My Airships; The Story of My Life

by Alberto Santos-Dumont

"Floating over the sea, it can be at once scout and offensive auxiliary of so delicate a character that the general service of the navy has not yet allowed itself to pronounce on the matter. We can no longer conceal it from ourselves, however, that the hour approaches when balloons, now become military engines, will acquire, from the point of view of battle results, a great and, perhaps, decisive influence in war."

IN THE BAY OF MONACO

As for myself, I have never made it any secret that, to my mind, the first practical use of the air-ship will be found in war, and the far-seeing Henri Rochefort, who was in the habit of coming to the aerodrome from his hotel at La Turbie, wrote a most significant editorial in this sense after I had laid before him the speed calculations of my "No. 7," then in course of building.

"The day when it shall be established that a man can make his air-ship travel in a given direction and manœuvre it at will during the four hours which the young Santos demands to go from Monaco to Calvi," wrote Henri Rochefort, "there will remain little more for the nations to do than to throw down their arms....

"I am astonished that the capital importance of this matter has not yet been grasped by all the professionals of aerostation. To mount in a balloon that one has not constructed, and which one is not in a state to guide, constitutes the easiest of performances. A little cat has done it at the Folies-Bergère."

Now in war service overland the air-ship will, doubtless, have often to mount to considerable heights to avoid the rifle fire of the enemy, but, as the maritime auxiliary described by the expert of the French Navy, its scouting rôle will for the most part be performed at the end of its guide rope, comparatively close to the waves, and yet high enough to take in a wide view. Only when for easily-imagined reasons it is desired to mount high for a short time will it quit the convenient contact of its guide rope with the surface of the sea.

For these considerations—and particularly the last—I was anxious to do a great deal of guide-roping over the Mediterranean. If the maritime experiment promises so much to spherical ballooning it is doubly promising to the air-ship, which, from the nature of its construction, carries comparatively little ballast. This ballast ought not to be currently sacrificed, as it is by the spherical balloonist, for the remedying of every little vertical aberration. Its purpose is for use in great emergencies. Nor ought the aerial navigator, particularly if he be alone, be forced to rectify his altitude continually by means of his propeller and shifting weights. He ought to be free to navigate his air-ship; if on pleasure bent, with ease and leisure to enjoy his flight; if on war service, with facility for his observations and hostile manœuvres. Therefore any automatic guarantee of vertical stability is peculiarly welcome to him.

You know already what the guide rope is. I have described it in my first experience of spherical ballooning. Overland, where there are level plains or roads or even streets, where there are not too many troublesome trees, buildings, fences, telegraph and trolley poles and wires and like irregularities, the guide rope is as great an aid to the air-ship as to the spherical balloon. Indeed, I have made it more so, for with me it is the central feature of my shifting weights ([Figs. 8] and [9], page 148).

Over the uninterrupted stretches of the sea my first Monaco flight proved it to be a true stabilisateur. Its very slight dragging resistance through the water is out of all proportion to the considerable weight of its floating extremity. According to its greater or less immersion, therefore, it ballasts or unballasts the air-ship (Fig. 11). The balloon is held by the weight of the guide rope down to a fixed level over the waves without danger of being drawn into contact with them. For the moment that the air-ship descends the slightest distance nearer to them that very moment it becomes relieved of just so much weight, and must naturally rise again by that amount of momentary unballasting. In this way an incessant little tugging toward and away from the waves is produced, infinitely gentle, an automatic ballasting and unballasting of the air-ship without loss of ballast.