CHAPTER II

THE AEROPLANE AND THE AIRSHIP

The age of the flying machine had come at last. A power-driven aeroplane

had been built, and had been flown under the control of its pilot. What

remained to do was to practise with it and test it; to improve it, and

perfect it, and put it on the market. The time allowed for all this was

not long; in less than eleven years, if only the world had known it, the

world would be at war, and would be calling for aeroplanes by the

thousand.

Romance, for all that it is inspired by real events, is never quite like

real life. It makes much of prominent dates and crises, and passes

lightly and carelessly over the intervening shallows and flats. Yet

these shallows and flats are the place where human endurance and purpose

are most severely tested. The problem of flight had been solved; the

people of the world, it might be expected, springing to attention, would

salute the new invention, and welcome the new era. Nothing of the kind

happened. America, which is more famous for journalistic activity than

any other country on earth, remained profoundly inattentive. The Wrights

returned to their home at Dayton, and there continued their experiments.

A legend has grown up that these experiments were conducted under a

close-drawn veil of secrecy. On the contrary, the proceedings of the

brothers were singularly public--indeed, for the preservation of their

title to their own invention, almost dangerously public. 'In the spring

of 1904,' says Wilbur Wright, through the kindness of Mr. Torrence

Huffman, of Dayton, Ohio, we were permitted to erect a shed, and to

continue experiments, on what is known as the Huffman Prairie, at Simms

Station, eight miles east of Dayton. The new machine was heavier and

stronger, but similar to the one flown at Kill Devil Hill. When it was

ready for its first trial every newspaper in Dayton was notified, and

about a dozen representatives of the Press were present. Our only

request was that no pictures be taken, and that the reports be

unsensational, so as not to attract crowds to our experiment grounds.

There were probably fifty persons altogether on the ground. When

preparations had been completed a wind of only three or four miles was

blowing--insufficient for starting on so short a track--but since many

had come a long way to see the machine in action, an attempt was made.

To add to the other difficulty, the engine refused to work properly. The

machine, after running the length of the track, slid off the end without

rising into the air at all. Several of the newspaper men returned again

the next day, but were again disappointed. The engine performed badly,

and after a glide of only sixty feet the machine came to the ground.

Further trial was postponed till the motor could be put in better

running condition. The reporters had now, no doubt, lost confidence in

the machine, though their reports, in kindness, concealed it. Later,

when they heard that we were making flights of several minutes'

duration, knowing that longer flights had been made with airships, and

not knowing any essential difference between airships and flying

machines, they were but little interested.'

The indifference and scepticism of the public and the press provided a

very effective veil of secrecy, and the brothers prosecuted their

researches undisturbed. In 1904 they made more than a hundred flights,

practising turning movements and complete circles, and learning how to

handle the machine so as to prevent it from 'stalling', that is, from

losing flying speed and falling to earth out of control when the air

resistance caused by its manoeuvring reduced its speed. In 1905 they

built another machine and resumed their experiments in the same field.

They did not want to attract a crowd. The cars on the electric line

adjoining the field ran every thirty minutes, and they timed their

flights between the runs. The farmers living near by saw the flying, but

their business was with the earth, not the air, and after looking on for

two years they lost what little interest they had. On the 5th of October

1905 one of them, from a neighbouring field, saw the great white form

rushing round on its circular course in the air. 'Well,' he remarked,

'the boys are at it again'; and he kept on cutting corn. The season's

work is summarized by Mr. Orville Wright in a letter dated the 17th of

November 1905, and communicated to the Aeronautical Society of Great

Britain:

'Up to September 6 we had the machine on but eight different days,

testing a number of changes which we had made since 1904.... During the

month of September we gradually improved in our practice, and on the

26th made a flight of a little over eleven miles. On the 30th we

increased this to twelve and one-fifth miles, on October 3 to fifteen

and one-third miles, on October 4 to twenty and three-fourth miles, and

on the 5th to twenty-four and one-fourth miles. All of these flights

were made at about thirty-eight miles an hour, the flight of the 5th

occupying thirty minutes three seconds.... We had intended to place the

record above the hour, but the attention these flights were beginning to

attract compelled us suddenly to discontinue our experiments in order

to prevent the construction of the machine from becoming public.

'The machine passed through all of these flights without the slightest

damage. In each of these flights we returned frequently to the

starting-point, passing high over the heads of the spectators.'

A young druggist called Foust, a friend of the Wrights, was present at

the flight of the 5th of October. He was told not to divulge what he had

seen, but his enthusiasm would not be restrained, and he talked to such

effect that next day the field was crowded with sightseers and the

fences were lined with photographers. Very reluctantly the brothers

ended their work for the year. They took apart their flyer, and brought

it back to the city.

From this time on, for a period of almost three years, the brothers

disappear from view. The secrets which it had cost them so much time and

effort to discover might, by a single photograph, be made into public

property. They were bound to do what they could to assert their claim to

their own invention. Their first task was to secure patent rights in

their machine; and, after that, to negotiate with the American, French,

and British Governments for its purchase. The bringer of so great a gift

as flight is worthy of his reward; but the attitude of the brothers to

their hard-won possession was not selfish or commercial. They thought

more of their responsibilities than of their profits; and in attempting

to dispose of their machine they handled the matter as if it were a

public trust. These years were full of disappointment, much unlike the

earlier years of progress and open-air holiday and happiness. No one,

except a few intimates and disciples, believed in the Wrights'

achievements. The American Government would not touch their invention.

When it was thrice offered to the British Government, between the years

1906 and 1908, it was thrice refused, twice by the War Office and once

by the Admiralty. At an earlier period the French Government, more

active than the other two, sent Captain Ferber, who had made many

gliding experiments of his own, to report after viewing the machine at

Dayton. The Wrights refused to show it to him, but their account of what

they had done impressed him by its truthfulness, and he reported in

their favour, though he told them that there was not a man in all France

who believed that they had done what they claimed. The French Government

would not buy; and things were at a standstill, until Mr. Hart O. Berg,

a good man of business who had helped the Wrights to secure their

patents, urged on them the necessity of putting in an appearance in

Europe and showing what they could do. By this time they had made

various improvements, especially in their engine, and had supplied

themselves with two machines. With one of these, in the summer of 1908,

Wilbur Wright came to France; with the other Orville Wright was to

attempt to secure the contract in America for an army aeroplane. A

French syndicate had agreed to buy the Wright patents and a certain

number of machines on condition that two flights of not less than fifty

kilometres each should be made in a single week, the machines to carry a

passenger or an equivalent weight, and the flights to be made in a wind

of not less than eleven metres a second, that is, about twenty-five

miles an hour. The conditions for the American army contract were no

less severe. The machine was to remain in continuous flight for at least

an hour; it was to be steered in all directions; and was to land,

without damage, at its starting-point. The place chosen for the French

tests was the Hunaudieres racecourse, near Le Mans. There Wilbur Wright

set up his shed, and, from the 8th of August onward, made many little

flights, showing his complete control of his machine by the elaborate

manoeuvres which he performed in the air. On the 9th of September there

came the news that Orville Wright had flown for over an hour at Fort

Myer in America. This liberated Wilbur Wright, who had been holding back

in order to give America the precedence, and on the 21st of September he

flew for more than an hour and a half, covering a distance of over sixty

miles. About three weeks later he fulfilled the conditions of his test

by successive passenger-carrying flights. Encouraged by his example, two

distinguished French pioneers, Henri Farman and Leon Delagrange, soon

began to make long flights on French machines, and from this time

onwards the progress of flying was rapid and immense. A great industry

came into being, and, after a short time, ceased to pay any tribute

whatever to the inventors. Merely to secure recognition of their

priority, it became necessary for the Wrights to bring actions at law

against the infringers of their patents. The tedious and distasteful

business of these law-suits troubled and shortened the days of Wilbur

Wright, who died at Dayton on the 30th of May 1912. In 1913, by

arrangement between the parties, a test action was begun against the

British Government. When the war broke out, and the trial of this action

was still pending, the supporters of the Wrights hastily met, and

offered to forgo all their claims for fifteen thousand pounds, a sum

substantial enough to establish the Wrights' priority, yet merely

nominal as a payment for the benefits conferred. So the matter was

settled. The last thoughts of Wilbur Wright were given, not to financial

profits, but to further developments of the art of flight. He was

constantly meditating on the possibility of soaring flight, which should

take advantage of the wind currents, and maintain the machine in the air

with but little expenditure of power. In a letter written not many days

before he died, and addressed to a German aviator at the Johannisthal

flying camp, he says, 'There must be a method whereby human beings can

remain in the air once they really find themselves aloft.... The birds

can do it. Why shouldn't men?' The coming of the war, with its

peremptory demand for power and yet more power, did much to develop

strong flight, but postponed experiment on this delicate and fascinating

problem.

