Sterling Heilig

“ The motor was already spitting and snapping amid its steady thunder-growl. On the instant the power was transferred to the propeller, its first revolutions sent the gently rising airship into the air as if it had received a mighty push from behind. Gathering force, it sped still obliquely upward, until, with a single masterly movement, the air-navigator was seen to shift his weights and bring his system to a level, onward course. ”

“ Imagine that you have thrown out the ballast—just enough, for if you throw too much, you will become too light and go too high. The little cloud ceases to mask the sun. Your gas heats up again to its first temperature and regains its old lifting-power. But, having less to lift by the amount of ballast thrown out, it now shoots higher into the air, and the gas in the balloon dilates still more, and either escapes through the safety-valve or has to be deliberately sacrificed to prevent the balloon going too high. ”

“ It had to be solidly constructed not to risk the fate of the all-wood Aërodrome of Toulon, which was twice all but carried away by tempests. Its risky form—almost that of a balloon itself—seemed to invite sea squalls to lift it. Its sensational features are its doors. Tourists never tire of telling each other that these doors are the greatest ever made, in modern times or in antiquity. They slide above on wheels hanging from an iron construction that extends from the façade on each side, and below on wheels that roll over a rail. ”

“ It was on these railroads that the young Santos-Dumont, before he was twelve years of age, drove locomotive-engines for his pleasure, and developed the taste for mechanics and invention which saved him, coming young and rich to Paris, from a life of mere sporting leisure. ”

“ Showing its construction, the inflated balloon, and the pennant with its mystic letters The little Bay of Monaco, sheltered from behind against wind and cold by mountains, and from the wind and sea on both sides by the heights of Monte Carlo and Monaco Town, seemed to offer an ideal situation for a balloon-house. The airship would be always ready, filled with hydrogen gas. ”

“ In a spirit of emulation more admirable than their first movement of detraction, they now announce the rapid construction of a steerable balloon of their own, and expected to offer “great resistance to the wind” and to be “capable of facing any weather.” In this way the young inventor will have to his honor not only his own performances, but the renewed efforts to which they shall have excited others. As for himself, he is occupied with his new balloon, the “Santos-Dumont No. 6,” his perfected model embodying all that he has learned from experimenting with the five which preceded it. ”

“ Again, while the maritime guide-rope affords the airship even a certain amount of lateral stability in presence of side gusts, this stability is by no means complete, and is purchased at the price of so much more dragging back, as of a brake. The fact that without the guide-rope the airship would be bound to lose time on a much more erratic course, to say nothing of the navigator’s extra labor, proves only that the device is, on the whole, immensely serviceable. In either case, with or without maritime guide-rope, the speed calculation has its own practically insurmountable difficulties. ”

“ MANŒVERING ABOVE THE BAY It is true that, in the present instance, one of the greatest difficulties regularly standing in the way of such speed calculation—the ’’shoot the chutes’’ of ever-varying altitude—was very much done away with by the maritime guide-rope. On the other hand, the dragging of the guide-rope’s weight against the wind is something very different from its petty tugging in calm weather, and the absence of all such resistance, to say the least, when speeding before the wind, which sometimes bellies it like a sail. ”

“ In No. 4 the thirty-foot bamboo pole became part of a real keel, no longer hanging above the navigator’s head, but amplified by vertical and horizontal cross-pieces and a system of tightly stretched cords. It sustained motor, petroleum-reservoir, propeller, and navigator in a spider-web frame without a basket. It was a daring innovation. The navigator himself must sit on a simple bicycle-saddle in the midst of the spider-web, where the absence of the traditional balloon-basket seemed to leave him astride a pole in the midst of a confusion of ropes, tubes, and machinery. ”

“ In the complicated and novel task of putting an air-ship through its best paces, much must necessarily be at the mercy of chance details. Thus a trial trip whose start and finish were witnessed by scarcely twenty-five persons was much more satisfactory than the succeeding day's official trial before the Technical Committee of the Deutsch Prize Foundation and a brilliant tout-Paris assemblage. ”

“ This manœuver of itself makes enough work for one man. To be freed from it, except when one desires to mount or descend, and to go forward on a chosen level automatically, is the ideal realizable from maritime guide-roping.
Over land, where there are level plains without the troublesome and really dangerous drawbacks of trees, rocks, fences, and buildings, and telegraph or trolley-wires, the guide-rope might be thought useful to the dirigible balloonist; but over the uninterrupted stretches of the sea, these Monaco experiments have proved it to be a true stabilisateur. ”

“ M. ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT, a young Brazilian resident in Paris, after four years of invention, construction, and constant experiment, has been navigating a cigar-shaped balloon with a sixteen horse-power petroleum motor under it, capable of making way against any wind that is less than forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) an hour. What this means may be imagined when it is remembered that a wind of fifty kilometers an hour is called a storm.
At the outset, a word should be allowed the inventor concerning two very different factors of his success—inventing and managing a dirigible balloon. ”

“ Floating over the sea, it can be at once a bird’s-eye scout and an offensive auxiliary of so delicate a character that the general service of the navy has not yet allowed itself to pronounce upon the matter. ”

