Gertrude Bacon

“ Coxwell was sitting, not in the car, but in the ring of the balloon, and presently, when they were about 7000 feet above the town, he noticed that the silk, the mouth of which appears to have been fastened, was growing dangerously distended with the expanding gas. By his advice the valve was immediately pulled, but it was already too late; the balloon burst, the gas escaped with a noise like the escape of steam from an engine, the silk collapsed, and the balloon began to descend with appalling speed, the immense mass of loose silk surging and rustling frightfully overhead. ”

“ An airship, therefore, is in principle an apparatus lighter than air.
A flying machine, on the contrary, is heavier than air, and maintains its position aloft merely by the power it obtains from its engines, assisted by its special construction. The inventors of flying machines take as their analogy the flight of birds. Birds are creatures heavier than air, which yet manage to rise and fly by reason of the strength and construction of their wings. In the same way the heavy flying machine essays to fly by the power of its machinery. ”

“ Probably no invention has ever aroused greater enthusiasm. Not only all France but all the civilised world went wild with excitement for the time. Most extravagant statements were made and written. A new kingdom, it was declared, had been given to mankind to conquer; voyages might be made to the moon and stars, and now it would even be possible to take Heaven itself by storm!
Ascent after ascent took place with the “Montgolfier” and the “Charlier,” both in France and in other countries; nor was it long before the balloon made its appearance in England. ”

“ Up to the present day the airship—to which we will first turn our attention—has been much more largely and successfully experimented with than the flying machine. It is, however, the opinion of many, including the great authority Sir Hiram Maxim, that in the future the flying machine will become the more important invention of the two. “In all Nature,” says Sir Hiram, “we do not find a single balloon. All Nature’s flying machines are heavier than air.” ”

“ Now let us suppose that there is no string to hold the kite in proper position, and no boy to run with it; but that their places are supplied by a motor and propeller to drive it through the air; while at the same time it is so balanced as to preserve a fitting angle against a wind of its own making. We should then have a true flying machine, heavier than air, and yet capable of sailing through the sky. ”

“ Maxim’s first task, therefore, was to discover what proportion this must be, and by his experiments he arrived at a conclusion which Professor Langley in America, working at the same task at the same time, but quite independently, had also proved to be true, namely, that the faster a machine travels through the air the greater weight it may carry; or, in other words, the quicker a body moves through the atmosphere the less tendency will it have to fall to the ground. ”

“ It remains for us now to make brief mention of how men have tried, and are still trying, to imitate the soaring or gliding flight of birds without the use of machinery to assist them. We have seen how an albatross can, when the wind is blowing, convert itself, as it were, into a kite, and keep aloft in the air for a while without moving its wings. Similarly many people have attempted, by attaching themselves to a large supporting surface or aeroplane, and casting themselves off from a height, to glide with the wind across wide stretches of country. ”

“ This was Henry Coxwell. He was the son of a naval officer, and was brought up to the profession of a dentist. But when a boy of only nine years old he watched, through his father’s telescope, a balloon ascent by Green, which so fired his imagination that henceforward balloons filled all his thoughts. As he grew older the fascination increased upon him. He would go long distances to see ascents or catch glimpses of balloons in the air, and he was fortunate enough to be present at the first launching of the great Nassau balloon. ”

“ We know that if we throw an empty bottle tightly corked into the sea it does not sink, but rises upwards, because it is filled with air, which is lighter than water. In the same way exactly a light bag or balloon which is filled with some gas which is lighter than air will not stay on the surface of the ground, but will rise upwards into the sky to a height which depends upon its weight and buoyancy. ”

“ Dwellers in the country are familiar with the way in which the parent birds teach their fledglings to fly, instructing them by example, and encouraging them in their first short flights until they have become familiar with their powers and can balance themselves aright in the air. And if even birds, with whom flying is an instinct, have to learn the art of balancing themselves in the air by practice, how much more so must such a clumsy creature as a man, to whom flying is entirely unnatural. ”

“ To steer his course in a balloon, therefore, the aeronaut must so arrange that he is travelling faster or slower than the wind in which he finds himself. To travel faster, he must employ some sort of engine or motor to drive his craft onwards. To travel slower, he must trail something along the ground beneath to act as a drag.
Part of the equipment of every balloon is a long trail-rope, which, when the balloon is aloft, hangs some 300 feet below the car. The object of this rope is to break the force of the fall when the balloon comes down to the earth at the end of the voyage. ”

“ David wished for the wings of a dove to fly away and be at rest, and since his time, and before it, how many have not longed to take flight and sail away in the boundless, glorious realms above, to explore the fleecy clouds, and to float free in the blue vault of heaven. ”

“ But in spite of the high hopes of early aeronauts, and the extravagant prophecies made when the first balloons ascended into the sky, it has long been evident that the balloon alone has not solved the problem of human flight or accomplished the conquest85 of the air. An ordinary balloon is, in fact, nothing more than a mere lifting machine, no more capable of sailing the sky, in the proper sense of the word, than a cork floating in the water is capable of sailing the sea. ”

“ It is a danger which is always present when a balloon is aloft, unless due precautions are taken, and the neglect of these precautions has probably led to more ballooning accidents than any other cause. The explanation is simply the varying pressure exerted upon the bag of gas by the weight of the atmosphere. When an inflated balloon is resting upon the ground, the vast ocean of air above it is pressing upon it with a weight of approximately fifteen pounds to the square inch, and it is this pressure which prevents the enclosed gas from expanding beyond a certain limit. ”