The name of the Wrights is so much the greatest name in the history of

flying that it is only fair to give their achievements a separate place.

In 1905 they were in possession of a practical flying machine. In 1908

they proved their powers and established their claims in the sight of

the world. During these three years events had not stood still; European

inventors were busy with experiments. There were rumours of the American

success, but the rumours were disbelieved, and the problem was attacked

again from the beginning. Long after the Wrights had circled in the air,

at their own free will, over the Huffman Prairie, European inventors

were establishing records, as they believed, by hopping off the ground

for a few yards in machines of their own construction.

The earliest of these European pioneers was Mr. I. C. H. Ellehammer, a

Danish engineer, who had built motor-cycles and light cars. In 1904 he

built a flying machine, and having prepared a ground in the small Danish

island of Lindholm, suspended the machine by a wire attached to a

central mast, and tested its lifting power. In the course of his

experiments he increased his engine-power, and added to the first

bird-like pair of wings a second pair placed above them. With this

improved machine he claims to have made, on the 12th of September 1906,

the first free flight in Europe, travelling in the air for forty-two

metres at a height of a metre and a half. With later machines he had

some successes, but the rapid progress of French aviation left him

behind, and his latest invention was an application to the aeroplane of

a helicopter, to raise it vertically in the air. The helicopter idea

continues to fascinate some inventors, and it would be rash to condemn

it, but the most it seems to promise is a flight like that of the

lark--an almost vertical ascent and a glide to earth again. A machine of

this kind might conceivably, at some future time, become a substitute,

in war, for the kite balloon; it is not likely to supersede the

aeroplane.

Of all European countries France was the most intelligent and the most

alert in taking up the problem of flight. The enduring rivalry between

the airship and the flying machine is well illustrated in the history of

French effort. Long before the first true flying machine was built and

flown balloons of a fish-like shape had been driven through the air by

mechanical airscrews. A bird is much heavier than the air it displaces;

a fish is about the same weight as the water it displaces; and the

question which of the two examples is better for aircraft, whether

flying or swimming is the better mode, remained an open question,

dividing opinion and distracting effort. The debate is not yet

concluded. It is now not very hazardous to say that both methods are

good, and that the partisans of the one side and the other were right in

their faith and wrong in their heresy-hunting. National rivalry

certainly quickened the competition between the two modes; the early

progress of aviation in France gave a great impulse to the development

of the Zeppelin in Germany. But the two modes are so entirely distinct

that they are better treated separately. None of the chief nations of

the world has dared wholly to neglect either; from the very beginning

the two have grown up side by side, and interest has been concentrated

now on the one and now on the other. When, in 1912, Great Britain took

in hand the creation of an air force, military and naval, France was

already furnished with a very large number of aeroplanes, organized for

service with the army, and Germany was provided with airships of

unprecedented power and range. France also had some airships, and

Germany, alarmed by the progress of French aviation, had begun to turn

her attention to aeroplanes, but the pride of Germany was in her

airships, and the pride of France was in her aeroplanes. These were the

conditions with which Great Britain had to reckon; they had grown up

rapidly in the course of a few years; and it will be convenient to speak

first of the airship, which, invented by France, was adopted and

improved by Germany; and then of the aeroplane, which was made by France

into so formidable a military engine that Germany had no choice but to

imitate again. Meantime Great Britain, during the earlier years of these

developments, entrusted her aerial fortunes to a few balloons, which

were operated by the Royal Engineers and were not very favourably

regarded by the chiefs of the army. The unpreparedness of Great Britain

in all national crises is a time-honoured theme. The Englishman, if he

does not wholly distrust science, at least distrusts theory. Facts

excite him, and rouse him to exertion. In an address delivered in 1910,

Mr. R. B. Haldane, who consistently did all that he could to promote and

encourage science, uttered a prophecy which deserves record. 'When a new

invention,' he said, 'like the submarine or the motor, comes to light,

the Englishman is usually behind. Give him a few years and he has not

only taken care of himself in the meantime, but is generally leading. As

it was with these inventions, so I suspect it will prove to be with

aircraft.'

The airship, like the balloon, was a French invention. When the balloon

first came into vogue many attempts were made to deflect or guide its

course by the use of oars. Those who made these attempts were almost

unanimous in declaring that the use of oars enabled them to alter the

course of a balloon by several points of the compass. Another method of

steering employed sails, held up to the wind by the drag of a guide-rope

on the ground. The control to be obtained by means like these was

pathetically small, and the real problem was soon seen to be the problem

of a motor. The spherical balloon is obviously unsuited for

power-navigation; in 1784, only a year after the invention of the

balloon, General Meusnier, of the French army, made designs for an

egg-shaped power-balloon to be driven by three airscrews, supported on

the rigging between the car and the balloon. To keep the balloon fully

inflated and stiff, in order to drive it against the wind, he planned a

double envelope, the inner space to contain hydrogen, the outer space to

be pumped full of air. He may thus be said to have invented the

ballonet, or air-chamber of the balloon, and to be the father of later

successful airships. His designs were mere descriptions; they could not

be carried out; there was at that time no light engine in existence, and

his own suggestion that the airscrews should be worked by manual labour

may be called a design for an engine that weighs something over half a

ton for every horse-power of energy exerted. In 1798 the French author

Beaumarchais recommended the construction of airships in the long shape

of a fish. As the years passed, models were made on this plan. In 1834

Mr. Monck Mason exhibited at the Lowther Arcade in London a model

airship, thirteen and a half feet long, and six and a half feet in

diameter; its airscrew was operated by a spring; it was fitted with

horizontal planes for setting its course; and in its very short flights

it attained a speed of something over five miles an hour. A larger

model, with two airscrews driven by clockwork, was exhibited in 1850 by

M. Jullien, a clockmaker of Paris, and flew successfully against a

slight breeze. The first successful man-carrying airship was built in

1852 by Henry Giffard, the French engineer, and was flown at Paris on

the 24th of September in that year. It was spindle-shaped, with a

capacity of 87,000 cubic feet, and a length of 144 feet. The airscrew,

ten feet in diameter, was driven by a steam-engine of three horse-power,

and the speed attained was about six miles an hour. It would take long

to record all the unsuccessful or partially successful experiments in

the history of the airship--the elaborately constructed ships which

never rose from the ground, the carefully thought out devices which did

not work. Progress was very slow and gradual, a mere residue in a

history of failures. The first use of the gas-engine was in an Austrian

dirigible, which made a single captive ascent at Brunn in 1872, and

developed a speed of three miles an hour. After 1870 the reconstituted

French Government showed itself willing to encourage aeronautics, and in

1872, at the cost of the State, a large dirigible was built by Dupuy de

Lome, the inventor of the ironclad. This ship, with an airscrew driven

by manpower, attained a speed of five and a half miles an hour. The

first really successful power-driven airship, that is, the first airship

to return to its starting-point at the end of a successful voyage, was

built in 1884 for the French army by Captain Krebs and Captain Charles

Renard, who subsequently became director of the French department of

military aeronautics. This dirigible, named _La France_, was

fish-shaped; its length was a hundred and sixty-five feet; its greatest

diameter, near the bows, was twenty-seven and a half feet, or one-sixth

of its length; it was fitted with an electric motor of eight and a half

horse-power which operated an airscrew of twenty-three feet in diameter,

situated in front of the car; it was steered by vertical and horizontal

rudders, and made several ascents in the neighbourhood of Meudon. It was

the progenitor and type of all later non-rigid dirigibles.

The success of _La France_ brought Germany into the field. Towards the

close of the century a German engineer called Woelfert constructed a

dirigible rather smaller than the French airship, with a slightly more

powerful engine, and two airscrews of twelve feet in diameter. This was

in one respect a forerunner of the most famous of the German airships,

for the car, instead of hanging loose, was rigidly connected to the

envelope by means of struts. The trials took place in 1896 at Tempelhof,

near Berlin; the airship was held captive by ropes; it answered well to

its rudders, and attained a speed of about nine miles an hour.

