Alberto Santos-Dumont

“ Though I never seek to fly at a great height—on the contrary, I hold the record for low altitude in a free balloon,—in passing over Paris I must necessarily move above all its chimney-pots and steeples. The Eiffel Tower was my one danger—yet it was my winning-post!
But in the air I have no time to fear. I have always kept a cool head. Alone in the air-ship, I am always very busy. I must not let go the rudder for a single instant. Then there is the strong joy of commanding. What does it feel like to sail in a dirigible balloon? ”

“ Prize or no prize, I must work, and I shall always work in this my chosen field of aerostation. For this my place is Paris, where the public, in particular the kindly and enthusiastic populace, both knows and trusts me. Here, in Paris, I go up for my own pleasure day by day, as my reward for long and costly experiment.
In England and America it is quite different. When I take my air-ships and my employees to those countries, build my own balloon house, furnish my own gas plant, and risk breaking machines that cost more than any automobile, I want it to be done with a settled aim. ”

“ I have always been attracted by the idea of reaching the Pole in an air-ship. When one considers the very few hundred kilometres remaining to be conquered, it seems annoyingly unpractical that an aerial machine, capable of racing against a time limit in the teeth of a wind blowing twenty-one kilometres per hour, should be baffled by them. To have recourse to speed would have been my fist idea, actually proposed by me in my book Dans L'Air:
“Some day explorers will guide-rope to the North Pole from their ice-locked steamship after it has reached its fartherst possible point north," I said. ”

“ Let us hope, then, for the victory of the allies; may the ideas of President Wilson triumph, and may Prussian militarism be extinguished on earth. Just as with present-day Poland society has suppressed the armed citizens, the desired Army of Nations will suppress the killings of war.
Confident in this future, I was comforted by the message from the President of the Aeronautical Club of America, in which I heard, again, of aeronautics for peaceful purposes, realization of my innermost ambitions, dream of those inventors who only saw in the airplane a collaborator in the happiness of men. ”

“ To those watching my return, from the terraces of Monte Carlo and Monaco town, as they told me afterwards, the air-ship increased in size at every instant, like a veritable eagle bearing down upon them. As the wind was coming toward them they could hear the low, crackling rumble of my motor a long distance off. Faintly, now, their own shouts of encouragement came to me. Almost instantly the shouts grew loud. Around the bay a thousand handkerchiefs were fluttering. ”

“ Personally, I have felt not only fear but also pain and real despair in a spherical balloon. It has not been often, because no sport is more regularly safe and mild and pleasurable. Such real dangers as it has are confined usually to the landing, and the balloonist of experience knows how to meet them; while from its imaginary dangers in the air one is regularly very safe. Therefore the particular adventure, full of pain and fear, that I recall to mind was all the more remarkable in that it occurred in high altitude. ”

“ Now again the wind was with me, stronger than it had been on the preceding flight down the coast. Yet it was easy steering, and I remarked with pleasure that going thus with the wind the pitching or tangage of the air-ship was much less. Though going fast with my propeller, and aided by the wind behind me, I felt no more motion, indeed even less, than before.
For the rest, how different were my sensations from those of the spherical balloonist! It is true that he sees the earth flying backward beneath him at tremendous speed. But he knows that he is powerless. ”

“ Today, when aviation is recognized as one of the main weapons of war, when every European nation possesses tens of thousands of aircrafts, when the American Congress has just ordered the construction of 22,000 of these machines and is already drafting a law ordering the construction of a new, even larger series; when Argentina and Chile have a splendid air fleet of war, we, here, still do not face this problem with the attention it deserves! ”

“ I longed after the land where the first Montgolfière had been sent up in 1783, where the first aëronaut had made his first ascension, where the first hydrogen balloon had been let loose, where first an air-ship had been made to navigate the air with its steam-engine, screw propeller, and rudder. In my heart I had an admiring worship for the four men of genius—Montgolfière, Pilátre de Rozier, the physicist, Charles, and the engineer, Henry Giffard—who have attached their names forever to each of the great steps forward of aërial navigation. ”

