THE FUTURE OF AIR-SHIPS.
453
Oh, yes, there will be certain complaints against them. Now and again an air-ship, either by design or accident, will come down in the street—by preference in a wide avenue. Crowds will collect around it. Now and again—not often—one of them will fall with painful, but not necessarily fatal, results.
There will be discussions. A portion of the population and Press will take sides against the aerial movement. Others will defend it, if only in the interest of French industry and of Paris as the world's centre of novelties : for Parisians will be once again ready as they have always been ready—to make greater concessions than other cities to maintain the reputation of their brilliant capital as the " Ville Lumière," the enlightened pleasure-city of the world, the capital of new sights and sensations !
Little by little these very accidents and interruptions of street traffic will force certain topographical changes on Paris.
The air-ship people will demand landing spaces.
They will say : We ask nothing of the street. We do not benefit by your expensively maintained avenues. If you will accord us landing spaces, we will keep to them ; and you will have no further trouble from us.
Thus the first landing spaces will be conceded—wide open spaces like parade grounds, free from trees, buildings, poles or fences, to which the air-ship captain may steer his craft in case of accident or desire to alight.
At the beginning they will probably be parts of already existing public squares ; but the topographical change will have begun. Little by little the landing spaces will have to be made in every part of Paris ; and when they begin to be constructed on the tops of houses, the second part of the topographical change will have begun.
Whether or not we who read these lines will ever mount in lifts to spacious platforms in the air to wait for the aerial craft to come and take us, will depend, I fancy, on how much the aeroplane principle will be found able to serve us. Dirigible elongated balloons, even when neither heavier nor lighter than the air, are accommodating craft, perfectly capable of mounting from landing spaces on the ground. Aeroplane air-ships, on the other hand, may find vital advantage in coming to, and especially in starting from, heights.
I have no objection to aeroplanes furnished with motors ; and there are even certain forms plus lourds que l'air, which I regard as eventually possible, if not probable. Indeed, were I, Santos-Dumont, to find myself at the head of a great experimental air-ship station with unlimited material and workmen at command, I would be immediately found constructing, side by side,
