My Airships; The Story of My Life

by Alberto Santos-Dumont

A joyous peal of bells mounted up to us. It was the noonday Angelus ringing from some village belfry. I had brought up with us a substantial lunch of hard-boiled eggs, cold roast beef and chicken, cheese, ice-cream, fruits and cakes, champagne, coffee, and Chartreuse. Nothing is more delicious than lunching like this above the clouds in a spherical balloon. No dining-room can be so marvellous in its decoration. The sun sets the clouds in ebullition, making them throw up rainbow jets of frozen vapour like great sheaves of fireworks all around the table. Lovely white spangles of the most delicate ice formation scatter here and there by magic; while flakes of snow form, moment by moment, out of nothingness, beneath our very eyes, and in our very drinking-glasses.

I was finishing my little glass of liqueur when the curtain suddenly fell on this wonderful stage setting of sunlight, cloud billows, and azure. The barometer rose rapidly 5 millimetres, showing a sudden rupture of equilibrium and a swift descent. Probably the balloon had become loaded down with several pounds of snow, and it was falling into a cloud.

We passed into the half darkness of the fog. We could still see our basket, our instruments, and the parts of the rigging nearest us, but the netting that held us to the balloon was visible only to a certain height, and the balloon itself had completely disappeared. So we had for a moment the strange and delightful sensation of hanging in the void without support, of having lost our last ounce of weight in a limbo of nothingness, sombre and portentous.

After a few minutes of fall, slackened by throwing out more ballast, we found ourselves under the clouds at a distance of about 300 yards from the ground. A village fled away from us below. We took our bearings with the compass, and compared our route map with the immense natural map that unfolded below. Soon we could identify roads, railways, villages, and forests, all hastening toward us from the horizon with the swiftness of the wind itself.

The storm which had sent us downward marked a change of weather. Now little gusts began to push the balloon from right to left, up and down. From time to time the guide rope—a great rope dangling 100 yards below our basket—would touch earth, and soon the basket, too, began to graze the tops of trees.

What is called "guide-roping" thus began for me under conditions peculiarly instructive. We had a sack of ballast at hand, and when some special obstacle rose in our path, like a tree or a house, we threw out a few handfuls of sand to leap up and pass over it. More than 50 yards of the guide rope dragged behind us on the ground; and this was more than enough to keep our equilibrium under the altitude of 100 yards, above which we decided not to rise for the rest of the trip.

This first ascent allowed me to appreciate fully the utility of this simple part of the spherical balloon's rigging, without which its landing would usually present grave difficulties. When, for one reason or another—humidity gathering on the surface of the balloon, a downward stroke of wind, accidental loss of gas, or, more frequently, the passing of a cloud before the face of the sun—the balloon came back to earth with disquieting speed, the guide rope would come to rest in part on the ground, and so, unballasting the whole system by so much of its weight, stopped, or at least eased, the fall. Under contrary conditions any too rapid upward tendency of the balloon was counterbalanced by the lifting of the guide rope off the ground, so that a little more of its weight became added to the weight of the floating system of the moment before.

Like all human devices, however, the guide rope, along with its advantages, has its inconveniences. Its rubbing along the uneven surfaces of the ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, roads and houses, hedges and telegraph wires—gives violent shocks to the balloon. Or it may happen that the guide rope, rapidly unravelling the snarl in which it has twisted itself, catches hold of some asperity of the surface or winds itself around the trunk or branches of a tree. Such an incident was alone lacking to complete my instruction.

As we passed a little group of trees a shock stronger than any hitherto felt threw us backward in the basket. The balloon had stopped short, and was swaying in the wind gusts at the end of its guide rope, which had curled itself around the head of an oak. For a quarter of an hour it kept us shaking like a salad-basket, and it was only by throwing out a quantity of ballast that we finally got ourselves loose. The lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward and pierced the clouds like a cannon-ball. Indeed, it threatened to reach dangerous heights, considering the little ballast we had remaining in store for use in descending. It was time to have recourse to effective means, to open the manœuvre valve and let out a portion of our gas.

It was the work of a moment. The balloon began descending to earth again, and soon the guide rope again rested on the ground. There was nothing to do but to bring the trip to an end, because only a few handfuls of sand remained to us.