THE DIRIGIBLE BALLOON OF M. SANTOS-DUMONT.
are small and encumbered, nothing like the grounds of a balloon club of the future, when clear, wide, elevated terraces will be considered essential to the aërial navigator’s safety and convenience.”[1]
“I expect the great contest now will be the battle with the air,” I said, “I have seen you go against it.”
“One scarcely goes ‘against’ the wind in a balloon,” replied M, Santos-Dumont. “You are in the wind itself; you are part of it, and so you do not feel it blowing against you. The old adage, “Il n'y a pas de vent en ballon,” is not completely true, because a streamer attached even to a spherical balloon will sometimes flutter, while if there were no wind at all, it would point to the ground; but the saying is true enough for practical purposes. The navigation of the air, for me, is like the navigation of a river,” he went on. “It is not like the navigation of the ocean; and to talk about ‘tacking’ is a mistake. With my propeller pushing me at the rate of, say, thirty miles an hour, I am in the position of a river-steamboat captain whose propeller is driving him up or down the river at the rate of thirty miles an hour. Suppose the current to be ten miles an hour. When he goes up-stream he will accomplish thirty less ten, or twenty miles an hour with respect to the land. When he goes down-stream he will accomplish thirty plus ten, or forty miles an hour with respect to the shore. It is the same in the air, a question of plus or minus. Like any river-steamboat captain, I would prefer to go with the current or navigate the calm, say, of a lake; but when the time comes that I must navigate ‘up-stream’ I will do it. I have done it.”
At the Chalais-Meudon Military Balloon Park they have gathered statistics of the wind over Paris. In every instance its force was measured by means of a registering anemometer situated on the plateau of Châtillon, at the summit of a mast ninety-two feet high. 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. The military balloonists, therefore, conclude that: “The conquest of the air will be practically accomplished on the day when there shall be constructed a dirigible balloon having a speed of forty-five kilometers an hour and able to sustain this speed all day.”
“What was your speed with No. 5?” I asked of M. Santos-Dumont.
“Forty kilometers an hour,” he replied, without expressing an opinion of the above figures which I cited; “and my No. 6 will be still more powerful.”
“M. Henry Deutsch is building a sixty horse-power air-ship modeled on your own,” I suggested. “He ought to get great speed out of it. What do you think of it?”
“Yes, it ought to furnish great speed,” he answered; “but I think it too much for any one to begin with. Such a balloon will be sixty yards long, where mine, after four years of growth based on experience, is still only thirty-five yards long. In every way it will be hard for a beginner to manage, 1 am afraid M. Deutsch will not be able to get any one to drive it. So far every professional chauffeur has refused to go up with him. ´To think that they are willing to risk their necks daily on the highways,’ he exclaims, ‘and yet they are afraid to go a few hundred feet into the air!’”
“But shall you never build a sixty horse-power dirigible balloon yourself?”
“Why not? And why not one of six hundred horse-power? My experience demonstrates that the thing itself is practicable; then why not go on improving in mere size and strength?”
NOTE TO THE PICTURE ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE.
M, Santos-Dumont ix seen sitting on a windowsill, to which he climbed, unaided, from his basket. A rope has been lowered to him from the roof above, but M. Santos-Dumont, who is being supported against the barred window by a pole held by a person inside of the building, surveys the wreck for a few minutes before allowing himself to be pulled up to the roof.—S. H.
- ↑ The of the Aéro Club are peculiarly encumbered by the gigantic skeleton of M. Henry Deutach's own balloon-shed, designed to “stable" the great airship he is having built on the exact lines of the “Santos-Dumont No. 5.” 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.
Once in the air, with its propeller working, the balloon is far safer than on the surface in the midst of such encumbrances,—S. H.
