protection of a fog-bank that was moving
down over the North Sea a German naval Zeppelin discovered the isolated
position of Admiral Beatty’s scout fleet and sent a wireless message
to the German high-seas fleet, which came out under Admiral Von Scheer
with the sole object of cutting off and destroying Admiral Beatty’s
fleet before it could unite with the British grand fleet. Undoubtedly,
had it not been for a seaplane launched from the mother ship _Engadine_
and flown by Flight Lieutenant Frederick J. Rutland, who discovered the
entire German navy coming out, the British scout fleet might have been
cut off and completely destroyed before Admiral Jellicoe could come to
the rescue.
In the meantime another Zeppelin was hovering over the British grand
fleet far to the north and was keeping the German Admiral Von Scheer
fully informed by wireless of every ship in the squadron. It was this
Zeppelin which finally warned the German admiral to return to the
protection of secure fortresses and defenses of the great German naval
base of Helgoland. By thus saving the Hun fleet from annihilation
in this naval encounter it was possible for the Germans to hold a
complete, continuous, and dangerous threat that their navy might again
come out to attack England or France and cut off English troops from
the Continent. This possibility alone compelled the Allies to maintain,
until the close of the war, an enormous fleet at all times in the North
Sea.
There is no gainsaying that in time of war the aeroplane has many
advantages over the Zeppelin. The heavier-than-air machine can be
produced in quantity much more readily than the lighter-than-air craft.
Exact figures on the cost of Zeppelins are not available. W. L. Marsh,
in the British publication _Aeronautics_, gives half a million dollars
as the estimated cost of a superdirigible of sixty tons, having a lift
of thirty-eight tons. This high cost is due, among other things, to the
enormous building in which the airship must be constructed, for it must
be borne in mind that one of these dinosaurs of the air extends its
bulk along the ground farther than the Woolworth Building towers in the
air. Indeed, it could not descend in an ordinary city street because of
its bulk, and if it did it would extend more than three city blocks of
two hundred feet frontage! Moreover, the plant necessary to generate
the hydrogen gas sufficient to inflate a bag of two million cubic
feet capacity would cost fifty thousand dollars alone. The amount of
aluminum in the L-49, forced to land in France in the spring of 1918,
would make a foot-bridge over the East River as long as the famous
Brooklyn Bridge!
To land and house such an elusive and buoyant monster requires many
winches and some two hundred men. Even then some have been known to
run away. This happened in the winter of 1907, when the _Patrie_, a
French semirigid dirigible, which was only a third as large as the
German super-Zeppelins, was caught in a gale of wind near Verdun and in
spite of the two hundred soldiers who held her in leash she broke her
moorings and, flying over France, England, Wales, Ireland, shedding a
few fragments on the way, finally disappeared into the sky above the
North Atlantic.
On the other hand, a six-ton aeroplane can carry a useful load of two
tons and does not cost more than $50,000. Also the wing spread of 150
feet of the largest aeroplane is small compared to a 700-foot Zeppelin.
Consequently, aeroplanes can be more readily produced in quantity, can
be housed, and require only a half-dozen men to take care of them.
Because of the small size of the scout machine—with only a
26-foot wing spread—and its speed of more than a hundred miles an
hour—compared to the Zeppelin speed of 60 or 70 miles—the aeroplane
was invaluable for scouting over short distances, for duels in the
air, for directing artillery-fire, for contact patrol; and the larger
aeroplanes were useful for bombing in huge fleets.
