Alberto Santos-Dumont

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The air-ship, carried by the impetus of its great speed, passed on as a racehorse passes the winning-post, as a sailing yacht passes the winning-line, as a road racing automobile continues flying past the judges who have snapped its time. ”

“ I do not believe that, without such previous study and experience with a spherical balloon, a man can be capable of succeeding with an elongated dirigible 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, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My first impression of aerial navigation was, I confess, surprise to feel the air-ship going straight ahead. It was astonishing to feel the wind in my face. In spherical ballooning we go with the wind, and do not feel it. True, in rising and descending the spherical balloonist feels the friction of the atmosphere, and the vertical oscillation makes the flag flutter, but in the horizontal movement the ordinary balloon seems to stand still, while the earth flies past under it. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ I would have a motor waggon. If I could find an artificial force I would cause it to act on a point in the circumference of each wheel. Then the waggon could carry its own puller!"
"You might as well attempt to lift yourself from the ground by pulling at your boot straps!" laughed Pedro. "Listen, Luis. Man is subject to certain natural laws. The horse, it is true, carries more than his own weight, but by a device of Nature's own—his legs. Had you the artificial force you dream of you would have to apply it naturally. ”

“ 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. They think no less of their automobile for this reason. Yet let the air-ship have the same trifling accident and all the world is likely to hear of the fact. ”

“ ALTITUDE 1000 FEET
suddenly my capricious motor started working at full speed again. The suddenly-accelerated propeller being almost under the high-pointed air-ship exaggerated the inclination, so that the applause of the crowd changed to cries of alarm. As for myself, I had no fear, being over the trees of the Bois, whose soft greenery, as I have already stated, always reassured me. All this happened very quickly—before I had a chance to shift my weights and guide rope back to the normal horizontal positions. I was now at an altitude of 150 metres. ”

“ When, for one reason or another — humidity gathering on the surface of the balloon, a downward stroke of wind, accidental loss of gas, or, more frequently, the passing of a cloud before the face of the sun—the balloon came back to earth with disquieting speed, the guide rope would come to rest in part on the ground, and so, unballasting the whole system by so much of its weight, stopped, or at least eased, the fall. ”

“ It is also the reason why air-ship captains will always prefer to navigate for their own pleasure in calm weather, and, when they find an air current against them, will steer obliquely upward or downward to get out of it. Birds do the same thing. The sailing yachtsman whistles for a fair breeze, without which he can do nothing, but the river steamboat captain will always hug the shore to avoid the freshet, and will time his descent of the river by the outgoing, rather than the incoming, tide. We air-shipmen are steamboat captains and not sailing yachtsmen. ”

“ Should my capricious motor stop as I approached the Tower—exactly as it stopped after I had passed over the timekeepers' heads at St Cloud, returning from my first trial on 13th July 1903—I should be powerless to hold the air-ship back.
Therefore I always dreaded the turn round the Eiffel Tower, looking on it as my principal danger. While never seeking to go high in my air-ships—on the contrary, I hold the record for the low altitudes in a free balloon—in passing over Paris I must necessarily move above and out of the way of the chimney-pots and steeples. ”

“ Thus, very curiously, the twentieth century air-ship must become from the beginning the great enemy of that other twentieth century marvel—the submarine boat—and not only its enemy but its master. For, while the submarine boat can do no harm to the air-ship, the latter, having twice its speed, can cruise about to find it, follow all its movements, and signal them to the warships against which it is moving. ”

“ At the risk of my neck and the needless sacrifice of a great deal of money I had won the Deutsch prize. I might have arrived at the same point of progress by less forced and more reasonable stages. Throughout I had been inventor, patron, manufacturer, amateur, mechanician, and air-ship captain all united! Yet any one of these qualities is thought to bring sufficient work and credit to the individual in the world of automobiles. ”

“ Evidently it would be a mistake to place the air-ship at a point suitable for an ordinary balloon without motor and propeller.
And yet it was there that I did place it, not by my own will, but by the will of the professional aeronauts who came in the crowd to be present at my experiment. In vain I explained that by placing myself "up stream" in the wind with relation to the centre of the open space I should inevitably risk precipitating the air-ship against the trees before I would have time to rise above them, the speed of my propeller being superior to that of the wind then blowing. ”

“ Therefore, even had not sentimental reasons led me to land at Bagatelle, I should have hesitated to return with the wind to the Vaugirard balloon house—itself of small size, and difficult of access, and surrounded by all the houses of a busy quarter. Landing in Paris, in general, is dangerous for any kind of balloon, amid chimney-pots that threaten to pierce its belly, and tiles that are always ready to be knocked down on the heads of passers-by. ”