Sterling Heilig

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is pale, cold, and phlegmatic, even, if the word may be applied to one so active. In his moments of greatest enthusiasm and of most lively disappointment he is always the same; and he is as free from affectation as a child. ”

“ All at once a little cloud, almost imperceptible, masks the sun for a few seconds. The temperature of the gas in your balloon cools down a little; and if at the very moment, you do not, throw out enough ballast to correspond to the ascensional force lost by the condensation of the gas, you will begin descending. ”

“ You know what the end of my No. 5 was. In the early morning of August 8, having called together the Technical Committee of the Deutsch Foundation, I navigated from St. Cloud to the Eiffel Tower in eight minutes and fifty seconds, turned round the tower in forty seconds more, and was just reaching the Bois on the home stretch, with eighteen minutes to the good, when the catastrophe happened. The balloon had already begun losing gas before I reached the tower. ”

“ It was, rather, elliptical in form, and while not a return to the slender straightness of No. 1, it had so little of No, 3's podgy compactness that I thought it prudent to put the compensating air-balloon inside it again, this time fed by a rotary ventilator of aluminium. Being smaller than No. 3, it would have less lifting-power; but this I made up by going back to hydrogen gas.
“A new seven horse-power two-cylinder motor, made for me by Bonchet, turned the propeller at the rate of one hundred revolutions per minute, furnishing a traction effort of sixty-six pounds. ”

“ Or it may have been the interior air-balloon that refused to fill out properly. Yesterday Lachambre’s man came to me for the plans of the air-balloon for my No. 6. From something he said I gathered that the air-balloon of No. 5, not having been given time for its varnish to dry before being adjusted, might have stuck together or to the side of the outer balloon. Next time we shall be more careful, although with so many things to think of, and all new, it is scarcely human not to overlook something. ”

“ Thus it is now a cigar-shaped balloon only in name, all its predecessors having deviated more and more from the original cylinder terminated by two cones. The balloon’s total capacity is twenty-two thousand one hundred and eight cubic feat, so that when filled with hydrogen gas it will have a lifting-power of thirteen hundred and sixty pounds. Of this, eleven hundred pounds are represented by keel, machinery, and M. Santos-Dumont’s own weight, leaving two hundred and sixty pounds disposable ballast. ”

“ At most it will rise very slowly and to no great height. To the lifting-power of the balloon, however, must be added the sixty-six pounds ascensional effort developed by the air-ship’s two-bladed propeller. This propeller, which describes a circle of thirteen feet in diameter, is driven by a new twenty horse-power, four-cylinder petroleum motor with water-refrigerator. Now more than ever dependent on propeller-force for mounting into the air that will be barely heavier than itself, the “Santos-Dumont No. ”