THE DIRIGIBLE BALLOON OF M. SANTOS-DUMONT.
BY STERLING HEILIG.
This article is published with the knowledge and consent of M. Santos-Dumont. Because he is resolved not to be drawn into a local controversy, and, more particularly, because he considers himself to be still in the experimental period, M. Santos-Dumont refuses to write any article, popular or technical, or to give diagrams of the inventions with which he is constantly experimenting, and which are, therefore, subject to continual changes. In the following interview, however, the writer, who has been a great deal with him during the past four years, was permitted by M. Santos-Dumont to take down questions and answers in shorthand.—S. H.
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. 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. The machine is all right, but you must learn to run is what I am doing with my air-ship."
This is what the crowds of Parisians who have been following M. Santos-Dumont’s aërial evolutions take but imperfectly into account; and the readers of the daily papers in far-off lands, who hear of his trails and narrow escapes only by way of garbled and hurriedly written cable despatches, are still less likely to appreciate it. Everything about the navigation of the air is new; newest of all is the art—practised only by this daring youth—of diving and mounting obliquely in the air by means of his propeller force. 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.
On this occasion (the morning of July 18, 1901) M. Santos-Dumont sped straight through the air above western Paris to the Eiffel Tower, turned round it, and returned to his starting-point, a distance of eleven kilometers (nearly seven miles), in thirty-nine minutes, and this in spite of a new petroleum motor that was discovered to be working imperfectly shortly after starting. The day before, while going over the same course, he found that his right-hand rudder-guide had become loose. This happened near the Eiffel Tower. Without sacrificing a cubic inch of gas, he descended to the ground by means of his shifting-weights; that is to say, he pointed the nose of his cigar-shaped balloon obliquely downward and navigated to the surface of the earth by means of his propeller. There he procured a ladder and repaired his rudder-guide. Then he mounted into the air and resumed his course without sacrificing a pound of ballast; that is to say, he pointed the balloon’s nose obliquely upward by means of the shifting-weights, and so navigated on high again by the force of his propeller.
To those who know anything about dirigible balloons, these evolutions, simple as they appear, constitute M. Santos-Dumont’s greatest triumph. They have never been