Encouraged by this experiment, Dr. Woelfert in the following year built a

second smaller dirigible, fitted with a Daimler benzine motor, and made

a free ascent in it on the 14th of June 1897, near Berlin. As soon as it

was well in the air, the ship caught fire and fell flaming to the

ground, killing Dr. Woelfert and his assistant. Later in the same year

the first completely rigid dirigible was built by a German called David

Schwarz; it was made of thin aluminium sheeting, internally braced by

steel wires, and was driven by a twelve horse-power Daimler motor which

worked twin airscrews, one on either side. It took the air near Berlin

on the 3rd of November 1897, but something went wrong with the airscrew

belts, and it was seriously damaged in its hasty descent. Thereupon the

crowd of people who had assembled to applaud it fell upon it, and

wrecked it. The behaviour of the crowd deserves a passing mention in any

history of flight; it was not the least of the ordeals of the early

aeronaut. The aeroplane or airship pilot who disappointed the

expectations of his public found no better treatment than Christian and

Faithful met with in Bunyan's Vanity Fair. There is here no question of

national weaknesses; in France and Germany, in England and America, the

thing has happened again and again. If an ascent was announced, and was

put off because the weather was bad, the crowd jeered, and hooted, and

threw stones. On more than one occasion a pilot has been driven by the

taunts of the crowd to attempt an impossible ascent; and has met his

death. If a damaged machine fell to earth, the crowd often wreaked their

vengeance on it, as deer fall upon a wounded comrade. The men who made

up the crowd were most of them kind and trustworthy in their private

relations, and in matters that they understood were not unreasonable or

inconsiderate. But aerial navigation was a new thing, and their attitude

to it was wholly spectacular. They came to see it because they craved

excitement, and under the influence of that cruel passion they were

capable of the worst excesses of the Roman populace at a gladiatorial

show.

In the years that joined the centuries, that is, from 1898 to 1903,

aviation seemed a forlorn hope, but there was great activity in the

construction of airships, and something like a race for supremacy

between France and Germany. In 1898 the Brazilian, Alberto Santos

Dumont, made his first gallant appearance in an airship of his own

construction. Born in 1873, the son of a prosperous coffee-planter of

San Paulo in Brazil, Santos Dumont was a young and wealthy amateur,

gifted with mechanical genius, and insensible to danger. The accidents

and perils that he survived in his many aerial adventures would have

killed a cat. One of his airships collapsed and fell with him on to the

roofs of Paris. Another collapsed and fell with him into the

Mediterranean. A third caught fire in the air, and he beat out the

flames with his Panama hat. He survived these and other mishaps, unhurt,

and after making more than a hundred ascents in airships, turned his

attention to aeroplanes, and was the first man to rise from French soil

in a flying machine. From his boyhood mechanisms had attracted him; he

was well acquainted with all the machines on his father's plantation,

and he records an observation that he made there--the only bad machine

on the plantation, he says, was an agitating sieve; the good machines

all worked on the rotary principle. He became a champion of the wheel,

and of the rotary principle. There was something of the fierceness of

theological dispute in the controversies of these early days. The wheel,

it was pointed out, is not in nature; it is a pedantic invention of man.

Birds do not employ it to fly with, nor fish to swim with. The

naturalist school of aeronauts declared against it. In 1892 M. A. le

Compagnon made experiments, not very successfully, in Paris, with a

captive dirigible balloon driven by a pair of oscillating wings. As late

as 1904 Mr. Thomas Moy, in a paper read to the Aeronautical Society of

Great Britain, maintained that the greatest hindrances to the solution

of the problem of mechanical flight have always been the balloon and the

airscrew. Mr. William Cochrane, in a paper read a few months earlier,

laid it down that the airscrew must give place to a more efficient form

of propulsion. Utterances like these help to explain the fervour with

which Santos Dumont, in the book called _My Airships_ (1904), defends

the rotary principle, which is the life of machines. Like the Wrights,

he believed in practice, and was a skilled and experienced balloonist

before he attempted to navigate an airship. His first airship was almost

absurdly small; it had little more than six thousand feet of cubic

capacity, was cigar-shaped, and was driven by a three and a half

horse-power petrol motor. The others followed in rapid succession. M.

Deutsch de la Meurthe had offered a prize of a hundred thousand francs

for the first airship that should rise from the Aero Club ground at St.

Cloud and voyage round the Eiffel Tower, returning within half an hour

to its starting-point. On the 19th of October 1901 the prize was won by

Santos Dumont in the sixth of his airships. The ship had over twenty-two

thousand feet of cubic capacity; its length was more than five times its

diameter; and it was driven by a twelve horse-power petrol motor. It

travelled six and three-quarter miles within the half-hour, part of the

journey being accomplished against a wind of about twelve miles an hour.

This achievement quickened interest in airships and gained a European

fame for Santos Dumont. His later airships were modelled on the egg

rather than the cigar; the smallest of these was so perfectly under

control that he was able, he says, to navigate it by night through the

streets of Paris.

The development of the airship continued for many years to pay toll in

wreckage and loss of life. In 1902 three notable airships were built and

flown in France; two of these were destroyed in the air above Paris,

within a few minutes of their first ascent. Senhor Augusto Severo, a

Brazilian, made a spindle-shaped airship, ninety-eight feet long, driven

by two airscrews, placed one at each end of a framework which formed the

longitudinal axis of the airship. It ascended on the 12th of May, and

when it had reached a height of thirteen hundred feet, exploded in

flames. Senhor Severo and his assistant perished in it. The other ship

was designed by Baron Bradsky, secretary to the German Embassy in Paris;

its total weight was made exactly equivalent to the weight of the air

that it displaced, and it was to be raised by the operation of an

airscrew rotating horizontally under the car. By the action of this

screw the car itself began to rotate, and to drag the ship round with

it; the resistance of the air on the body of the ship put too great a

strain on the steel wires by which the car was suspended; they broke,

and from a height of many hundred feet Baron Bradsky and his engineer,

M. Morin, fell to earth with the car, and were killed. This second

disaster happened on the 13th of October 1902, at Stains, near Paris.

Twelve days later, on the 25th of October, a much more fortunate

airship, the dirigible built for the brothers Lebaudy, made its first

ascent at Moisson. This vessel was more successful than any of its

predecessors, and became the model for airships of the semi-rigid type.

It was fish-shaped, with a capacity of more than eighty thousand cubic

feet, and was driven by a forty horse-power Daimler petrol motor, which

worked two airscrews, eight feet in diameter, at a rate exceeding a

thousand revolutions a minute. The lower part of the envelope was flat,

and secured to a rigid metal framework; six steel tubes, attached to

this framework, supported the car below, and, besides distributing the

load, conveyed the thrust of the airscrew to the ship above. In the

course of a year the ship made twenty-eight return journeys, covering

distances up to twenty-two miles. In November 1903 it broke all records,

first by making the longest voyage that had ever been made by a

navigable balloon, that is, from Moisson to Paris, a distance of about

forty miles, and next, a week later, by successfully combating a wind of

more than twenty miles an hour. 'Aerial navigation', said Colonel

Renard, who witnessed this trial, 'is no longer a Utopia.' After a time

the ship was taken over by the French army, and its immediate Lebaudy

successors, _La Patrie_ of 1906 and _La Republique_ of 1908, also became

military airships. Both were wrecked after a short career, but the

military airship had made good its promise, and three new

airship-building firms were established in France. In 1902 the Astra

Company, in 1909 and 1910 the Zodiac Company and the Clement-Bayard

Company, began to build airships, some for the French army and some for

foreign powers.

