Alberto Santos Dumont
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ing, in preference to the steam-engine, which is immeasurably lighter; likewise I could not understand why Dupuy de Lome tried to substitute human strength, which is clearly insufficient, in place of Henry Giffard’s steam-engine.
Before launching out into the construction of air-ships, I took pains to make myself familiar with the handling of spherical balloons. I did not hasten, but took plenty of time. In all, I made something like thirty ascensions; at first as a passenger, then as my own captain, and at last alone. Some of these spherical balloons I rented. Others I had constructed for me. Of such I have owned at least six or eight. And I do not believe that, without such previous study and experience, a man is capable of succeeding with an elongated balloon, whose handling is so much more delicate. Before attempting to direct an air-ship, it is necessary to have learned in an ordinary balloon the conditions of the atmospheric medium; to have become acquainted with the caprices of the wind, now caressing and now brutal, and to have gone thoroughly into the difficulties of the ballast problem, from the triple point of view of starting, of equilibrium in the air, and of landing at the end of the trip. To go up in an ordinary balloon, at least a dozen times, seems to me an indispensable preliminary for acquiring an exact notion of the requisites for the construction and handling of an elongated balloon, furnished with its motor and propeller.
Naturally I am filled with amazement when I see inventors, who have never set foot in the basket, drawing out on paper—and even executing in whole or in part—fantastic air-ships whose balloons had cubic capacities of thousands of meters, loaded down with enormous motors, which they do not succeed even in raising up from the ground, and furnished with machinery so complicated that nothing works. Such inventors are afraid of nothing, because they have no idea of the difficulties of the problem. Had they previously journeyed through the air at the wind’s will, and amid all the disturbing influences of atmospheric phenomena, they would understand that a dirigible balloon, to be practicable, requires, first of all, the utmost simplicity in all its mechanism. Curiously enough, last year’s constructors who began work on dirigible balloons (of which the least would be large enough, could it be filled, to lift up tons) had, for the most part, not made a single ascension in a free balloon. This is my explanation of their lack of success. They are in the condition in which the first-comer would find himself were he to agree to build and steer a transatlantic steamer without having ever quitted land or set foot in a boat.
It was at the end of 1897 that I went up, for the first time, in a spherical balloon, as passenger with M. Machuron, who was just back from Spitzbergen. He had gone thither to inflate Andrée’s balloon, and get the toorash Swede ready to start off with his two companions in disaster.
I have kept a very clear remembrance of the delightful sensations I experienced in this, my first trial in the air. I arrived early at the Parc d’ Aérostation of Vaugirard, so as to lose nothing of the preparations. I had paid 400 francs ($80) for the rent and inflation of the balloon, which had a cubic capacity of 750