In all other purposes of war the Zeppelin is far superior to the
aeroplane. Even the contention that the aeroplanes stopped the Zeppelin
raids on England is absurd. It is true that two Zeppelins were brought
down over England by aeroplane, but it was September 3, 1916, two years
after the breaking out of the war, when young Leefe Robinson brought
down the first Hun dirigible over London. It was June 3, 1915, when a
Canadian sublieutenant, R. A. J. Warneford, flying a Morane monoplane
for the Royal Naval Air Service, got above a dirigible returning to its
aerodrome in Belgium from a raid on England and dropped a bomb upon
the gigantic gas-bag, blowing it up and killing the crew; but before
that came to pass thirteen Zeppelin raids had already been visited upon
England, 408 bombs had been dropped, twenty-one persons had been killed
and a thousand injured. In both this case and in the case of Lieutenant
Robinson, more than a year later, the aeroplanes happened to be in the
air above the Zeppelins before they came along, and the aeroplanes in
both instances were blown completely upside down by the force of the
explosion. Needless to say, a moment later Lieutenant Robinson looped
the loop for joy when he saw what destruction he had wrought.
In other words, because the Zeppelins could put out their lights, shut
off their motors, and drift through clouds unheard in the night at two
thousand feet altitude, and because the dropping of the bombs, like
the throwing out of ballast, allowed the dirigibles to jump suddenly
up to much higher altitudes, they were as a rule far too elusive for
the aeroplanes to get near enough even to shoot incendiary bullets into
them.
In point of flying comforts and safety, time that can be spent in the
air, flying distances and useful load carried, the Zeppelin is far in
advance of any kind of heavier-than-air machine ever built.
Before the war the passenger-carrying Zeppelins _Schwaben_ and
_Victoria Louise_ were equipped with cabins for the accommodation of
twenty-four passengers and crew. Meals were served à la carte; two rows
of easy-chairs were arranged before the windows, with a passageway
between; and there was a wash-room with water-faucets; which will
give an idea of the completeness of the appointments for the comfort
of passengers. In the super-Zeppelins constructed since then, and now
being fitted to fly the Atlantic, there is ample room for a promenade
of four to five hundred feet in the keel. Moreover, there is even a
greater opportunity for the giant sky-liners to provide luxurious
cabins and other comforts for the travellers, such as of course cannot
possibly be supplied on a heavier-than-air machine, where even the
chief engineer cannot so much as leave his seat to examine the engine
once the machine is in flight!
The ability of the airship to cruise at low heights is another comfort
the dirigible enjoys over the aeroplane, which, to insure a safe
landing in event of engine trouble, usually navigates across country at
five thousand feet altitude or more. The most pleasurable height for
air cruising is between five hundred and one thousand feet, for from
there the perspective of the countryside is not too diminutive.
As regards the safety of travel in lighter-than-air machines,
naturally there have been several disasters such as are inevitable
in perfecting a new science. The disasters that occur in the air are
closely analogous to those of the sea. The greatest dangers to the
airship are the wind, storms, and fire. Of these the last is the most
dangerous, because hydrogen gas is so highly explosive. That was what
caused the destruction of the _Akron_, with Vaniman and his companions.
What caused the explosion that annihilated the crew of twenty-five of
the L-11 in September, 1913, is not known. Perhaps the absorption of
the rays of the sun caused the gas to expand, bursting the gas-bags.
Glossed surfaces now deflect the rays and help to avoid that danger.
The extraordinary point in the long experimentation with Zeppelins was
the immunity of the actual crews of the airships from death, until the
thirteenth year of the Zeppelin’s existence. Despite the ever-recurring
accidents and the frequent loss of life and serious injury among
landing parties and the workshop hands, not a single fatality occurred
to any of the navigators until September, 1913, when naval Zeppelin
L-1, which was actually the fourteenth Zeppelin to be constructed,
was wrecked in the North Sea by a squall, her crew of thirteen being
drowned.
Most of the minor accidents to Zeppelins were due to poor landings
and high winds. At first this was not to be avoided, because of the
huge bulk of these air-liners and their great buoyancy and the ease
with which the wind could blow them against their moorings. With
experience, though, this was eliminated. Indeed, the officers of the
passenger-carrying _Schwaben_ never bothered about the weather, and
went out when aeroplanes would not dare go up. The _Parseval VI_ made
224 trips about Berlin within two years’ time, remained in the air a
total of 342 hours, carried 2,286 passengers, and travelled a distance
of 15,000 miles.
