The object of the equilibrator was to eliminate ballast. It was intended that the balloon should sail along at a height of about two hundred feet; if it settled close to the water the wooden blocks and the tanks would float on the water and relieve it of some of its weight. The America was also equipped with sextants, compasses, and other instruments for locating its position, the same as an ocean-liner.
Besides Walter Wellman, the explorer and writer, were Melvin Vaniman, chief engineer; F. Murray Vaniman, navigator of airships; J. K. Irwin, wireless operator; Albert L. Loud and John Aubert, assistant engineers.
They left Atlantic City in a dead calm and were towed out to sea by a motor-boat. Three days later, on October 18, after many vicissitudes the engines broke down and the huge gas-bag was at the mercy of the winds. Wellman and his crew were picked up by the steamer Trent 375 miles east of Cape Hatteras. The dirigible had been carried out of its course because of insufficient power to navigate against the winds and had to be abandoned, a total loss.
A year later, financed by the Chamber of Commerce of Akron, Ohio, and one of the large rubber companies, a balloon called the Akron, 268 feet long and 47 feet in diameter, with a gas capacity of 350,000 cubic feet, was built to be flown across the Atlantic by Melvin Vaniman. It had two 105 horse-power engines.
Unfortunately, on July 2, 1912, while making a trial flight over Absecon Inlet, near Atlantic City, the balloon took fire and exploded, killing Melvin Vaniman and the four members of his crew. This disaster put an end to building dirigibles in this country for transatlantic flight.
The preparation for another attempt to cross the Atlantic was made by Glenn H. Curtiss through the generosity of Rodman Wanamaker, who financed the building of the flying-boat America. Owing to the breaking out of the war this project was abandoned.
Neither of these two American-built lighter-than-air ships could be compared in size, engine power, lifting capacity, or flying radius with the dirigibles constructed by the German Government and people under the direction of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Indeed, his first airship, constructed in 1900, measured 410 feet and contained 400,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, whereas the super-Zeppelins were many times larger than either Wellman’s or Vaniman’s airship.
A description of the giant dirigible brought down in the summer of 1916 in Essex, England, will give an excellent idea of the gigantic proportions, the buoyancy, the engine power, and the accommodations of these leviathans of the air.
The airship measured 650 feet to 680 feet in length and 72 feet in diameter. The vessel was of cigar-shaped stream-line form, with a blunt rounded nose and a tail that tapered off to a sharp point. The framework was made of longitudinal latticework girders, connected together at intervals by circumferential latticework tires, all made of aluminum alloy resembling duraluminum. The whole was braced and stiffened by a system of wires. The weight of the framework was about nine tons, or barely a fifth of the total of fifty tons attributed to the airship complete with engines, fuel, guns, and crew. There were twenty-four balloonets arranged within the framework, and the hydrogen capacity was 2,000,000 cubic feet.
A cat walk—an arched passage with a footway nine inches wide—running along the keel enabled the crew, which consisted of twenty-two men, to move about the ship and get from one gondola to another. The gondolas, made of aluminum alloy, were four in number: one was placed forward on the centre line; two were amidships, one on each side, and the fourth was aft, again on the centre line.