“ Yet such heating of one’s gas is too tempting an idea to be abandoned, especially in these days of perfected petroleum fuel. With one kilogramme of petroleum I am promised by the manufacturers of my boilers and condensers that I can vaporise twenty kilogrammes of water. If I can devise a practical means for catching this water again as it ceases to be steam, the oft-studied problem will be solved. Imagine the balloon to be coming down—the result of gas condensation. Instead of lightening it by throwing out twenty kilogrammes of sand, I will have but to burn one kilogramme of petroleum! ”

“ The choice of altitude is yours—whether to accept this current or mount higher and go with another. You may mount above the clouds, where one breathes oxygen from tubes, while the earth, in the last glimpse you had of it, seems to spin beneath you, and you lose all bearings; or you may descend and scud along the surface, aided by your guide rope and a dipperful of ballast to leap over trees and houses—giant leaps made without effort. ”

“ Like all human devices, however, the guide rope, along with its advantages, has its inconveniences. Its rubbing along the uneven surfaces of the ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, roads and houses, hedges and telegraph wires—gives violent shocks to the balloon. Or it may happen that the guide rope, rapidly unravelling the snarl in which it has twisted itself, catches hold of some asperity of the surface or winds itself around the trunk or branches of a tree. ”

“ A few years ago the submarine-boat occupied the same category as the air-ship in our consciousness ; and it is only yesterday that a British submarine-boat drowned its entire crew while under cautious experiment in protected waters! Yet there are few who doubt to-day that hostile submarine-boats rather than inexplicable carelessness with respect to their own mines destroyed the Russians' men-of-war and cruisers.
So it will be with the air-ship in war. The first successful one has but to appear, and the world will forget all its unfavourable judgments. ”

“ As my air-ship ploughed ahead the wind struck my face and fluttered my coat, as on the deck of a transatlantic liner, though in other respects it will be more accurate to liken aerial to river navigation with a steamboat. It is not like sail navigation, and all talk about "tacking" is meaningless. If there is any wind at all it is in a given direction, so that the analogy with a river current is complete. When there is no wind at all we may liken it to the navigation of a smooth lake or pond. ”

“ To whom does humankind owe air navigation through heavier-than-air? To the Wright Brothers' experiments, done in secret (they themselves say that they did everything possible so that nothing transpired from the results of their experiments) and which were so ignored in the world that we see everyone calling my 250 meters "a memorable minute in the history of aviation," or is it to Farman, Bleriot and me who did all our demonstrations in front of scientific commissions and in full sunlight? ”

“ And I do not believe that, without such previous study and experience, a man is capable of succeeding with an elongated balloon, whose handling is so much more delicate. Before attempting to direct an air-ship, it is necessary to have learned in an ordinary balloon the conditions of the atmospheric medium; to have become acquainted with the caprices of the wind, now caressing and now brutal, and to have gone thoroughly into the difficulties of the ballast problem, from the triple point of view of starting, of equilibrium in the air, and of landing at the end of the trip. ”

“ Seeing that they might easily break their legs by stumbling into those foundation trenches I had positively forbidden my men to run across that space to catch my guide rope with their eyes and arms up in the air. Not dreaming that such a point could be raised, my men obeyed the injunction. Observing that I was quite master of my rudder, motor, and propeller, able to turn and return to the spot where the judges stood, they let me pass on over their heads without seeking to catch and run along with the guide rope, a thing they might have done easily—at the risk of their legs. ”

“ In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, when the hum of insects, punctuated by the far-off cry of some bird, lulled me, I would lie in the shade of the verandah and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to raise your eyes to fall in love with space and freedom. ”

“ Nowhere does Nature employ the device you call the wheel. Observe the mechanism of the human body; observe the horse's frame; observe . . ."
"Observe that horse and man and waggon with its wheels are speeding from us," replied Luis, laughing. " Cannot you yield to accomplished facts? You tire me with your appeals to Nature. Has man ever accomplished anything worth having except by combating Nature? We do violence to her when we chop down a tree! I would go further than this invention of the waggon. Conceive a more powerful motive force than that horse . ”