Meanwhile, at the time when Santos Dumont was gaining credit for the

smallest airship ever known, the largest known airship had been designed

and launched in Germany. On the 2nd of July 1900 the first Zeppelin made

its trial trip from the floating shed at Manzell, near Friedrichshafen,

on Lake Constance. When the Great War shall be only a faded memory, when

the sufferings of millions of men and women shall be condensed into

matter for handbooks, and their sacrifices shall be expressed only in

arithmetical figures, certain incidents and names, because they caught

the popular imagination, will still be narrated and repeated. The names

that will live are the names that symbolize the causes for which they

stood. Edith Cavell will never be forgotten; when she persevered in her

work of mercy, and calmly faced the ultimate cruelties of a monstrous

system, all that was best in the war seemed to find expression in that

lonely passion. She was brought home to England in a warship, and was

carried to her grave on a gun-carriage, under the Union Jack, because

her cause was her country's cause, and England claimed a title in her

sacrifice. It is a far cry from Edith Cavell to the old soldier who gave

Germany the giant airship, but the Zeppelin will also be remembered,

because the popular imagination, which is often both just and fanciful,

found a symbol of Germany's cause in this engine of terror, so carefully

and admirably planned down to the minutest detail, so impressive by its

bulk, so indiscriminate in its destructive action, and so frail. Its

inventor was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a Lieutenant-General in the

German army. His first balloon ascent had been made during the American

Civil War, in one of the military balloons of the Federal army. Later

on, in the Franco-Prussian War, he distinguished himself by his daring

cavalry reconnaissances in Alsace. At about that time there was in

Alsace a Frenchman named Spiess, who had drawn a design for a rigid

airship not unlike the later Zeppelin, and had endeavoured, without

success, to patent it. The suggestion has been made, but with no proof,

that Count Zeppelin may have seen Spiess's plans, and borrowed from

them. If so, the borrowed idea took long in maturing. It was not until

1898 that the Count went to work on a large scale, and formed a company

with a capital of a million marks. It was not until 1908, after ten

years of struggle and disaster, that the German Government made him a

grant for the continuance of his experiments, and the German people,

impressed by his pertinacity and courage in misfortune, raised for him a

subscription of three hundred thousand pounds, to enable him to build

the great airship works at Friedrichshafen. From this time the Zeppelin

was a national ship. Sheds to harbour airships were built at strategic

points on the western and eastern fronts, and plans were set on foot to

house naval Zeppelins at Heligoland, Emden, and Kiel. With

characteristic German thoroughness a network of weather stations on

German soil, and, it is believed, of secret weather reports from other

countries, was provided for the guidance of airship pilots. All this was

a monument to the perseverance, which might almost be called obstinacy,

of the indomitable Count. He built enormous and costly airships, one

after another; one after another they were wrecked or burnt, and then he

built more. The German people watched him as King Robert the Bruce

watched the spider, with a scepticism that was gradually turned into

wonder, till, in the end, when disaster after disaster found him willing

patiently to begin again, they resolved to make him their teacher and to

take a lesson from him.

Count Zeppelin was about sixty years old when he began to make airships;

he had been long studying the problem and preparing his plans; so that

his many airships do not much differ among themselves in general design,

and a description of the first gives a fair enough idea of its

successors. It was a pencil-shaped rigid structure, about four hundred

and twenty feet long, with a diameter almost exactly one-eleventh part

of its length. The framework, built of aluminium, consisted of sixteen

hoops, connected by longitudinal pieces, and kept rigid by diagonal wire

stays. Before it was covered it resembled a vast bird-cage, and looked

as frail as a cobweb, but was stronger and stiffer than it looked. It

was divided by aluminium bulkheads into seventeen compartments; of these

all but the two end compartments contained separate balloons or

gas-bags. Two or three of these might collapse without completely

destroying the buoyancy of the ship. The whole structure was covered

with a fabric of rubberized cotton. A triangular latticed aluminium keel

ran along below, to give strength to the ship, and to furnish a

passage-way from end to end. At points about a third of the way from

either end of the ship spaces in the keel were made for the two cars, in

each of which was a sixteen horse-power Daimler motor driving two small

high velocity airscrews, one on each side of the ship. The lateral

steering was done by a large vertical rudder, placed aft. The

longitudinal balance was controlled in several ways. In the first ship a

heavy sliding weight in the keel was moved at will, fore and aft. This

was supplemented or superseded in later ships by four sets of elevating

planes, two sets in the fore-part and two sets aft. An advantage of the

rigid ship is that she can tilt herself without danger from the pressure

of the gas on the higher end. Moreover, she can be driven at a very high

speed, and the gas-bags, being housed in the compartments and protected

from the outer air, are less liable to sudden contraction and expansion

caused by variations of temperature.

The great disadvantage of the rigid type has hitherto been that in bad

weather the airship cannot land. A non-rigid airship in a nasty wind can

land and deflate itself at once by ripping the panel in the envelope, at

no greater price than the loss of its gas, and probably some damage to

its car. To land in a rigid ship is at best a ticklish business; indeed,

the rigid airship is in exactly the same case as a large sea-going

vessel; its chief dangers are from the land, which it cannot touch with

impunity. Its troubles have been greatly diminished, since the war, by

the development of the mooring-mast, which does away with the necessity

of housing the ship after every flight. The prevailing type of weather

in this country is unsettled, and the changes in the force and direction

of the wind are rapid and numerous. The landing and housing of an

airship demands hundreds of men for its performance, and is not safely

to be undertaken in a wind that blows more than eighteen miles an hour.

A staff of from eight to ten men is sufficient to anchor a large airship

to a mooring-mast, where it has been proved by experiment that she can

safely ride out a wind that blows fifty miles an hour. At Pulham, our

largest airship station, which was taken over from the Royal Air Force

by the Controller-General of Civil Aviation in December 1920, a number

of valuable experiments have since been carried out with an improvised

mooring-mast, and it has been shown that with a properly designed and

constructed mast, fitted with adequate receiving gear and hauling

apparatus, there will be no difficulty in landing the largest rigid

airships in a wind of from thirty-five to forty miles an hour. This

spells an immense advance. Sheds will still be necessary for overhauls

and repairs, as a dry dock is necessary for sea-going vessels. But an

airship on service may be moored to the mast, as a sea-going vessel is

moored to a quay, and can take on board or discharge cargo, passengers,

and fuel.

The trial trip of the first Zeppelin was short, because of accidents to

the steering-gear, but on the whole was not unsuccessful. The ship was

perfectly stable, and in its voyage of three and a half miles proved

that it could make headway against a wind of sixteen miles an hour. A

second ascent, lasting for an hour and twenty minutes, was made on the

17th of October 1900. These trials were of value in discovering the

faults of the ship; in the following year it was broken up, and Count

Zeppelin went to work again. In his second ship of 1905 the power of

each engine was increased to eighty-five horse-power, and other

improvements were made. This ship suffered many minor mishaps. At last,

in January 1906, it ascended over Lake Constance to a height of 1,800

feet; then the motors failed, the helm jammed; when the ship attempted

to descend the ground was frozen and the anchors would not hold, it was

driven against some trees, and a high wind arising in the night made it

a total wreck.

* * * * *

The following list shows the number of Zeppelin airships built up to the

outbreak of the war, and the fate of each of them:

_Zeppelin _Year of

No._ Completion_ _Name_ _Remarks_

1 1900 L.Z.I Broken up after experiments spring

1901.

2 1905 L.Z. II Wrecked January 1906.

3 1906 Z. I Taken over by the army. Broken

up February 1913.

4 1908 L.Z. IV Burnt August 1908.

5 1909 Z. II Taken over by the army. Wrecked

April 1910.

6 1909 L.Z. VI Burnt September 1910.

7 1910 _Deutschland_ Wrecked June 1910.

8 1911 _Ersatz_ Wrecked May 1911.

_Deutschland_

9 1911 Ersatz Taken over by the army. Broken

Z. II up summer 1914.

10 1911 _Schwaben_ Wrecked June 1912.

11 1912 _Viktoria_ Wrecked June 1915.

_Luise_

12 1912 Z. III Taken over by the army. Broken

up summer 1914.

13 1912 _Hansa_ Broken up summer 1916.

14 1912 L. I Taken over by the navy. Wrecked

September 1913.

15 1913 Ersatz Taken over by the army. Wrecked

Z. I March 1913.

16 1913 Z. IV Taken over by the army. Broken

up spring 1916.

17 1913 _Sachsen_ Broken up spring 1916.

18 1913 L. 2 Taken over by the navy. Burnt

October 1913.

19 1913 Ersatz Taken over by the army. Wrecked

E.Z. I June 1914.

20 1913 Z. V Taken over by the army. Crashed

after damage by gunfire in

Poland, August 1914.

21 1913 Z. VI Taken over by the army. Crashed

at Cologne after damage by gunfire

over Liege, 6th August 1914.

22 1914 Z. VII Taken over by the army. Crashed

in the Argonne after damage by

gunfire, August 1914.

