THE OVER-SEA EXPERIMENTS OF SANTOS-DUMONT
unlubricated motor to overheat itself when they are simply transferred without adaptation to an airship that moves diagonally through the air.
Thus his fall to the roofs of the Trocadero Hotels taught him the delicate and complicated insufficiency of certain automatic valves which, on paper—that is, in theory—ought to have interacted on each other to perfection. These are practical details. The air-navigator knows them now; but they were none the less learned at the cost of apparent failure.
In the same way M. Santos-Dumont has now learned that, while a properly inflated balloon furnished with the proper kind of valves has nothing to fear from gas displacement, it is best to be on the safe side and guard oneself against the possibility of such displacement. Thus the balloon of his ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 7’’ is divided by two vertical silk partitions, not varnished, into three compartments. The partitions remaining unvarnished, the hydrogen gas can slowly pass through their meshes from one compartment to the other, to insure an equal, pressure throughout; but, as they are nevertheless partitions, they will guard against a precipitous rush of gas toward either extremity. In the same way he has learned that the automobile motors, already considerably adapted to their new uses of aërial navigation, must be further modified to permit the airship to point, not only diagonally, but at almost a perpendicular angle, without the risk of spilling their petroleum.
Finally, M. Santos-Dumont will yield to the consensus of expert opinion and the lesson of events, and take with him on the ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 7’’ an aid, whose title and functions remain yet to be defined. Had such an aid been in his place beside the motor on the afternoon of the accident, he would have been in a position to meet the danger of the over-slopping petroleum half way, if not to prevent it.
The new airship’s thirty-yard-long keel will therefore be furnished with two baskets, one for M. Santos-Dumont and the other for this unnamed lieutenant. To carry this extra weight the length of the new balloon has been increased to 161 feet, as against the 112 feet of the ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 6.’’ This will give it a total ascensional force of 2,904 pounds, as against the 1,360 pounds of the ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 6.’’ A difference is also made necessary by the increased weight of the more powerful motors—two of forty-five horse-power as against one of twenty horse-power. All this agrees with the summing-up of the lessons of these Mediterranean experiments of M. Santos-Dumont by M. Armengaud, jeune, in his learned and impartial inaugural discourse, delivered at the last meeting of the Société Frangaise de Navigation Aërienne.
‘‘In the first place, these five flights have demonstrated that M. Santos-Dumont, in spite of his skill hors ligne, is not sufficient to conduct his airship alone, and that he must take an aid up with him. In the second place, his experiments cannot without imprudence be continued over the sea. He must return to the land. It would be well, however, for him to choose vast plains, like those of La Beauce, where the surface is not encumbered, and he can guide-rope just as over the sea.’’
Injustice to the young Brazilian inventor and navigator, it ought to be pointed out that there may be a great difference between the learning of the lesson and its application. Where is the new engineer to be found? Certainly not among M. Santos-Dumont’s Parisian rivals. M. Roze, who has undertaken the construction of his gigantic ‘’Aviateur’’ for a financial company, is not an aëronaut. He has but lately made his first ascent—as a passenger in a spherical balloon—and is consequently ignorant of all the practical difficulties of the aerial problem. M. Tatin, who invented M. Deutsch’s imitation of the ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 5,’’ has never made a balloon ascent. M. Simoni, the engineer-constructor of M. Lebaudy’s dirigible balloon at Mantes, has never made a balloon ascent. M. de Brasky, who is constructing a dirigible balloon invented by himself, has never made a balloon ascent. M. Severo, the Brazilian for whom Lachambre has so long had ready the envelope of his dirigible ‘‘Pax,’’ made his first trip as a passenger in a spherical balloon after he had arrived in Paris. And so one may go through the list in Europe. Count Zeppelin, it is to be noted, never recommenced his experiments after the first flight, when the wind carried his highly expensive invention thirty miles away, to be towed back on the surface of the water. In Europe, at least, M. Santos-Dumont remains the only navigator of the air.
