THE OVER-SEA EXPERIMENTS OF SANTOS-DUMONT
prominent people, several of whom signified their willingness to lend valuable aid to the experiments. From Beaulieu, where his steam-yacht ‘‘Lysistrata’’ was at anchor, came Mr. James Gordon Bennett, and Mr. Eugene Higgins twice brought his ‘‘Varuna’’ up from the harbor of Nice. The beautiful little steam-yacht of M. Eiffel also held itself in readiness. It had been the kind intention of these steam-yacht owners, as it had been the Prince’s with his ‘‘Princesse Alice,’’ to follow the airship in its flights, so as to be on the spot in case of accident. Unfortunately the first day’s flight alone demonstrated that this kind of protection must not be counted on overmuch by air-ships. If rapid steam-launches could not keep up with this old ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 6’’ and its one twenty horse-power motor, but were passed by and left rapidly behind, it will be all the more impossible for steam vessels following the ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 7,’’ with its two forty-five horse-power motors of a newer type and much less weight per horse-power. Henri Rochefort was right. The air-ship will be to the warship what the hawk is to the heron.
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Final Trial and Conclusions
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ON the 14th of February the famous airship ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 6,’’ which, before winning the Deutsch Prize had to fall from mid-air over Paris to the roofs of the Trocadero Hotels, was destined to fall now once again in what was at first thought to be nothing less than a complete and final catastrophe. That the catastrophe was anything but final may be gathered from the fact that with this same historic balloon, which has been since fully inflated again and put on exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London, M. Santos-Dumont has engaged himself to try for the London-Birmingham Prize, offered through the English Aëro Club.
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The ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 6’’ left the Aërodrome at 2.30 p.m. of the 14th of February, escorted by the steam-launches of the ‘‘Princesse Alice’’ and the ‘‘Varuna.’’ As before, a number of other craft were stationed at intervals along the course to Cap Martin. From the beginning the balloon behaved badly, dipping heavily.
The truth is that it was imperfectly inflated when it left the balloon-house, a fault on the part of some one which the generosity of M. Santos-Dumont has passed by in silence.
Perceiving the balloon’s unusual lack of ascensional force, the aëronaut—alone in the air to meet every emergency—threw out ballast. At that moment a cloud which had obscured the sun passed by. The heat of the sun's rays now dilated the hydrogen gas very suddenly, and greatly increased the balloon’s
