Why was the balloon fluttering an empty end and causing all this extra danger? How was it that the rotary ventilator was not fulfilling its purpose in feeding the interior air balloon and in this manner swelling out the gas balloon around it? The answer must be looked for in the nature of the accident. The rotary ventilator stopped working when the motor itself stopped, and I had been obliged to stop the motor to prevent the propeller from tearing the suspension wires near it when the balloon first began to sag from loss of gas. It is true that the ventilator, which was working at that moment, had not proved sufficient to prevent the first sagging. It may have been that the interior air balloon refused to fill out properly. The day after the accident, when my balloon constructor's man came to me for the plans of a "No. 6" balloon envelope, I gathered from something he said that the interior air balloon of the "No. 5," not having been given time for its varnish to dry before being adjusted, might have stuck together or stuck to the sides or bottom of the outer balloon. Such are the rewards of haste.
I was falling. At the same time the wind was carrying me toward the Eiffel Tower. It had already carried me so far that I was expecting to land on the Seine embankment beyond the Trocadero. My basket and the whole of the keel had already passed the Trocadero hotels, and had my balloon been a spherical one, it too would have cleared the building. But now, at the last critical moment, the end of the long balloon that was still full of gas came slapping down on the roof just before clearing it. It exploded with a great noise—exactly like a paper bag struck after being blown up. This was the "terrific explosion" described in the newspapers of the day.
I had made a mistake in my estimate of the wind's force by a few yards. Instead of being carried on to fall on the Seine embankment I now found myself hanging in my wicker basket high up in the courtyard of the Trocadero hotels, supported by my air-ship's keel, which stood braced at an angle of about 45 degrees between the courtyard wall above and the roof of a lower construction farther down. The keel, in spite of my weight, that of the motor and machinery, and the shock it had received in falling, resisted wonderfully. The thin pine scantlings and piano wires of Nice had saved my life!
PHASE OF AN ACCIDENT
After what seemed tedious waiting I saw a rope being lowered to me from the roof above. I held to it, and was hauled up, when I perceived my rescuers to be the brave firemen of Paris. From their station at Passy they had been watching the flight of the air-ship. They had seen my fall, and immediately hastened to the spot. Then, having rescued me, they proceeded to rescue the air-ship.
The operation was painful. The remains of the balloon envelope and the suspension wires hung lamentably, and it was impossible to disengage them except in strips and fragments!
So I escaped—and my escape may have been narrow—but it was not from the particular danger always present in my mind during this period of trials around the Eiffel Tower. A Parisian journalist said that had the Eiffel Tower not existed it would have been necessary to invent it for the needs of aerostation. It is true that the engineers who remain at its summit have at their hands all necessary instruments for observing aerial and meteorological conditions: their chronometers are exact; and, as Professor Langley has said in a communication to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Committee, the position of the Tower as a central landmark, visible to everyone from considerable distances, made it a unique winning-post for an aerial contest. I myself had circled round it at a respectful distance, of my own free will, in 1899, before the stipulation of the Deutsch prize competition was dreamed of. Yet none of these considerations altered the other fact that the necessity to round the Eiffel Tower attached a unique element of danger to the task.
What I feared was that in my eagerness to make a quick turning, by some error in steering or by the influence of some unexpected side wind, I might be dashed against the Tower. The impact would certainly burst my balloon, and I should fall to the ground like a stone. Nor could the utmost prudence and self-control in making a wide turn guarantee me against the danger. Should my capricious motor stop as I approached the Tower—exactly as it stopped after I had passed over the timekeepers' heads at St Cloud, returning from my first trial on 13th July 1903—I should be powerless to hold the air-ship back.
Therefore I always dreaded the turn round the Eiffel Tower, looking on it as my principal danger. While never seeking to go high in my air-ships—on the contrary, I hold the record for the low altitudes in a free balloon—in passing over Paris I must necessarily move above and out of the way of the chimney-pots and steeples. The Eiffel Tower was my one danger, yet it was my winning-post!