Aircraft and Submarines. Willis J. Abbot
was limited it was clear that the time of his flight was necessarily curtailed every time he ascended or descended. Santos-Dumont thought to husband his supplies of lifting force and of ballast, and make the motor raise and lower the ship. It was obvious that the craft would go whichever way the bow might be pointed, whether up or down. But how to shift the bow? The solution seems so simple that one wonders it ever perplexed aviators. From the peak of the bow and stern of his craft Santos-Dumont hung long ropes caught in the centre by lighter ropes by which they could be dragged into the car. In the car was carried a heavy bag of sand, which so long as it was there held the ship in a horizontal plane. Was it needful to depress the bow? Then the bow rope was hauled in, the bag attached, and swung out to a position where it would pull the forward tip of the delicately adjusted gas bag toward the earth. If only a gentle inclination was desired the bag was not allowed to hang directly under the bow, but was held at a point somewhere between the car and the bow so that the pull would be diagonal and the great cylinder would be diverted but little from the horizontal. If it were desired to ascend, a like manipulation of the ballast on the stern rope would depress the stern and point the bow upwards. For slight changes in direction it was not necessary even to attach the sand bag. Merely drawing the rope into the car and thus changing the line of its "pull" was sufficient.
The Deutsch prize which stimulated Santos-Dumont to his greatest achievements with dirigibles was a purse of twenty thousand dollars, offered by Mr. Henry Deutsch, a wealthy patron of the art of aviation. Not himself an aviator, M. Deutsch greatly aided the progress of the air's conquest. Convinced that the true solution of the problem lay in development of the gasoline engine, he expended large sums in developing and perfecting it. When he believed it was sufficiently developed to solve the problem of directing the flight of balloons he offered his prize for the circuit of the Eiffel Tower. The conditions of the contest were not easy. The competitor had to sail from the Aero Club at St. Cloud, pass twice over the Seine which at that point makes an abrupt bend, sail over the Bois de Boulogne, circle the Tower, and return to the stopping place within a half an hour. The distance was about seven miles, and it is noteworthy that in his own comment on the test Santos-Dumont complains that that required an average speed of fifteen miles an hour of which he could not be sure with his balloon. To-day dirigibles make sixty miles an hour, and airplanes not infrequently reach 130 miles. Moreover there could be no picking of a day on which atmospheric conditions were especially good. Mr. Deutsch had stipulated that the test must be made in the presence of a Scientific Commission whose members must be notified twenty-four hours in advance. None could tell twenty-four hours ahead what the air might be like, and as for utilizing the aviator's most favourable hour, the calm of the dawn, M. Santos-Dumont remarked: "The duellist may call out his friends at that sacred hour, but not the airship captain."
The craft with which the Brazilian first strove to win the Deutsch prize he called Santos-Dumont No. V. It was a cylinder, sharp at both ends, 109 feet long and driven by a 12-horse-power motor. A new feature was the use of piano wire for the support of the car, thus greatly reducing the resistance of the air which in the case of the old cord suspensions was almost as great as that of the balloon itself. Another novel feature was water ballast tanks forward and aft on the balloon itself and holding together twelve gallons. By pulling steel wires in the car the aviator could open the stop-cocks. The layman scarcely appreciates the very slight shift in ballast which will affect the stability of a dirigible. The shifting of a rope a few feet from its normal position, the dropping of two handfuls of sand, or release of a cup of water will do it. A humorous writer describing a lunch with Santos-Dumont in the air says: "Nothing must be thrown overboard, be it a bottle, an empty box or a chicken bone without the pilot's permission."
After unofficial tests of his "No. 5" in one of which he circled the Tower without difficulty, Santos-Dumont summoned the Scientific Commission for a test. In ten minutes he had turned the Tower, and started back against a fierce head-wind, which made him ten minutes late in reaching the time-keepers. Just as he did so his engine failed, and after drifting for a time his ship perched in the top of a chestnut tree on the estate of M. Edmond Rothschild. Philosophical as ever the aeronaut clung to his craft, dispatched an excellent lunch which the Princess Isabel, Comtesse d'Eu, daughter of Dom Pedro, the deposed Emperor of Brazil, sent to his eyrie in the branches, and finally extricated himself and his balloon—neither much the worse for the accident. He had failed but his determination to win was only whetted.
The second trial for the Deutsch prize like the first ended in failure, but that failure was so much more dramatic even than the success which attended the third effort that it is worth telling and can best be told in M. Santos-Dumont's own words. The quotation is from his memoir, My Airships:
And now I come to a terrible day—8th of August, 1901. At 6:30 A.M. in presence of the Scientific Commission of the Aero Club, I started again for the Eiffel Tower.
I turned the tower at the end of nine minutes and took my way back to St. Cloud; but my balloon was losing hydrogen through one of its two automatic gas valves whose spring had been accidentally weakened.
I had perceived the beginning of this loss of gas even before reaching the Eiffel Tower, and ordinarily, in such an event, I should have come at once to earth to examine the lesion. But here I was competing for a prize of great honour and my speed had been good. Therefore I risked going on.
The balloon now shrunk visibly. By the time I had got back to the fortifications of Paris, near La Muette, it caused the suspension wires to sag so much that those nearest to the screw-propeller caught in it as it revolved.
I saw the propeller cutting and tearing at the wires. I stopped the motor instantly. Then, as a consequence, the airship was at once driven back toward the tower by the wind which was strong.
Photo by International Film Service Co.
A Kite Balloon Rising from the Hold of a Ship.
At the same time I was falling. The balloon had lost much gas. I might have thrown out ballast and greatly diminished the fall, but then the wind would have time to blow me back on the Eiffel Tower. I therefore preferred to let the airship go down as it was going. It may have seemed a terrific fall to those who watched it from the ground but to me the worst detail was the airship's lack of equilibrium. The half-empty balloon, fluttering its empty end as an elephant waves his trunk, caused the airship's stern to point upward at an alarming angle. What I most feared therefore was that the unequal strain on the suspension wires would break them one by one and so precipitate me to the ground.
Why was the balloon fluttering an empty end causing all this extra danger? How was it that the rotary ventilator was not fulfilling its purpose in feeding the interior air balloon and in this manner swelling out the gas balloon around it? The answer must be looked for in the nature of the accident. The rotary ventilator stopped working when the motor itself stopped, and I had been obliged to stop the motor to prevent the propeller from tearing the suspension wires near it when the balloon first began to sag from loss of gas. It is true that the ventilator which was working at that moment had not proved sufficient to prevent the first sagging. It may have been that the interior balloon refused to fill out properly. The day after the accident when my balloon constructor's man came to me for the plans of a "No. 6" balloon envelope I gathered from something he said that the interior balloon of "No. 5," not having been given time for its varnish to dry before being adjusted, might have stuck together or stuck to the sides or bottom of the outer balloon. Such are the rewards of haste.
I was falling. At the same time the wind was carrying me toward the Eiffel Tower. It had already carried me so far that I was expecting to land on the Seine embankment beyond the Trocadero. My basket and the whole of the keel had already passed the Trocadero hotels, and had my balloon been a spherical one it would have cleared the building. But now at the last critical moment, the end of the long balloon that was still full of gas came slapping down on the roof just before clearing it. It exploded with a great noise; struck after being blown up. This was the terrific explosion described in the newspaper of the day.
I had made a mistake in my estimate of the wind's force, by a few yards. Instead of being carried