23 1914 Z. VIII Taken over by the army. Brought

down by gunfire at Badonvillers,

23rd August 1914.

24 1914 L. 3 Taken over by the navy. Wrecked

off Fanoe, 17th February 1915.

25 1914 Z. IX Taken over by the army. Dismantled

August 1914.

The list is full of wreckage; what it does not show is the immense

progress made in a few years. As early as 1907 Count Zeppelin made a

voyage of eight hours in his third airship, covering 211 miles. In 1909

he voyaged, in stages, from Friedrichshafen to Berlin, landing at Tegel

in the presence of the Emperor on the 29th of August, and returning

safely to Friedrichshafen by the 2nd of September. But the growing

efficiency of the Zeppelin and the growing confidence of the German

public are best seen in the records of passenger-carrying flights. The

Zeppelin Company, being founded and supported by national enterprise,

did not sell any ships to foreign powers. For passenger-carrying

purposes it supplied ships to the subsidiary company usually called the

Delag (that is, the Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien-Gesellschaft), which

had its headquarters at Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Delag acquired six

Zeppelin airships, which, unlike the military and naval ships, bore

names. A record of the voyages made by the _Viktoria Luise_, the

_Hansa_, and the _Sachsen_ will show how rapidly the German people were

familiarized with the Zeppelin, and how safe air-travel became, when

safety was essential, as it is in all passenger-carrying enterprises.

The _Viktoria Luise_ made her first trip on the 4th of March 1912, with

twenty-three passengers on board, from Friedrichshafen to

Frankfort-on-the-Main--a distance of about two hundred miles, which she

covered in seven and a half hours. She made her hundredth trip on the

23rd of June 1912; her two-hundredth on the 21st of October in the same

year; in the following year her three-hundredth trip was made on the

30th of June, and her four-hundredth on the 26th of November. In these

four hundred trips she carried 8,551 persons and travelled 29,430 miles.

Some of them were made over the sea; on the 27th of June, for instance,

she left Hamburg in the morning, and reached Cuxhaven in about two

hours. There she picked up with a Hamburg-America liner starting for New

York, and accompanied the steamer for some distance; then she steered

for Heligoland, and flying round the island very low was greeted with

cheers by the inhabitants. Part of her return journey was made against a

head-wind of sixteen miles an hour, and she reached Hamburg after a

voyage of eight hours, during which she had covered a distance of about

two hundred and fifty miles. The _Hansa_, beginning in July 1912, by the

end of 1913 had made two hundred and seventy-five trips, carrying 5,697

persons and travelling 22,319 miles. The _Sachsen_, beginning in May

1913, before the end of the year had made two hundred and six trips,

carrying 4,857 persons and travelling about 13,700 miles. A wrecked

Zeppelin is such a picture of destruction, such a vast display of

twisted metal and rags lying wreathed across a landscape, that those who

see it are apt to get an exaggerated idea of the dangers of airship

travel. With all his misfortunes, it was Count Zeppelin's luck for many

years that no life was lost among those who travelled in his ships.

In May 1906, before Count Zeppelin's enterprise had received the

stamp of Imperial and national approval, there was formed, under the

inspiration of the German Emperor, a society for airship development.

The success of the Lebaudy airship in France prompted the

construction in Germany of two types of semi-rigid airship--the

Parseval and the Gross. Only four of the latter type were built, and

all four suffered mishap; the last and best of them, built in 1911,

is said to have shown a better performance than the best contemporary

Zeppelin. The Parseval was designed in 1906 by Major August von Parseval,

of the Third Bavarian Infantry Regiment, who retired from the German

army in 1907 in order to devote himself entirely to scientific work.

He was already famous for the kite balloon, which he had invented in

collaboration with Hauptmann Bartsch von Sigsfeld, who died in 1906.

The Parseval kite balloon was adopted or imitated by all other

nations during the war. The Parseval airship was as good an airship,

of the non-rigid type, as had ever been built; it was supplanted,

later on, by the rigid type, because an airship's lift depends on

its size, and very large airships could not be built without a rigid

framework. The society for airship development bought up Major von

Parseval's plans, and began to construct Parseval airships. The

statutes of the society forbade it to sell ships for profit, so an

allied company was formed, the Luftfahrzeugbau-Gesellschaft, with

works at Bitterfeld, and a subsidiary company, the L.V.G., or

Luftverkehrs-Gesellschaft, to exploit Parseval airships for

passenger-carrying, with its headquarters at Berlin and sheds at

Johannisthal. Two passenger-carrying ships were built, the

_Stollwerk_ in 1910, and the _Charlotte_ in 1912. The Parseval

ships, perhaps because, being non-rigid, they were held to be

inferior to the Zeppelins, were freely sold to foreign powers--one

to the Austrian army in 1909, one to the Russian and one to the

Turkish army in 1910, one to the Japanese army in 1912, another to

the Russian and two to the Italian army in 1913; last of all, in the

same year, one to the British Admiralty. Some eighteen Parseval

airships were built and launched between 1909 and 1913. The third

great airship-building company in Germany was the Schuette-Lanz

Company, with its factory in Mannheim. It was named from Heinrich

Lanz, the founder of machine works near Mannheim, who supplied the

money, and Professor Schuette, of the Technical University, Danzig,

who supplied the skill. Its rigid airships were made of wood; they

were built from 1912 onwards expressly for the uses of the army and

navy, and they played a great part in the war.

Those who were responsible for the development of the airship in Germany

took the people into partnership, and devoted themselves largely to

passenger-carrying. The airship became popular; and the officers and men

who worked it were practised in navigation all the year round. The

people, for their part, regarded the Zeppelin with the enthusiasm of

patriotic fervour. France had taken the lead and had shown the way with

the dirigible, but Germany, by recruiting the people for the cause, soon

out-distanced her. The passenger ships served as training-ships for

crews, and, if occasion should arise, were readily convertible to

warlike purposes. Yet things changed and moved so fast, that before the

war broke out, although the German people still believed that the

Zeppelin gave them the sovereignty of the air, the German Government had

been troubled by doubts, had changed its policy, and was striving hard

to overtake the French in the construction and manning of army

aeroplanes. The consequence was that the war found Germany better

provided with aeroplanes for use on the western front than with airships

for operations oversea. The German Emperor, speaking to a wounded

soldier, is reported to have said that he never willed this war. One

proof that this war was not the war he willed may be found in the state

of preparation of the German air force. If war with England had been any

part of the German plan, German airships would have been more numerous,

and would have been ready for immediate action, as the armies that

invaded Belgium were ready. The German theory was that England was not

prepared for war, which, with certain brilliant and crucial exceptions,

was true, and that therefore England would not go to war, which proved

to be false. The French were supplying themselves with a great force of

aeroplanes, and for all that could be known, air operations on the

western front might determine the fortunes of the campaign. So the

German Government turned its attention to machines that are heavier than

air.

What had brought about this situation was the rapid and surprising

development of the aeroplane by France. Here it is necessary to go back

and take up the story again at the beginning of those few and headlong

years.

French aviation derives directly from Lilienthal and collaterally from

the Wrights. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; but the

martyrs, for the most part, die in faith, without assurance of the

harvest that is to come. When Lilienthal was killed he can hardly have

known that his example and his careful records would so soon bear fruit

in other countries. He was regarded by his fellow-countrymen as a

whimsical acrobat, who took mad risks and paid the price. But as soon as

he was dead, the story of what he had done got abroad, and began to

raise up for him disciples and successors, who carried on his

experiments. The chief of these in France was Captain F. Ferber, an

officer of artillery and a student of science, who from 1896 onwards was

a teacher in the military school at Fontainebleau. It was in 1898 that

he first came across an account of Lilienthal; the reading of it

impressed him as deeply as it impressed the Wrights. Here was a man, he

thought, who had discovered the right way of learning to fly; if only

the way were followed, success was sure. Like the Wrights, Ferber lays

stress chiefly on practice. It was he, not Lilienthal, who was the

author of the saying, 'To design a flying machine is nothing; to build

one is nothing much; to try it in the air is everything'. In the book on

aviation which he wrote shortly before his death in 1909 he expounds his

creed and narrates his experiences. His mathematical knowledge, he says,

served him well, for it saved him from being condemned as an empiric by

those dogmatic men of science, very numerous in France (and, he might

have added, in the universities of all countries), who believe that

science points the way to practice, whereas the most that science can

do, says Ferber, is to follow in the wake of practice, and interpret it.