“ Indeed, the factors are three,—inventing, constructing, and managing, — as inventors on paper are likely to discover before they find themselves navigating the air. M. Santos-Dumont has occupied four years with invention and construction. Now he is learning to manage the perfected air-ship,
“Suppose you buy new bicycle or automobile,” he says. “You will have a perfect machine to your hand; but it does not necessarily mean that you will go spinning with it over the highways. You may be so unpractised that you fall off the bicycle or blow up the automobile. ”

“ This young Brazilian inventor works for the love of the thing, not for lucre. He has never felt moved to apply for a single patent. He is a son of the “Coffee King” of Brazil, the proprietor of the Santos-Dumont plantations of São Paulo, the friend of the former Emperor Dom Pedro, and the benefactor and adviser of whole populations, Santos-Dumont, the father, although a Brazilian by birth and nationality, was French by descent, and had his technical education at the École Centrale (Arts and Industries) in Paris. ”

“ LOSING ITS GAS AND SINKING The intrepid aëronaut, who had lost neither his cool head nor his balance, could still have righted himself had he not perceived with dismay that the up-pointing of the airship had caused the oil in the motor to overflow and the ballast itself to shift. To permit the flame-spitting motor to continue working under these circumstances would be to risk a fatal explosion. To stop the motor and remain in the air would mean the certainty of being cast by the wind on the telegraph wires, trees, and houses of Monte Carlo. ”

“ Thus it has been found that the winds vary from five and a half miles to one hundred miles an hour; but as a a wind of a hundred miles an hour has been noted only once in eleven thousand six hundred and forty-nine hours of observation, analysis of the data has shown that a dirigible balloon possessing a speed of its own of forty-five kilometers (twenty-eight miles) an hour will be able to navigate the air above Paris eight hundred and fifteen times out of a thousand, and make almost six miles an hour straight ahead in the wind seven hundred and eight times out of a thousand. ”

“ According to its greater or less immersion, therefore, it ballasts or unballasts the airship. The balloon is held by its weight down to almost a fixed level over the waves, yet without danger of its being drawn into contact with them. Every extra foot of guide-rope floating means so much less weight for the balloon to lift and so much automatic remounting into the air. In this way an incessant little tugging toward and away from the waves is produced, an automatic ballasting and unballasting accomplished without loss of ballast. ”

“ It is much more significant to dwell on the picture of the fast steam-launches overtaken and left far behind, one after the other, the Prince’s chaloupe utterly outdistanced, and the forty horse-power road racing automobiles keeping up with the airship only by being driven at their high speed.
During the manufacture of the hydrogen gas and the filling of the balloon, the new Aërodrome received the visits of a great number of prominent people, several of whom signified their willingness to lend valuable aid to the experiments. ”

“ Hanging beneath the cigar-shaped balloon, it consisted simply of a light basket containing motor, propeller, ballast, and myself. The motor was one of the De Dion-Bouton tricycles, of an early type, with one cylinder, and giving about one and a half horse-power. You know how they work? Reduced to their simplicity, you may say that there is gasolene in a receptacle. Air passing through it comes out mixed with gasolene gas, ready to explode. You give a whirl to a crank, and the thing begins working automatically. The piston goes down, sucking combined gas and air into the cylinder. ”

“ To the sight-seeing crowd it made an exhilarating show of M. Santos-Dumont’s control of his airship; while to the inventor, to his aids and intimates, the maritime experiment had peculiar interests, both technical and general.
Over-sea ballooning has become the temptation of all European aëronauts. Lieutenant Tapissier, Director of the Toulon Maritime Ballooning Station, who accompanied Count Henry de La Vaulx in his recent highly subsidized but unsuccessful Mediterranean venture, says: ‘‘The balloon can render the navy immense services, on condition always that its direction can be assured. ”

“ Colonel Renard’s assertion that Santos-Dumont is not a man of science, but un sporteman de l ́aérostation qui a beau-coup de crânerie (an aërostatic sportsman who has a great deal of swagger) , is equally inexact. Sufficiently at home in mathematical mechanics to make the calculations which necessarily preceded not only the construction of his various air-ships, but their very idea, sufficiently practised and ingenious to make his own models, the young inventor owes no more to his constructors and hired mechanics than he does to his theoretical friends. ”

“ Rising as it does directly opposite the sliding-doors of M. Santos-Dumont's shed, and at scarcely two balloon-lengths' distance, it constitutes a veritable peril to the latter's air-ship on any but the calmest days. ”

“ Mr. Santos-Dumont, during his last winter's flights over the Mediterranean, was occupied with experiments quite different from those which took him around the Eiffel Tower in Paris. There, for a time, he went aside from his steadfast practice, to accomplish a set task and win a prize. ”

“ Cloud there is a kind of moral pressure to go on, no matter how the weather may have changed or in what condition the balloon or its machinery may be found to be. Yet a previous day's preliminary spin may easily derange so uncertain an engine as the present-day petroleum motor. When M. Santos-Dumont last spring won the four thousand francs annual Prize of Encouragement of the Aéro Club, he handed the money back to the club for the foundation of a Santos-Dumont Prize clogged by no such vexatious conditions. ”