To compare this record with the long list of those who have lost their
lives in aeroplane flying and experimentation is impossible and of no
avail. The radical differences of construction make it much easier for
the balloon to avoid disaster than the aeroplane.
Whenever a wing breaks on an aeroplane or whenever the engine on a
single-motored machine stops, the aeroplane must fall down or glide
to a landing. These defects will undoubtedly be greatly overcome with
standardized construction of aircraft and the establishment of proper
landing-fields. The hazard, nevertheless, will always be there in some
degree.
Such an accident is not frequent with a lighter-than-air machine,
which does not depend on its motor but upon gas to keep it afloat.
Indeed, an airship may drift hundreds of miles with the wind with all
its motors completely shut off—which, by the way, is another reason
why the transatlantic fight with the air-currents, which move from
America to Europe, seems to be a very feasible possibility for the
lighter-than-air craft. The conservation of fuel under such a condition
is tremendous.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Flying Magazine._
The R-34, the British rigid dirigible.
The R-34 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, New York, a
distance of 3,300 miles, in 108 hours and 10 minutes, and returned to
Pulham, Norfolk, England, in 75 hours and 3 minutes, non-stop flight.]
“It is unquestionably her long endurance and great weight-carrying
capacity which gives the airship her chief advantage over the
aeroplane,” says W. L. Marsh, the eminent authority on dirigibles
previously referred to. “It will no doubt be conceded that in spite
of the stimulus of war the airship is little further advanced in
development than the aeroplane was at the beginning of 1915; and
already airships have visited this country”—England—“which could with
ease fly from England to America, carrying a considerable load
of merchandise. A present-day Zeppelin has a gross lift of sixty-five
tons, of which some 58 per cent is available for crew, fuel, ballast,
merchandise, and so on. If we take the distance across the Atlantic in
a direct line as two thousand miles we get the following disposition of
our load of thirty-eight tons:
TONS
Crew of 30 2.3
Ballast 2.0
Gasoline 12.0
Oil 2.0
Extras [food, and so on] 1.0
——
Total [say, 20 tons] 19.3
“This leaves eighteen tons available for freight. These figures are
based on the ship maintaining a constant speed of fifty miles an hour,
at which she would do the journey in forty hours, consuming 650 pounds
of gasoline an hour.
“This represents what a rigid airship of slightly over capacity can
do to-day, and is given as an indication of what is possible in a
comparatively early stage of development.
“No one who has considered rigid airship design and studied rapid
strides which aeroplanes have made in the last three and a half years
can doubt for a moment that an airship could be built in the course
of the next two years which would have a disposal lift—or, in
aeroplane parlance, a ‘useful load’—of over two hundred tons, giving
it an endurance of anything up to three weeks at a speed of forty to
forty-five miles an hour.
“I am endeavoring to state the case as moderately as possible, and
am therefore purposely putting the speed at a low figure. I believe
I am correct in estimating the full speed of a modern Zeppelin at
seventy-five miles an hour. I shall not be too optimistic in claiming
eighty miles as a conservative figure for the future. There is little
doubt that a ship of some 800,000 cubic feet should be able to carry
twenty or thirty passengers, having a full speed of about seventy miles
an hour, which it could maintain for two days or more, the endurance at
forty-five miles an hour being probably in the neighborhood of five or
six days. This ship would be able to cross the Atlantic. A present-day
Zeppelin could carry some eighteen tons of freight across to America,
and the really big ship—it must be remembered that up to the present
we have been talking of lighter-than-air midgets—could transport at
least 150 tons the same distance.”
But Mr. Marsh is not the only British authority on aerodynamics who
has gone on record as to the practicability of transnavigation of the
Atlantic. The British Aerial Transport Committee, consisting of some of
the most representative men of Great Britain, such as G. Holt-Thomas,
Tom Sopwith, H. G. Wells, Brigadier-General Brancker, Lord Montagu of
Beaulieu and Lord Northcliffe—to mention only a few—in its report of
November, 1918, to the Air Council of the British Parliament, says:
“Airships now exist with a range of more than 4,000 miles, and they can
travel at a speed of 78 miles an hour. By running their engines slower
a maximum range of 8,000 miles can be obtained. On first speed Cape
Town, South Africa, is to-day aerially only a little more than three
days from Southampton. This ship could fly across the Atlantic and
return without stopping. The committee points out that the airship will
soon develop a speed of 100 miles an hour, that it will be fitted with
ample saloons, staterooms, an elevator to a roof-garden, and it will be
able to remain in the air for more than a week.”