So he set himself to work on a plan as old as the world--first to create

the facts, and then to expound them in speech and writing.

He began to build gliders, but had no success with them until he found

out for himself what he had not gathered from his reading of

Lilienthal--that an up-current of wind is necessary for a prolonged

glide. His first successful flight was made with his fourth glider on

the 7th of December 1901. He got into touch with Mr. Chanute, another of

Lilienthal's scattered disciples, and through him was supplied with

papers and photographs concerning the gliding experiments of the

Wrights. These were a revelation to him, and he used them in making his

fifth glider, which was a great improvement on its predecessors. He

lectured at Lyons to the Aero Club of the Rhone on the progress of

aviation by means of gliding, and published his lecture in the _Revue

d'Artillerie_ of March 1904. About this time the air was full of rumours

of flight. M. Ernest Archdeacon, of Paris, took up the subject with

ardour, wrote many articles on it, and encouraged others to work at it.

A young man, called Gabriel Voisin, who heard Captain Ferber lecture at

Lyons, came on to the platform after the lecture and declared that he

wished to devote his life to the cause of aviation. The next morning he

started for Paris, and with the help of M. Archdeacon founded the

earliest aeroplane factory in France--the firm of the brothers Voisin,

which became the mainstay of early French aviation.

Ferber himself was carrying out a series of experiments at Nice with an

aeroplane which he fitted with a six horse-power engine and suspended

from a tall mast, when he was invited by Colonel Renard to help with the

work of the official research laboratory at Chalais Meudon. He joined

the staff, but found that the officials of a Government organization are

as ill qualified as the theorists of a university for progress in

practical invention. The lower members of the hierarchy are men under

orders, who do what they are told to do; the higher members are hampered

by having to work through subordinates, who often do not understand

their aims and take no particular interest in the work in hand.

Nevertheless, he improved his aeroplane, stabilizing it by means of a

long tail, and fitting it with wheels for landing, in place of the skids

which were used by the Wrights. Then, like those who had gone before

him, he was held up by the question of the engine. Engineers are a

conservative race of men, and perhaps the perfected aeroplane would

still be waiting for a suitable engine if they had not been prompted to

innovation by the fashion of motor-racing. There are strange links in

the chain of cause and effect; the pneumatic tyre made the motor-bicycle

possible; for motor-bicycle races a light engine was devised which later

on was adapted to the needs of the aeroplane. Ferber made acquaintance

with M. Levavasseur, who had invented an engine of eighty horse-power

weighing less than five pounds per horse-power, and had won many races

with it. This engine was named the _Antoinette_ in honour of the

daughter of M. Gastambide, a capitalist, who had supplied the inventor

with funds. The most famous of early French aviators, Santos Dumont,

Farman, Bleriot, Delagrange, and others, owed much to this engine.

Ferber might have had it before any of them, for M. Levavasseur offered

to build it for him--twenty-four horse-power with a weight of about a

hundred and twelve pounds--but public moneys could not be advanced for

an engine that did not exist, so the other pioneers, who had followed

Ferber in gliding experiments, preceded him in flying. In 1906 Ferber

obtained Government permission to join the Antoinette firm for a period,

and by 1908 he was flying in an aeroplane of his own design. He was

killed in September 1909, on the aerodrome of Beuvrequen, near Boulogne,

by capsizing on rough ground in the act of alighting. His own estimate

of his work was modest; he had acted, he said, as a ferment and a

popularizer, and had helped to put France on the right track; but it was

his pride that he belonged to the great school, the school of

Lilienthal, Pilcher, Chanute, and the Wrights, who went to work by a

progressive method of practical experiment, who combined daring with

patience, and found their way into the air.

Ferber, after his visit to America, had failed to induce the French

authorities to purchase the Wright aeroplane, which he had never seen,

but which, from descriptions and photographs, he was able to

reconstruct, much as a geologist reconstructs an animal from fossil

bones. The refusal of the French Government to purchase and the

withdrawal of the Wrights from their public experiments gave France a

period of respite for two years, during which time French aviation

rapidly developed on lines of its own. At the back of this movement was

M. Archdeacon, who as early as 1903 had established a fund and had

offered a cup as a prize for the first officially recorded flight of

more than twenty-five metres. The Voisin brothers, Gabriel and Charles,

having set up their factory at Billancourt-sur-Seine, built machines for

him, box-kites and aeroplanes. After a time the Voisin brothers went

into business on their own account, and employed M. Colliex as their

engineer. Their earliest customers, Leon Delagrange, who had been

trained as a sculptor, and Henri Farman, who had combined the

professions of cyclist, painter, and motor-racer, were distinguished

early French flyers. That both these men had been artists seems to bear

out the favourite contention of Wilbur Wright and of Captain Ferber. To

be an artist a man must create or initiate; the accumulation of

knowledge will do little for him. A politician or a lawyer can reach to

high distinction in his profession without the power of initiating

anything. It is enough for him to handle other men's ideas, to combine

them and balance them, to study and conciliate other men, and to suggest

a compromise. But the artist, like the scientific discoverer, must act

on his own ideas, and do battle, single-handed, with the nature of

things.

The earliest experiments of M. Archdeacon and the Voisins were made with

man-carrying Hargrave box-kites, or with gliders made on the same

principle, which were towed in the air behind a fast motor-boat

travelling down the Seine. The next step was to fit an aeroplane with an

engine and wheels so that it might attempt to rise from the ground. The

Voisins collaborated with most of the early French aviators, with Louis

Bleriot and Robert Esnault-Pelterie, as well as with Farman and

Delagrange. At one time they were closely associated with Bleriot, at

another time with Farman. Their first machines depended for lateral

stability on the vertical panels of the box-kite structure. This was

insufficient, and the French designers had to grapple, one by one, with

all the difficulties that had been met and conquered by the Wrights.

They had this advantage, that the design of the Wrights' machine was,

though not exactly, yet in its main features known to them. All the

early aeroplanes which mounted their elevators in front of the machine

may, without much doubt, be affiliated to the Wrights. The elevator is

not best placed in front; its action in that position is too quick and

violent, but it is under the eye of the operator, and with cool nerves

he can learn to work it.

While the group of enthusiasts who gathered round the Voisins were

designing and experimenting, Santos Dumont, having turned his attention

to machines heavier than air, suddenly appeared among them, made the

first successful flight over French soil, and carried off the Archdeacon

prize. His machine was a biplane, built on the box-kite principle, with

three vertical panels on each side between the planes, and a box-kite

elevator projecting far in front. The wings were fixed at a considerable

dihedral angle, and the engine was a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette.

In his first trial, which took place at Bagatelle on the 23rd of July

1906, Santos Dumont attached a spindle-shaped balloon to the upper

surface of the machine, to help it into the air. The combination of the

two modes he soon found to be impossible; with the balloon attached to

it the machine could not develop speed enough to support itself in the

air. His next step was to practise the machine by running it down an

inclined cable; then he discarded as much weight as he could, doubled

the horse-power of the motor, and began to taxi freely along the ground.

On a day in September the machine raised itself for a very short space

into the air. The first officially witnessed flight, of about eighty

yards, took place on the 23rd of October 1906, and gained the Archdeacon

Cup. About a month later he made a flight of more than a furlong.

Thereafter he established himself at Saint-Cyr and developed a machine

of the monoplane type, with a long tail. But he was too far from the

resources of Paris, and when, on the 13th of January 1908, Henri Farman

overtook his records and won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a flight

of one kilometre in a closed circuit, Santos Dumont lost his leading

position in the world of aviation, after a brief and meteoric career

which has stamped his name on history.

During these early years the Voisin brothers had the foresight and

wisdom to put themselves wholly at the service of others. The promise of

flight had taken hold of many minds in France and there was no lack of

inventors and would-be inventors who wished to test their own ideas and

to have machines built to their own designs. If the Voisins had refused

to gratify them, these clients would have disappeared; and the work done

for them, though much of it was done in the old blind alleys of

horizontal elevating airscrews and wing-flapping machines, yet had this

advantage, that it kept the workshop active and made it self-supporting.

