Alberto Santos-Dumont

“ How soon are we to enter on the Air-ship Age? Probably the great change will come rapidly : once let an air-ship reach the Pole, once let an aerial cruiser make some action d’éctat in war—and within an astonishingly short time you will see hundreds of air-ships gliding overhead. The great change will have begun !
Hundreds of engineers and mechanicians will begin competing with each other in the improvement of aerial craft, copying from each other, improving on each other, racing with each other, exhibiting side by side in Air-Ship Salons. ”

“ The skill of the spherical balloonist consists precisely in maintaining his desired altitude with the greatest economy of gas and ballast ; but, be he ever so exact, the time must come when repeated condensations have forced him to throw out his last gramme of ballast and repeated dilatations have lost him so much gas that the balloon sinks to earth—no longer spherical, but pearshaped, with its lower part hanging flaccid. ”

“ The surface of the balloon is so great that the mass of the steam, instead of condensing and falling in drops as it ought to do, seems simply to disappear, to escape through the varnished silk, where gas itself cannot escape. ”

“ There are inventions that have luck, others that have less : or is it simply that we are prone to overlook the small beginnings of the successful ones? The submarine-boat has, for the moment, distanced the air-ship-but in the end it is the air-ship that will be its master! ”

“ You have overshot your equilibrium and lost too much gas—because the balloon is an impetuous thing, always exaggerating. Therefore you will find yourself descending—to condense your gas again as the atmospheric pressure increases—when more ballast must be sacrificed, and the balloon shoots up too high again, and the trouble recommences ! ”

“ With a balloon of such lifting power, enough fuel could be curtied to make one thousand kilometres at full speed, or from three to four thousand kilometres at reduced speed, and there would remain enough lifting power to carry a crew of twenty men and a supply of explosives to be hurled at the enemy by means of one or two cannons genre lance-torpille à l'air comprimée.
Such an aerial cruiser would have nothing to fear from the wind. With its high speed of one hundred kilometres per hour it could make its way tranquilly in the stiffest breeze ”

“ The aerial yacht is not designed for high speed. Therefore its balloon need not be cylindrical. I am even making it egg-shaped ; consequently the skilled labour and unremitting attention required for the maintenance of a cylindrical form by means of interworking ventilators and valves will not be needed. In this respect, indeed, the aerial yacht can, for hours at a time, be made to assemble very closely a spherical balloon, its motor being stopped, and the system being allowed to float gently through the night—or afternoon or morning—on a favourable air current. ”

“ I concede that they may be shot at, hit, and even be brought down ; yet the French and English officers who watched the Boers shoot day after day at the captive balloon that rose above Ladysmith have ideas of their own about the practical difficulties of thus bringing down a bag of silk filled with gas.
I concede that air-ships may be destroyed in war ; but, at the worst, remember that the crew of a great aerial cruiser will not contain a tenth of the crew of a war-ship ; that its construction will cost far less than a tenth in both money and time. Yes, air-ships will be destroyed in war ”

“ Protected by an aerial cruiser, observe how its chances change! The air-ship will be seen moving over the waves in long, parallel lines. Beneath the surface of the water moves the submarine-boat. Its speed is little in comparison with that of its adversary in the air. It cannot even perceive that the air-ship is threatening it without rising to the surface at great risk; and it can profit by the knowledge so obtained only by diving to depths in which its usefulness becomes nil.
In a word, the submarine boat can do no harm to the air-ship ”

“ All goes well for a time. Then the little cloud ceases to mask the sun. Your gas will heat up again, and by its dilatation will regain its old lifting power ; but, having less to lift by the amount of ballast just thrown out, it will dart higher into the air, where the decreasing atmospheric pressure will permit it to go on dilating until a lot of gas escapes through the valve with which every balloon is furnished. ”

“ The gas in the balloon cools and condenses, and if you do not at once throw out enough ballast to correspond to the ascensional force lost by such condensation, you will begin descending to earth. If you throw out too much ballast, you will become too light again and shoot up too high. ”

“ From the earliest ballooning times, men have sought to combat condensation by means of heat. Montgolfier's first balloon was filled with nothing but hot air, which is lighter than the cool air of the atmosphere ; and it has always been known than an adequate heating of one's gas would be equivalent to saving so much ballast. ”

“ Doubtless in future wars on land and sea the great aerial cruisers, with their crews, will be brought down like simple little air-ship scouts. It will happen less frequently because of their speed, the vigilance of their numerous crew, and their terrible offensive power. ”

“ Little by little the landing spaces will have to be made in every part of Paris ; and when they begin to be constructed on the tops of houses, the second part of the topographical change will have begun.
Whether or not we who read these lines will ever mount in lifts to spacious platforms in the air to wait for the aerial craft to come and take us, will depend, I fancy, on how much the aeroplane principle will be found able to serve us. ”

“ They will resemble the termini of railways only in so far as they must have waiting-rooms, restaurants, bars and cab-ranks on one side, and traffic halls, machine shops, gas plants, and a lot of parallel railway tracks on the other. The railway tracks will be for the accommodation of small trucks and locomotives used in the manɶuvring of waiting air-ships—for an air-ship on the ground is as clumsy as an eagle ! ”

“ Dirigible elongated balloons, even when neither heavier nor lighter than the air, are accommodating craft, perfectly capable of mounting from landing spaces on the ground. Aeroplane air-ships, on the other hand, may find vital advantage in coming to, and especially in starting from, heights. ”

“ There may be aeroplane air-ships with great fixed wings, which will permit powerful motors to propel them, skimming through the atmosphere. The proportion between motive force and surface may be satisfactorily arrived at ”

“ Factories will be devoted to air-ship construction, and the models of each succccding year will be more practical—by reason of the experience gained by a thousand experts in every-day competitive experiment. ”