Mr. Ed. M. Thierry, Berlin correspondent of the N. E. A., under date
of December, 1918, says: “I recently visited the immense works outside
Berlin at Staaken. The new super-Zeppelin which is now building has a
gas capacity of 100,000 cubic metres. It will have nine engines and
eight propellers. This transatlantic Zeppelin is 800 feet in length. It
will cost nearly $1,000,000, and it will have a carrying capacity of
100 passengers and forty-five tons of mail and baggage, and thirty tons
of petrol, oil, and water and provisions. The first machine for the
transatlantic service is to be completed in July, 1919. For maintenance
of the service planned, eight active machines and four reserved will
be required. As soon as the international situation is clarified it is
proposed to establish the service with a hangar in New York.”
Major Thomas S. Baldwin, U. S. A. C., considered one of the best
authorities in regard to balloons and dirigibles in the United States,
said that the Germans had constructed aircraft that could stay in the
air for two weeks and could make upward of 75 miles an hour. Major
Baldwin stated that the relatively small American Blimps were capable
of 60 miles an hour. Only recently one of these flew from Akron, Ohio,
to New York without stopping, a distance of more than 300 miles, and
the Naval NC-1 flew from New York to Pensacola, Florida, a distance of
over 1,000 miles, stopping at Norfolk, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia.
On December 12 an interesting experiment of launching a plane from a
dirigible was conducted at Rockaway Beach, New York. The dirigible
rose about one hundred feet above the sand-field near Fort Tilden.
An aeroplane was attached to the roof. After discharging ballast and
starting the motor the dirigible ascended to three thousand feet and
released the aeroplane, which dived about one thousand feet and then
flew off to Mineola. Lieutenant George Crompton, Naval Flying Corps,
piloted the dirigible, assisted by J. L. Nichols and G. Cooper. The
plane was piloted by A. W. Redfield.
In the flight of the British naval dirigible R-23 over the North
Sea, in April, 1919, the aeroplane was hung suspended from the keel
amidships and launched when near the British coast.
The above experiment is cited only as an indication of what the
possibilities are of combining the aeroplane with the dirigible
in landing mail or express from dirigibles crossing the Atlantic.
Undoubtedly aeroplanes weighing only a thousand pounds, with a flying
radius of 600 miles and making 150 miles an hour, will be launched
from superdirigibles 500 miles from the journey’s end, especially when
airships are to be constructed with 10,000,000 cubic feet of gas, with
a 60 per cent gross lift for crew, fuel, freight, and so on, as Mr.
Marsh says is quite possible in the immediate future.
Experiments for launching aeroplanes from ocean-liners for a like
purpose are already under way. The object is to fly the mail for London
or New York from the ocean greyhounds as soon as they get within five
hundred miles of either coast. This will, of course, cut the flight
time from New York to London considerably. As a matter of fact the
dirigible might fly over only the great expanse of water from land’s
end to land’s end, while the aeroplanes negotiated the remainder of the
distance. It is granted that for short flights over land the aeroplane
is twice as fast as the Zeppelin, whereas the latter, because it can
stay in the air for weeks, is the best adapted for long cruises over
large bodies of water. Moreover, the removal of the weight of an
aeroplane from a dirigible six hundred miles from its journey’s end
would facilitate the remaining flight of the Zeppelin by just so much;
it would be equivalent to throwing out ballast to keep a balloon in the
air.
