ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT
313
Like all other human devices, however, the guide-rope, along with its advantages, has its inconveniences. As it trails along the uneven surface of the ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, fences and forests, roads and houses, hedges and telegraph wires—the balloon receives violent shocks. Or it may happen that the guide-rope rapidly unraveling catches on some projection or winds itself around the branch of a tree. Such an incident was alone lacking to complete my instruction.
As we passed a little group of trees, a stronger shock than the others threw us backward into the basket. The balloon had stopped short and was swaying in the gusts of wind at the end of its guide-rope, which had wrapped itself around the head of an oak-tree. For a quarter of an hour it kept us shaking like a salad-basket; and it was only by throwing out ballast that we finally got ourselves loose. The lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward and pierced the clouds like a cannon-ball. It threatened to reach heights from which the fall would have been terrible, considering the little ballast we had remaining in store. It was time to have recourse to effective means—to open the valve so that the excess of gas over our lessened weight, which was taking us upward might escape.
It was the work of a moment. The balloon was stopped in its flight, and began descending to earth, and soon the guide-rope again rested on the ground. It was time to bring the trip to an end, for only a few handfuls of sand remained as ballast.
He who wishes to navigate an air-ship should first practice landing in an ordinary balloon, that is, if he wishes to land without breaking motor and propeller. The wind being rather strong, it was necessary to profit by a moment of comparative calm, and seek a shelter. At the end of the plain the forest of Fontaine-bleau was hurrying toward us. In a few minutes we had turned the extremity of the wood, sacrificing our last handful of ballast. The trees which we had left behind us protected that side from the violence of the wind; and we cast anchor, opening wide at the same time the valve for the escape of the gas. The twofold manœuver stopped us without the least dragging. We set foot on land and stood there, watching the balloon as it died. Stretched out in the field it was losing the rest of its gas in convulsive agitation, like a great bird which dies beating its wings.
Already in this first ascension I was allowed to share the handling of the balloon with the long-experienced M. Machuron. After a few other trips I began to consider myself quite an aëronaut. This was so much the case that, for an ascension in March, 1898, I resolved to go up alone. The ascension took place at Péronne, in the north of France, one stormy afternoon, quite late. I started in spite of the thunder threatening in the distance and the remonstrances of the public, among who in it was known that I was not an aëronaut by trade. They feared my rashness and inexperience, and wished either to keep me from going up, or else oblige me to take M. Lachambre, who had organized the ascension. But I would listen to nothing, and started off as I had planned.
The sensations I experienced can in no wise be compared with those of the previous trips, especially the first. I was alone, lost in the clouds amid flashes of lightning and claps of thunder, in the rapidly-approaching darkness of the night, during which I crossed over into Belgium without seeing my route for an instant.
I have always noted that no one ascension resembles any other, while my impressions in an air-ship are utterly different from those in a spherical balloon. The aëronaut guides his air-ship; the spherical balloon conducts the aëronaut. The spherical balloon is an unstable buoy left to the hazard of the winds. The only reason for its existence is to serve as an instrument of study in the upper regions of the air, or to familiarize the constructor of air-ships with the medium in which he will have to try his dirigible aërial system.
Before setting about the construction of my first air-ship, I gave much consideration to the matter. I knew that I was entering on a way sure to lead me into a long series of experiments and expenditures. I was not foolish enough to think that I could succeed at a first trial in a problem where so many others, in spite of the fruitful investigations of the great engineer, Henry Giffard, had failed. I knew that the French government had spent millions of francs on air-ships with electric motors whose plan had finally been abandoned, chiefly because of the motor’s weight. I had only my own funds to count on. Moreover, even had I at my disposition the resources of a military budget, I should have been led to adopt some simple system—a practical motor having a sure and immediate future in present-day industry.
I started from this principle: to succeed in my experiments it would be necessary to economize weight, and so comply with the mechanical as well as with the pecuniary conditions of the problem. I resolved to build an
