CHAPTER XIII

THE COMMERCIAL ZEPPELIN

THE AMBITION OF THE AGES REALIZED—A GIANT GERMAN DIRIGIBLE—ZEPPELIN ACCOMPLISHMENTS—HIGH COST OF ZEPPELINS—SAFETY OF TRAVEL—SOME BRITISH PREDICTIONS—THE FUTURE OF HELIUM—THE LIFE-BLOOD OF COMMERCE

Almost daily during the winter of 1918-1919 reports were coming out of Europe to the effect that Zeppelins were being converted into aerial merchantmen to fly regularly between New York and Hamburg.

Because these gigantic lighter-than-air machines, measuring more than 700 feet in length, 70 feet in diameter, buoyed up by more than 2,000,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas, and driven by six Maybach-Mercedes engines, generating a total of 1,400 horse-power, had carried, in all kinds of weather and under adverse circumstances of war, a crew of forty-eight men and a useful load of four tons from Germany over the British fleet and the North Sea and the anti-aircraft guns and by hostile fleets of Allied aeroplanes, and had successfully raided England and Scotland more than a score of times, returning safely to their home ports, often having flown a total distance of approximately 800 miles—the eyes of the aeronautical world, like search-lights in the night, were sweeping the heavens over the Atlantic seaboard to discover whether these leviathans of the air or the little dragon-flies of aeroplanes were to be the first to appear in the firmament, aerially transnavigating the 1,195 miles of water that separates the Old World from the New.

Indeed, ever since man has learned to fly he has become such an exalted creature that he has ceased to regard any mechanical feat as impossible. This is, in a measure at least, pardonable when we stop to consider that ever since man got up off his hands and learned to walk upright he has longed to be able to fly as a bird through the heavens in any direction he chose, without let or hindrance, boundary or border. Though he expended every effort to accomplish this feat, and often lost his life in the attempt, for countless ages the privilege to soar aloft was denied him.

In point of time it was, as we have seen, September, 1783, before the Montgolfier brothers succeeded in sending up even a paper bag inflated with hot air, and it was November of the same year before two Frenchmen, the Marquis d’Arlandes and Pilâtre de Roziers, made the world’s first trip in any kind of aerial vehicle—namely, a free balloon.

But these and most of the attempts to navigate the air in the next century were unsuccessful, primarily due to the lack of power adaptable to propelling a gas-bag through the air. In 1852. Henri Gifford, another Frenchman, made the first successful directed flight in a dirigible 143 feet long and 39 feet in diameter. It was inflated with hydrogen and driven by a three-horse-power steam-engine, an eleven-foot screw propeller, and it made six miles an hour relative to the wind. Owing to the fuel, fire, and weight problems the steam-engine was then impractical as a means of propulsion for lighter-than-air machines.

In 1884 Captain Charles Renard went a step farther in the right direction by installing a 200-pound electric motor, generating nine horse-power. The battery, composed of chlorochromic salts, delivered one shaft horse-power for each eighty-eight pounds of weight, but in spite of such a handicap he flew over Paris at fourteen and a half miles an hour. Nevertheless, the electric motor was also impractical, even for a rigid dirigible. As a matter of fact, every gas-bag was at the mercy of the winds, and could not steer a direct course, until the gasoline motor was invented and developed to generate more than a dozen horse-power.

The first man to build a rigid dirigible with an aluminum framework and drive it with a gasoline motor was an Austrian named Schwartz, but the first man to build, equip, and perform the necessary evolutions with a rigid dirigible was Santos-Dumont, the famous Brazilian. He accomplished this feat in September, 1898, when he set out from the Zoological Gardens at Paris and in the face of a gentle wind steered his airship in nearly every point of the compass. In 1901 he circumnavigated the Eiffel Tower, thus demonstrating the feasibility of the lighter-than-air ship as a practical means of locomotion through the air.