THE FUTURE OF AIR-SHIPS.
a dozen different types of aerial craft, being convinced—as I have ever been convinced—that practical experiment must be our only true guide in the air. If, in my own modest experiments, I have thus far held to the elongated balloon, it has been uniquely from my desire to navigate the air at once, without delay, for my own pleasure !
There may be aeroplane air-ships with great fixed wings, which will permit powerful motors to propel them, skimming through the atmosphere. The proportion between motive force and surface may be satisfactorily arrived at ; the natural laws of the sizes of such aeroplanes, either simple or combined with balloons, may be discovered. And so quickly do we become habituated to new things, the day when aerial omnibuses begin carrying tourists and business men from Paris to St. Petersburg, you and I will take our places in them as naturally as our grandfathers took the first railway trains.
Then, in addition to the surface landing spaces and the elevated landing stages of the smaller aerial craft, new and highly-organised aerial line stations will complete the topographical change.
They will resemble the termini of railways only in so far as they must have waiting-rooms, restaurants, bars and cab-ranks on one side, and traffic halls, machine shops, gas plants, and a lot of parallel railway tracks on the other. The railway tracks will be for the accommodation of small trucks and locomotives used in the manɶuvring of waiting air-ships—for an air-ship on the ground is as clumsy as an eagle !
As clumsy as an eagle ! The other day I stood looking at an eagle flopping on his branch in his cage at the Jardin des Plantes. And as his clumsiness grew more and more apparent, I congratulated his Designer and Constructor that He had no mathematicians in frock coats and high hats at His elbow when He began His first experiments with the flying lizards. Their clumsiness and weight would have condenmed them in advance as their clumsiness and lightness has condemned the first dirigible balloons !
SANTOS-DUMONT.