Inventors are a difficult and jealous people; they received every

indulgence from the Voisins. The machines built for them were named

after them, though most of the skill and experience that went to the

making came from the factory. In the same way M. Archdeacon gave up all

practical experiment after 1905 and was content to play the part of the

good genius of aviation, presiding at the Aero Club, offering prizes for

new achievements, bringing inventors together and encouraging the

exchange of ideas. The rapidity of French progress was not a little due

to this self-effacing and social instinct, so characteristic of the

French spirit, which kept the patron and the engineers in the

background, and brought order and progress out of the chaos of personal

rivalry.

Progress was slow at first. The experiments made in 1906 by Bleriot in

conjunction with the Voisins were made, for safety, on the water of the

Lake of Enghien, but it proved impossible to get up sufficient speed on

the water to rise into the air. In 1907 a greater success attended the

experiments made at Vincennes, at Bagatelle, and at Issy-les-Moulineaux,

where Henri Farman had obtained permission to use the army manoeuvre

ground and had built himself a hangar, or shed, for his aeroplane. On

the 30th of March, at Bagatelle, the Delagrange aeroplane made a flight

of sixty metres. A few months later, Farman, on a similar machine fitted

with landing-wheels which worked on pivots, like castors, began to make

short flights. On the 30th of September he flew for eighty metres.

Seeing is believing, but many of those who saw Farman fly did not

believe. The machine, they said, was only hopping into the air with the

speed it had gathered on the ground; it would never fly. When, on the

26th of October, Farman made a flight of more than seven hundred metres

the pessimists found another objection. The machine, they said, would

never be able to turn; it could only continue in a straight line. They

had hit on a real difficulty, but the Voisins and Farman himself, who,

starting without any knowledge of aeroplanes or flying, had soon

developed practical ideas of his own, were hard at work to meet it. The

Wrights had simplified the handling of a machine by combining the

control of the vertical rudder with the control of the wing-warping. In

the early Voisin machines there was no wing-warping, and the pilots had

to attempt to balance and turn the machine without it; but a rod with a

wheel attached to it was used to control both the elevating plane in

front and the vertical rudder behind. By turning the wheel the rudder

was operated, by moving the rod the elevator was raised or lowered. It

was on a machine of this kind that Farman began to practise gradual

turning movements. The lateral inclination of the machine was feared

and, as much as possible, avoided in these first experiments, though it

is not only harmless in turning movements, but is necessary for their

complete success, just as the banking of a motor race-track is necessary

to keep the machines on the course. Farman made rapid progress; and, as

has been said, by the beginning of 1908 he gained the two thousand pound

Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a closed circuit of one kilometre in

length. The wonderful skill of this achievement will be fully

appreciated only by the best modern pilots, who would not like to be

asked to repeat it on a machine unprovided with ailerons (that is to

say, hinged flaps on the trailing edge of the planes), and controlled

only by the elevator and the rudder. There is nothing very extravagant

in dating the conquest of the air, as some French writers have dated it,

from the circular flights of Farman. It is true that the Wrights had

attained a much higher skill in manoeuvring, but they had retired, like

Achilles, to their tent, whereas Farman's flight showed the way to many

others. In the spring of the same year Delagrange began to execute

turning flights; on the 6th of July Farman gained the prize offered by

M. Armengaud, the president of the society of aerial navigation, for a

flight of a quarter of an hour's duration, and after the arrival of

Wilbur Wright at Le Mans progress became so rapid that records were

broken week by week and almost day by day. In January 1909 the Aero Club

of France issued their first list of pilots' certificates. Eight names,

all famous, made up the list--Leon Delagrange, Alberto Santos Dumont,

Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Henri Farman, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright,

Captain Ferdinand Ferber, Louis Bleriot. To make this a list of the

chief French pioneers, the names of the Wrights would have to be

omitted, and the names of some who were not famous pilots but who did

much for flying, especially the names of M. Ernest Archdeacon and

Gabriel Voisin, would have to be included.

These men, and those who worked for them, gave to France her own school

of aviation. Louis Bleriot and Robert Esnault-Pelterie broke away from

what, since the days of Francis Wenham, had been accepted as the

orthodox doctrine of the biplane, and, taking the bird for master,

devised swift, light, and easily handled monoplanes. The Bleriot

monoplane, which first flew the Channel; the R.E.P. (or Robert

Esnault-Pelterie) monoplane; the Antoinette monoplane, on which Hubert

Latham performed his exploits; the small and swift Demoiselle monoplane,

designed and flown by Santos Dumont; and the Tellier monoplane, which

for a time held the record for cross-country flight--all these made

history by their performances in the crowded years from 1908 to 1910.

The monoplane is, without any doubt, the prettiest of machines in the

air. When Captain Ferber gave this reason to Mr. Chanute for preferring

it to the biplane, Mr. Chanute, he says, laughed a good deal at an

argument so characteristically French. But there is sense and weight in

the argument. No flying animal is half so ugly as the early Wright

biplane. In the world of natural fliers beauty and efficiency are one.

Purity of line and economy of parts are beautiful and efficient. A good

illustration of this may be found in the question of the airscrew. The

early French biplanes of the Voisin and Farman type were what would now

be called 'pusher' machines; their airscrews operated behind the main

planes, and their tails were supported by an open structure of wood or

metal which left room for the play of the screw. In this ugly

arrangement the loss of efficiency is easy to see. The screw works in a

disturbed medium, and the complicated metal-work presents a large

resistance to the passage of the machine through the air. The monoplane,

from the first, was a 'tractor' machine; its airscrew was in front of

the planes, and its body, or fuselage, was covered in and streamlined,

so as to offer the least possible resistance to the air. A later

difficulty caused by the forward position of the airscrew had nothing to

do with flying. When the war came, and machine-guns were mounted on

aeroplanes, a clear field was needed for forward firing. This difficulty

was ultimately met by the invention of a synchronizing gear, which timed

the bullets between the strokes of the airscrew-blades. In all but a few

types of machine the airscrew is now retained in the forward position.

The debate between monoplane and biplane is not yet concluded; the

biplane holds its own because with the same area of supporting surface

it is much stronger and more compact than the monoplane.

Instead of wing-warping, which puts a strain on the supporting surfaces

and is liable to distort them, the French (to whom Bleriot is believed

to have shown the way) introduced ailerons, that is, small subsidiary

hinged planes attached to the extremities of the wings. By controlling

these, one up and the other down, in conjunction with the rudder, the

pilot can preserve his lateral balance, and turn the machine to right or

left. Later on, these ailerons, when they were borrowed by the Voisin

and Farman biplanes, were not fitted to the extremities of the planes,

but became hinged flaps forming the extreme section of the trailing

edge; and this position they have kept in all modern aeroplanes. An even

greater advance was made by the French school in its device for the

control of the machine. The machine which Wilbur Wright flew in France

was controlled by two upright levers, grasped by the pilot, one in

either hand. The left-hand lever moved only backwards and forwards; it

controlled the elevator and directed the machine upwards or downwards.

The right-hand lever controlled the rudder and the warping of the wings.

By moving it backwards or forwards the pilot turned the machine to right

or left; by moving it sideways he warped the wings. There is nothing

instinctive or natural in these correspondences; the backward and

forward movement which in one lever spells up and down in the other

spells right and left. It is a testimony to the extraordinary

cool-headed skill of the Wrights, and to their endless practice and

perseverance, that they were able to fly such a machine in safety, and

to outfly their rivals. The French school centralized the control in a

single lever with a universal joint attachment at the lower end. The

movements of this lever in any direction produced the effects that would

instinctively be expected; a backward or forward movement turned the

machine upwards or downwards, a sideways movement raised one wing or the

other so as to bank the machine or to bring it to a level position

again. The vertical rudder was controlled either by a wheel attached to

this central lever, or by the pressure of the pilot's feet on a

horizontal bar. The French moreover improved the means of taking off and

alighting. The early Wright machines were launched on rails, and

alighted on skids attached to the machine like the skids of a sledge. To

rise into the air again after a forced landing was impossible without

special apparatus. By means of wheels elastically fixed to an

undercarriage the French inventors made the aeroplane available for

cross-country journeys. But the greatest difference between the two

types of aeroplane, the American and the French, was their difference in

stability. The Wright machine demanded everything of the pilot; it could

not fly itself. If the pilot relaxed his attention for a moment, or took

his hands from the levers, a crash was the certain result. The machine

was a bird which flew with extended bill and without a tail; whereas the

French machines had a horizontal tail-plane, which, being held rigidly

at a distance from the main planes, gave to the machine a far greater

measure of longitudinal stability.

