THE CENTURY MAGAZINE
able to lower the volume of the “Brazil,” his first spherical balloon, to the unusual minimum of one hundred and thirteen cubic meters. The little “Brazil” was always filled with hydrogen, and after each ascension he never failed to bring it back with him in his valise.
This Brazilian has neither the structure, the complexion, nor the exuberant gestures of the men of his country. 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. He has a weakness for driving dog-cart tandems, and—something which has had a vital influence over his career as a balloonist—he has been an intrepid automobile chauffeur from the first.
He began with a Peugeot roadster of two and a half horse-power. He has since owned and driven half a dozen automobiles of continually increasing speed and power, his longest trip without stop being taken in 1898, between Nice and Paris, and accomplished with a six horse-power Panhard in fifty-four hours. Latterly he has abandoned petroleum in favor of electricity, in a dainty light-running American buggy manufactured in Chicago. It serves him, he says, better than the more troublesome teuf-teuf for his morning spin through the Bois and his afternoon errands from the balloon-maker’s at Vaugirard to his apartment in the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, and from the Aéro Club's ground at St. Cloud to the Automobile Club in the Place de la Concorde. “I was once enamoured of petroleum automobiles, because of their freedom,” he explains. “You can buy the essence everywhere; and so, at a moment's notice, one is at liberty to start off for Rome or St. Petersburg. But when I discovered that I did not want to go to Rome or St. Petersburg, but only to take short trips about Paris, I went in for the electric buggy.
“I got my first idea of putting an automobile motor under a cigar-shaped balloon filled with hydrogen gas while returning from the Paris-Amsterdam automobile race in 1897,” he said when he began giving me this interview. “From the beginning everybody was against the idea, I was told that an explosive gas-engine would ignite the hydrogen in the balloon above it, and that the resulting explosion would end the experiment with my life. Lachambre, my balloon-constructor, went to work without enthusiasm. So far from others ‘convincing me that their notions were worth taking up,’ as has been said, I met with nothing but discouragement.”
Such a categorical statement ought to dispose of the legend of a young “Mæcenas of balloon-builders,” who “does not set up himself to invent machines, only to judge of those which inventors bring to him, and of the work done by the mechanics he employs”[1] 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.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE INVENTION.
“I ORDERED my first dirigible balloon from Lachambre in the summer of 1898,” M. Santos-Dumont said. “It was in the form of a cylinder terminated at each end by a cone; it was eighty-two feet long and almost six feet in diameter, with a capacity of sixty-four hundred cubic feet of gas, which gave it a lifting-power of four hundred and fifty pounds. Being of varnished Japanese silk, it weighed only sixty-six pounds. This left me some three hundred and eighty pounds for basket, motor and other machinery, ballast, and my own weight.
“There was a time when any piece of silk of seemingly good quality was accepted in balloon-construction, without subjecting it to preliminary tension; to-day each piece is experimented with, and if its dynamometric resistance does not attain the number of kilograms necessary to offset the maximum force of gas dilatation, it is pitilessly rejected. It is the same for all ropes and cords; they are tried with the dynamometer up to the greatest strain that may ever come to be put on them.”
This minute painstaking in the construction of his air-ships has served M, Santos-Dumont to good purpose more than once—most of all in the accident of August 6, 1901, when nothing but a long and slender “keel” of thin pine scantlings and piano-
- ↑ London “Truth,” July 18, 1901.
