Any one of those red-hot sparks might have, ascending, burned a hole in my balloon, set fire to the hydrogen, and blown balloon and myself to atoms.
[CHAPTER XXI]
THE FIRST OF THE WORLD'S AIR-SHIP STATIONS
Air-ship experimenters labour under one peculiar disadvantage, quite apart from the proper difficulties of the problem. It is due to the utter newness of travel in a third dimension, and consists in the slowness with which our minds realise the necessity of providing for the diagonal mountings and descents of the air-ships starting from and returning to the ground.
When the Aéro Club of Paris laid out its grounds at St Cloud it was with the sole idea of facilitating the vertical mounting of spherical balloons. Indeed, no provisions were made even for the landing of spherical balloons, because their captains never hoped to bring them back to the St Cloud balloon park otherwise than by rail, packed in their boxes. The spherical balloon lands where the wind takes it.
When I built my first air-ship house in the Club's grounds at St Cloud I dare say that the then novel advantages of possessing my own gas plant, workshop, and a shelter in which the inflated dirigibles could be housed indefinitely withheld my attention from this other almost vital problem of surroundings. It was already a great progress for me not to be obliged to empty the balloon and waste its hydrogen at the end of each trip. Thus I was content to build simply an air-ship house with great sliding doors without even taking precautions to guarantee a flat, open space in front, and, less still, on either side of it. When, little by little, trenches something like a metre (yard) deep—vague foundation outlines for constructions that were never finished—began appearing here and there to the right of my open doors and on beyond I realised that my aids might risk falling into them in running to catch my guide rope when I should be returning from a trip. And when the gigantic skeleton of M. Henry Deutsch's air-ship house, designed to shelter the air-ship he built on the lines of my "No. 6," and called "La Ville de Paris," rose directly in front of my sliding doors, scarcely two air-ships' lengths distant from them, it dawned on me at last that here was something of a peril, and more than a simple inconvenience due to natural crowding in a club's grounds. In spite of the new peril the Deutsch prize was won. Returning from the Eiffel Tower I passed high above the skeleton. I may say here, however, that the foundation trenches innocently caused the painful controversy about my time, to which I have made a brief allusion in the chapter. Seeing that they might easily break their legs by stumbling into those foundation trenches I had positively forbidden my men to run across that space to catch my guide rope with their eyes and arms up in the air. Not dreaming that such a point could be raised, my men obeyed the injunction. Observing that I was quite master of my rudder, motor, and propeller, able to turn and return to the spot where the judges stood, they let me pass on over their heads without seeking to catch and run along with the guide rope, a thing they might have done easily—at the risk of their legs.
Again, at Monaco, after a well-planned air-ship house had been erected in what seemed an ideal spot, we have seen what dangers were, nevertheless, threatened by the sea wall, the Boulevard de la Condamine with its poles, wires, and traffic, and the final disaster, due entirely to the absence of a weighing ground beside the aerodrome. These are dangers and inconveniences against which we come in time to be on our guard by actual and often dire experience.
"SANTOS-DUMONT No. 5"
SHOWING HOW AËRO CLUB GROUNDS WERE CUT UP