Perhaps of all the revolutionary scientific developments of the Great
War—especially in the field of chemistry—the one that may perform the
greatest service to mankind is the steps taken by the Bureau of Mines
to produce helium, the non-inflammable gas which has 92 per cent of
the lifting power of hydrogen, in sufficient quantities to be used in
floating airships!
A non-inflammable gas with such a lifting capacity as helium has been
the dream of the aeronaut and the dirigible engineer ever since the
Robert brothers first conducted their experiments in France in 1784 and
found that hydrogen had greater buoyancy than any other gas available
in large quantities for balloons; for with it they could jump over the
highest peaks of the Himalaya Mountains and the broadest expanses of
the Pacific Ocean without danger of the gas igniting from the sun or
the engine.
It will be recalled that we pointed out that the greatest danger to
people riding in dirigibles was the possibility of heat expanding and
exploding the hydrogen gas. One of the first airships to experience
this fate simply passed through a cloud into the hot sun, whose rays
expanded and exploded the gas, blowing the airship and its crew into
smithereens before they could open the gauges and release the pressure.
The same thing may have caused the explosion of the German dirigible
L-2, which killed its crew of twenty-five; and the American airship
_Akron_, which blew up, destroying Vaniman and his companions. The
substitution of helium entirely eliminates that danger and makes it
possible to carry heating devices for the comfort of passengers in
high altitudes where it is so cold.
Of course, the lifting power of helium was known to students of
aerostatics before the war, but the mechanical difficulties and cost
involved in producing this gas on an industrial basis were so great
that it would hardly pay to produce it for commercial purposes. Indeed,
the largest amount of helium in any one container up to the beginning
of 1918 was five cubic feet, and it cost between fifteen hundred and
six thousand dollars, whereas under the new system it is expected that
one thousand cubic feet can be produced for one hundred dollars!
In war, however, cost is nothing—results are everything. As there was
a possibility that helium might be one of the chief factors in winning
the war, the joint Army and Navy Board on Rigid Airships in August,
1917, provided the Bureau of Mines with the requisite funds to do the
necessary experiment work.
This, however, is not the time or the place to go into a detailed
description of this wonderful gas or how it was obtained, further than
to state that apparatus had to be designed on entirely new lines for
the liquefaction of nitrogen into natural gases, at temperatures as low
as -317 degrees Fahrenheit; that the natural gas of Kansas, Oklahoma,
Texas, and Ontario contains 1 per cent of helium; that a $900,000
building was constructed for the Navy Department at Fort Worth, Texas,
and a ten-inch pipe-line ninety-four miles long was laid, at a cost of
more than a million dollars, from the wells at Petrolia, Texas, for
supplying the plant with natural gas; and that the first production of
it was in operation April 1, 1918.
Within a comparatively short time, then, we ought to see many companies
organized in this country for aerial transnavigation of the globe by
helium airship! Before the year 1919 has come to a close we ought to
see aeroplanes and dirigibles jumping the Atlantic from shore to shore.
Who knows, it may even come to pass that man shall become as much a
creature of the air as the birds! As a world of exploration and travel
the heavens offer him many adventures. It presents to him the shortest
distance and the line of least resistance between any two given
points on this planet. By the aircraft he has already designed he has
penetrated to a height of 38,000 feet and flown a thousand miles in a
straight line without stopping.
Is there any reason to doubt that in a very short time man will extend
the capacity of these airships or the distance they can travel? The
monetary and laudatory incentives are there. For affording to his
fellow man and his chattels faster transportation, man’s reward has
been great and commensurate with his success. In order to win that
remuneration he has enslaved and domesticated the beasts of the
fields; he has harnessed the river and the streams; he has sought out
the secrets of nature and devised ways and means to make her hidden
forces transport him up and down the highways and byways of the globe;
for that reward he has invented machines and engines to rush him
over the land and across the seven seas at an ever-increasing rate.
When mountains have raised their ponderous bulk between him and his
objective he has climbed over them or tunnelled under them or cut them
down; when rivers, lakes, or oceans have intervened he has spanned them
by bridges or boats; when isthmus or even continents have injected
their lengths between him and his markets he has cut them asunder that
his ships might pass through.