“ It has no movement of its own, but drifts simply at the mercy of the wind, and quite beyond control. By the discharge of ballast, or by the letting out of gas, the aeronaut can indeed cause it to rise or sink at pleasure, and sometimes when two currents of air are blowing aloft in different directions at the same time he may, by passing from one to the other, “tack” his balloon to some extent across the sky. ”

“ It was John Wise’s great desire at one time to sail a balloon right across the Atlantic from America to Europe. Long study of the upper winds had convinced him that a regular current of air is always blowing steadily high aloft from west to east, and he believed that if an aeronaut could only keep his balloon in this upper current he might be carried across the ocean quicker, and with more ease and safety, than in the fastest steamship. Wise went so far as to work out all the details for this plan, the size of the balloon required, the ballast, provisions, and number of passengers ”

“ His first machine was a comparatively small one, capable only of lifting a light man. It took the usual form of a cigar-shaped balloon, the framework of which was built of bamboo, driven forward by a screw-propeller worked by a small petrol engine. Warned by the fate of the unfortunate Severo, Mr. Spencer placed his engine far away from the valve. Profiting also by Santos Dumont’s experience, he constructed his balloon in such a manner that, should it become torn and the gas escape, the empty silk would collapse into the form of a parachute and break the fall. ”

“ On another voyage the famous balloon met with serious injury, for having been some time above the clouds, during an ascent, Green found himself carried out to sea, and was obliged to come down in the water two miles north of Sheerness. As in the accident which befell Mr. Sadler in his attempt to cross the Irish Channel, the wind caught the silk and bore it along across the water too rapidly for a pursuing vessel to overtake it. Green then lowered his anchor, which by happy chance soon became entangled in a sunken wreck, and so brought the balloon up. ”

“ The first man who appeared to have any inkling of the real way of solving the problem of a “flying chariot,” and who in dim fashion seems to have foreshadowed the invention of the balloon, was that wonderful genius, Roger Bacon, the Learned Friar of Ilchester, the inventor or re-inventor of gunpowder, who lived in the thirteenth century. ”

“ But it was soon clear that the art of human14 flight was not to be achieved by such means; and when men found that they were unable to soar upwards by their own bodily strength alone, they set about devising some apparatus or machine which should carry them aloft. Many ancient philosophers bent their minds to the inventing of a machine for this purpose. One suggested that strong flying birds, such as eagles or vultures, might be harnessed to a car, and trained to carry it into the sky. ”

“ It will now be seen that we are arguing in a circle, and we can understand that a point must be reached in the making of airships when, with our present materials, the advantage107 gained by increase of strength will be more than counterbalanced by increased weight. On this point Sir Hiram Maxim says: “It is not possible to make a balloon, strong enough to be driven through the air at any considerable speed, at the same time light enough to rise in the air; therefore balloons must always be at the mercy of a wind no greater than that which prevails at least 300 days in the year;” ”

“ But directly it has to face the wind, and fight its way against it as an airship must do, then it has to be made of sufficient strength and rigidity to withstand the wind’s power, or it will be blown to pieces. To make so large a thing as an airship withstand a rough wind, it must be built of very strong and rigid materials. To do this means to add to the weight of the machine. To lift the increased weight, a larger machine which can hold more gas is needed. The larger the machine the more surface it offers to the wind, and the stronger therefore must be its construction. ”

“ This is the kind of flying machine that inventors at the present moment are trying to produce. They have, in their machines, to reproduce artificially two essential conditions that cause a kite to fly. They have to provide111 a substitute for the strength of the wind, and also a substitute for the pull of the string which keeps the kite at the best angle to profit by that strength. The first they achieve by using a suitable engine or motor, and the second by supplying it with what are called “aeroplanes”—large flat surfaces, light but rigid, inclined at a suitable angle to the horizon. ”

“ The veteran Green lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1870, aged eighty-five. When a very old man he still delighted in taking visitors to60 an outhouse where he kept the old Nassau balloon, now worn out and useless, and, handling it affectionately, would talk of its famous adventures and his own thousand ascents, during which he had never once met with serious accident or failure. After his death the old balloon passed into the hands of another equally famous man, who, after Green’s retirement, took his place as the most celebrated English aeronaut of the day. ”

“ The making of kites has now reached a high pitch of perfection, and by their means self-recording scientific instruments can be raised to vast heights in the air, and even men carried aloft with safety. A kite which latterly has excited much attention is the Cody kite. With this, during the autumn of 1903, its inventor, a Mexican, hazarded a bold venture.124 Harnessing it to a light boat, and waiting for a favourable wind, he started from Calais at eight o’clock one November evening, and was safely towed all night across the Channel, reaching Dover at five the next morning. ”

“ It is now time to speak of the practical uses of the balloon, and how it has been employed as a most valuable scientific instrument to teach us facts about the upper atmosphere, its nature and extent, the clouds, the winds and their ways, the travel of sounds, and many other things of which we should otherwise be ignorant. ”

“ On the last occasion a speed of forty-two miles an hour was attained, when the lifting power became so great that the restraining rail broke away altogether, and the great flying machine actually floated in the air for a few moments, “giving those on board the sensation of being in a boat,” until, steam being shut off, it fell to the ground and was broken.
The enormous expense of his experiments has not prevented Sir Hiram Maxim from repeating them, and he hopes soon to have a much improved machine. ”

“ Such strength a man has never possessed, or can ever hope to; but even as it is, by long practice and great effort, men have succeeded at different times, not exactly in flying, but in helping themselves along considerably by means of wings. ”