All these advantages told in favour of French aviation, and secured for

it progress and achievement.

A few dates and facts may serve to show its rapid progress at a time

when it was making history week by week. On the 30th of September 1908

Henri Farman made the first cross-country flight, from Chalons to

Rheims, a distance of twenty-seven kilometres, which he covered in

twenty minutes. Three days later, at Chalons, he remained in the air for

just under three-quarters of an hour, covering twenty-five miles, that

is, about forty times the distance that had won him the

Deutsch-Archdeacon prize in January. Between April and September of the

same year Leon Delagrange had four times in succession raised the

world's official records (which, of course, took no note of the Wrights)

for duration of flight. On the 31st of October Louis Bleriot made the

first cross-country circuit flight, from Toury to Artenay and back, a

distance of about seventeen miles, in the course of which flight he

twice landed and rose again into the air. All these and many similar

achievements were dwarfed by Wilbur Wright's performance at the

Hunaudieres racecourse near Le Mans. His first flight, on Saturday the

8th of August, lasted one minute and forty-seven seconds. Three days

later, though he flew for only four minutes, the figures of eight and

other manoeuvres which he executed in the air caused M. Delagrange, who

witnessed them, to remark, 'Eh bien. Nous n'existons pas. Nous sommes

battus.' On the last day of the year he flew for two hours and twenty

minutes, covering seventy-seven miles. In the intervening time he had

beaten the French records for duration, distance, and height.

Cross-country work he did not attempt; his machine at that time was

ill-fitted for it. During the winter he went to Pau to instruct his

first three pupils--the Count de Lambert and MM. Paul Tissandier and

Alfred Leblanc.

At the beginning of the year 1909 the mystery and craft of flying was

still known only to the few. In the two years that followed it was

divulged to the many, and became a public spectacle. The age of the

designers was followed by the age of the performers. Flying machines and

men who could fly them rapidly increased in number. A man working in a

laboratory on difficult and uncertain experiments cannot engage or

retain the attention of the public; a flying man, who circles over a

city or flies across great tracts of populated country, is visible to

all, and, when he is first seen, excites a frenzy of popular enthusiasm.

These years were the years of competition and adventure, of races, and

of record-breaking in distance, speed, duration, and height. Flying was

the newest sport; and the aviator, whose courage, coolness, and skill

carried him through great dangers, was the hero of the day. The press,

with its ready instinct for profitable publicity, offered magnificent

encouragement to the new art. Large money prizes were won by gallant

deeds that have made history. The _Daily Mail_, of London, offered a

prize of a thousand pounds for the first flight across the English

Channel. Hubert Latham, in his Antoinette monoplane, attempted this

flight on the 19th of July from the neighbourhood of Calais, but the

failure of his sparking plugs brought him down on to the water about six

miles from the French coast, where he was picked up by his accompanying

destroyer. He was preparing another attempt when Louis Bleriot, suddenly

arriving at Calais, anticipated him. At half-past four on the morning of

Sunday, the 25th of July, Bleriot rose into the air on his monoplane,

furnished with an Anzani engine of twenty-five horse-power, and headed

for Dover. He flew without map or compass, and soon out-distanced the

French destroyer which had been appointed to escort him. For ten minutes

he lost sight of all land, but he corrected his course by observing the

steamers below him, and landed in the Northfall meadow behind Dover

Castle after a flight of forty minutes. Two other newspaper prizes, one

of ten thousand pounds offered by the London _Daily Mail_ for a flight

from London to Manchester, in three stages, the other of ten thousand

dollars offered by the New York _World_ for a flight from Albany to New

York, were won in 1910. The first of these flights was attempted on the

24th of April by an Englishman, Claude Grahame-White, who flew a Farman

biplane, but was compelled by engine trouble to descend near Lichfield,

where his machine was damaged by wind in the night. Three days later

Louis Paulhan, also mounted on a Farman biplane, covered the whole

distance to Manchester in something over four hours, with only one

landing. Paulhan had first learned to fly in July 1909; Grahame-White

had obtained his pilot's certificate from the French Aero Club as late

as December 1909. The flight of a hundred and twenty miles from Albany

to New York, down the Hudson river, was achieved on the 29th of May in

two hours and thirty-two minutes by Glenn H. Curtiss, one of the most

distinguished of American pioneers. Later on in 1910 a prize of a

hundred thousand francs was offered by the Paris newspaper, the _Matin_,

for what was called the _Circuit de l'Est_, a voyage from Paris and back

by way of Troyes, Nancy, Mezieres, Douai, and Amiens, a distance of four

hundred and eighty-eight miles, to be completed in six stages, on

alternate days, from the 7th of August to the 17th of August. This

competition was won by Wilbur Wright's pupil, Alfred Leblanc, on a

Bleriot monoplane. The eastern part of this circuit, a territory not

much larger than Yorkshire, has since been made famous and sacred by the

battles of the Marne and Verdun and a hundred other places.

Of more value for the furtherance of the art than any of these

individual exploits were the series of meetings which brought aviators

together in friendly rivalry, to see and to be seen. The most notable

of these meetings was also the first, the Champagne Week of Rheims,

which was organized by the Marquis de Polignac, and was held, during the

last week of August 1909, on the Betheny Plain, near Rheims. The number

of spectators day by day was from forty to fifty thousand, and the

gate-money taken during the week was about L35,000. Henri Farman, Hubert

Latham, and Glenn Curtiss earned among them almost L6,000 in prizes. The

Grand Prix de la Champagne for the flight of longest duration was won by

Farman, who remained in the air, plodding steadily round the course, for

more than three hours. He also won the passenger-carrying prize in a

flight which carried two passengers round the ten-kilometre course in

about ten minutes and a half. Latham gained the altitude prize by flying

to a height of more than five hundred feet. The Gordon Bennett Cup, for

the best speed over two rounds of the course, was won by Curtiss in

fifteen minutes fifty and three-fifths seconds, with Bleriot only some

five seconds behind him. There were many other prizes distributed among

the more fortunate of the competitors. Perhaps the greatest gain of the

meeting was that it did away with the notion that the aeroplane is a

fair-weather toy. There was rain and storm, and Paulhan flew in a wind

of twenty-five miles an hour. The meeting witnessed the first public

success of the most famous (and most revolutionary) of aeroplane

engines--the rotary Gnome engine, in which the cylinders rotate bodily

round a fixed crank-shaft. This engine was built by the brothers Louis

and Laurent Seguin, who had a small motor factory in Paris. Most of the

regular aviators looked askance at it, but Seguin offered to instal it

in a Voisin biplane of the box-kite pattern which had just been won as a

prize by Louis Paulhan. In the result the old box-kite flew as never

box-kite flew before, and produced a great impression at the Rheims

meeting. The Gnome engine was also mounted by Henri Farman on one of the

machines that he flew at Rheims, and by the solitary English competitor,

Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who, according to Mr. Holt Thomas, was the first to

use this engine in the air.

Other meetings followed in rapid succession, gaining recruits for the

new art and converting the nations to a belief in it. Two of these, held

simultaneously at Blackpool and Doncaster, soon after the Rheims

meeting, were spoilt by bad weather and high winds, but at Blackpool

Hubert Latham gave a marvellous display on his Antoinette machine by

flying in a wind of about forty miles an hour, when no one else ventured

the attempt. During 1910 aviation weeks were held in February at

Heliopolis, Egypt, and in April at Nice. In October of the same year an

International Aviation Tournament was held in America at Belmont Park,

Long Island, where the highest honour, the prize for the Gordon Bennett

speed contest, was won by Claude Grahame-White on a Bleriot machine. In

Great Britain many meetings were held during the summer of 1910: one at

Wolverhampton; another at Bournemouth, where the Hon. C. S. Rolls, who a

month before had flown across the Channel and back without alighting,

was killed; another at Lanark; and yet another at Blackpool, where

George Chavez flew to a height of 5,887 feet. In the following month

Chavez flew across the Alps, over the Simplon Pass, into Italy, but was

fatally injured in alighting at Domodossola. These are specimen deeds

only, taken from a story of adventure and progress, danger and disaster,

which, if it were fully told, would fill volumes. Records, as they are

called, were made and broken so fast that the heroic achievement of the

spring became the daily average performance of the ensuing autumn. The

movement was fairly under way, and nothing could stop it.