I foresaw also that when a competitor had once committed the formal act of assembling a Scientific Commission on a slope of the River Seine so far away from Paris as St Cloud he would be under a kind of moral pressure to go on with his trial, no matter how the air currents might have increased, and no matter in what kind of weather—wet, dry, or simply humid—he might find himself.
Again, this moral pressure to go on with the trial against the aeronaut's better judgment must extend even to the event of an unlucky change in the state of the air-ship itself. One does not convoke a body of prominent personages to a distant riverside for nothing, yet in the twenty-four hours between notification and trial even a well-watched elongated balloon might well lose a little of its tautness unperceived. A previous day's preliminary trial might easily derange so uncertain an engine as the petroleum motor of the year 1900. And, finally, I saw that the competitor would be barred by common courtesy from convoking the Commission at the very hour most favourable for dirigible balloon experiments over Paris—the calm of the dawn. The duellist may call out his friends at that sacred hour, but not the air-ship captain.
In founding the Santos-Dumont prize with the 4000 francs awarded to me by the Aéro Club for my work in the year 1900 it will be observed that I made no such conditions by the way. I did not wish to complicate the trial by imposing a minimum velocity, the check of a special committee, or any limitation of time of trial during the day. I was sure that even under the widest conditions it would be a great deal to come back to the starting-point after having reached a post publicly pointed out in advance—a thing that was unheard of before the year 1901.
The conditions of the Santos-Dumont prize, therefore, left competitors free to choose the state of the air least unfavourable to them, as the calm of late evening or early morning. Nor would I inflict on them the possible surprises of a period of waiting between the convocation and the meeting of a Scientific Commission, itself in my eyes quite unnecessary in these days, when the army of newspaper reporters of a great capital is always ready to mobilise without notice, at any hour and spot, on the bare prospect of news. The newspaper men of Paris would be my Scientific Commission.
"No. 5." LEAVING AËRO CLUB GROUNDS, JULY 12, 1901
As I had excluded myself from trying for the Santos-Dumont prize I naturally wished to show that it would not be impossible to fulfil its conditions. My "No. 5"—composed of the enlarged balloon of the "No. 4" and the new keel, motor, and propeller already described—was now ready for trial. In it, on the first attempt, I fulfilled the conditions of my own prize foundation.
This was on July 12th, 1901, after a practice flight the day before. At 4.30 A.M. I steered my air-ship from the park of the Aéro Club at St Cloud to the Longchamps racecourse. I did not at that moment take time to ask permission of the Jockey Club, which, however, a few days later placed that admirable open space at my disposition. Ten times in succession I made the circuit of Longchamps, stopping each time at a point designed beforehand.
After these first evolutions, which altogether made up a distance of about 35 kilometres (22 miles), I set out for Puteaux, and after an excursion of about 3 kilometres (2 miles), done in nine minutes, I steered back again to Longchamps.
I was by this time so well satisfied with the dirigibility of my "No. 5" that I began looking for the Eiffel Tower. It had disappeared in the mists of the morning, but its direction was well known to me, so I steered for it as well as I might.