“ Instead of being carried on to fall on the Seine embankment I now found myself hanging in my wicker basket high up in the courtyard of the Trocadero hotels, supported by my air-ship's keel, which stood braced at an angle of about 45 degrees between the courtyard wall above and the roof of a lower construction farther down. The keel, in spite of my weight, that of the motor and machinery, and the shock it had received in falling, resisted wonderfully. The thin pine scantlings and piano wires of Nice had saved my life! ”

“ When I built and navigated my first air-ships neither Aéro Club nor Deutsch prize were yet in existence. The two, by their rapid rise and deserved prominence, had brought the problem of aerial navigation suddenly before the public—so suddenly, indeed, that I was really not prepared to enter into such a race with a time limit. Naturally anxious to have the honour of winning such a competition, I had been forced on rapidly in new constructions at both danger and expense. Now I would take time to perfect myself systematically as an aerial navigator.
Suppose you buy a new bicycle or automobile. ”

“ I had entered the bay after flying homeward up the coast, and they were towing me toward the aerodrome. The air-ship had descended very close to the surface of the water, and they were pulling it still lower by means of the guide rope, until it was not many feet above the smoke-stack of the steam chaloupe—and that smoke-stack was belching red-hot sparks.
Any one of those red-hot sparks might have, ascending, burned a hole in my balloon, set fire to the hydrogen, and blown balloon and myself to atoms. ”

“ During my ascent with M. Machuron, while our guide rope was wrapped around the tree and the wind was shaking us so outrageously, he improved the occasion to discourage me against all steerable ballooning.
"Observe the treachery and vindictiveness of the wind," he cried between shocks. "We are tied to the tree, yet see with what force it tries to jerk us loose." (Here I was thrown again to the bottom of the basket.) "What screw propeller could hold a course against it? What elongated balloon would not double up and take you flying to destruction?" ”

“ Nothing is more delicious than lunching like this above the clouds in a spherical balloon. No dining-room can be so marvellous in its decoration. The sun sets the clouds in ebullition, making them throw up rainbow jets of frozen vapour like great sheaves of fireworks all around the table. ”

“ Pedro reassured him. "He takes pleasure in it."
"No, my boy," said the planter; "man will never navigate a ship in the sky."
"But on St John's Eve, when we all make bonfires, we also send up little tissue-paper spheres with hot air in them," insisted Luis. "If we could construct a very great one, big enough to lift a man, a light car, and a motor, might not the whole system be propelled through the air, as a steam-boat is propelled through the water?" ”

“ Then for safety we throw out more ballast, and rise through the black solitudes of the clouds into a soul-lifting burst of splendid starlight. There, alone with the constellations, we await the dawn.
And when the dawn comes, red and gold and purple in its glory, one is almost loth to seek the earth again, although the novelty of landing in who knows what part of Europe affords still another unique pleasure. ”

“ Such inventors are afraid of nothing, because they have no idea of the difficulties of the problem. Had they previously journeyed through the air at the wind's will, and amid all the disturbing influences of atmospheric phenomena, they would understand that a dirigible balloon, to be practical, requires first of all to have the utmost extreme of simplicity in all its mechanism.
Some of the unhappy constructors who have paid with their lives the forfeit of their rashness had never made a single responsible ascent as captain of a spherical balloon! ”

“ So it is to-day with the automobile. Imagine the united labours and financial sacrifices of the engineers and manufacturers that led, step by step, up to the road-racing automobiles of the Paris-Berlin competition in 1901—the year in which the only working dirigible balloon then in existence won the Deutsch prize against a time limit that was thought by many a complete bar to success. ”

“ The petroleum motor is still a delicate and capricious thing, and there are sounds in its spitting rumble that are intelligible only to the long-experienced ear. Should the time come in some future flight of mine when the motor of my air-ship threatens danger I am convinced that my ear will hear, and I shall heed, the warning. ”

“ Do the cords commanding rudder, motor, water ballast, and the shifting guide rope work freely?
Is the ballast properly weighed?
Looked on as a mere machine the air-ship requires no more care than an automobile, but, from the point of view of consequences, the need of faithful and intelligent surveillance is simply imperious. This very day all the highways of France are dotted with a thousand automobiles en panne, with their enthusiastic drivers crawling underneath them in the dust, oil-can and wrench in hand, repairing momentary accidents. ”