In short, transportation is the life-blood of commerce, and by it and
through it the perishable fruits of India, Africa, and America are
carried from the tropics to the remotest corners of the frigid zone;
likewise the foods or minerals or other materials confined by nature
to the temperate zone are taken to the balmy tropics. In fact, every
instrument and every force in nature is enslaved so that man may enjoy
all the blessings of the earth at one time and in one place. Taken all
in all, the speed of transportation has increased man’s pleasures and
years proportionately.
But how many people to-day realize that when aerial transportation of
passengers and freight has become an actual accomplished fact in the
sense that water and land transportation of man and his goods now is, a
complete redistribution and reconcentration of the cities, people, and
nations and a new internationalism in the form of customs and language
will have become a historic fact! This statement may seem like an
absurd phantasy, but if history repeats itself in the future as it has
in the past this will take place as surely as the sun rises.
Ever since man transported his goods from one place to another he has
followed the lines of least resistance and the greatest speed. For that
reason rivers were his first natural highway. At the stopping-places
along these routes and waterways he built for himself villages, towns,
and cities. The biggest of these, however, have always been located at
some favorable terminus or harbor. Nineveh, Babylon, Carthage, and Tyre
were ancient cities that grew and flourished because they were either
the termini or the harbors of advantageous trade routes or excellent
stopping-places on great waterways. With the change in the rivers of
commerce those cities decayed and passed away.
The rise of such cities as Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages, when
they afforded the best ports for the sailing-vessels that connected
the caravan routes which came across Asia from the East for their
distribution of goods to Europe and the West, was due to the same
cause. With the changing of those routes those cities lost their
importance and prestige and became what they are to-day.
At the present time most of the largest cities of the world are
located near inviting harbors or in river-mouths where the great
ships of commerce come and go and find refuge. London, Liverpool, New
York, Hamburg, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Calcutta, Bombay, Havana,
Buenos Aires—to mention only a very few—depend primarily upon their
strategic geographic position for their business and their very life.
If in time, then, the nearest points of land between continents and
countries become the great landing-places for the new passenger and
freight ships of the air, it is quite conceivable that the great
centres of population and commerce may grow up themselves round those
havens.
Moreover, if, as the British Civil Aerial Transport Committee and most
of the world’s aeronautical authorities are convinced, Cape Town, South
Africa—to take but one example—is only three days’ flight by aircraft
from Southampton, England, and if all the remotest capitals of the East
are only hours or days instead of weeks away from those of the West,
there will be such rapid and constant intercommunication that customs
practices will become obsolete and one international language may have
to be adopted for trade and convenience. Indeed, the only impediment
originally put in the way of the Handley Page Company’s London-to-Paris
air-line was the violation of customs practices, which is delaying the
aeroplanes from making the round trip between breakfast and dinner.
Furthermore, with the coming of such rapid inter-communication it is
conceivable that foggy and damp countries like the British Isles may be
abandoned—save by the workers of minerals—as living and manufacturing
places for more beautiful and delightful climates, such as France or
Spain. Indeed, the pleasantly located gardens and plateaus of the
world—like the one in Mexico, for instance—may be the favorite
dwelling-places of the peoples of the world when all the fruits and
foods and goods of the earth can be aerially transported to such
places in a matter of hours.
Needless to say that when each country possesses a fleet of commercial
aircraft numbered by tens of thousands, inherently convertible into
bombers large enough to annihilate whole cities entirely—as French
aeronautic military authorities have already stated they feared
Germany would be able to do with ten thousand aeroplanes and Zeppelins
in the next ten years unless she was limited in her construction
programme—when many countries can be flown over in a matter of hours
without anything to prevent them, then undoubtedly a league of nations
will have been organized for self-preservation and war abolished as
too horrible to contemplate. Thus by levelling boundaries and borders
of nations and countries the aircraft promises to perform the greatest
blessing of mankind by abolishing war, destroying nationalism, and
establishing internationalism and the brotherhood of man throughout the
world.