Balloons, Airships, and Flying Machines

by Gertrude Bacon

Early inventors thought they would be able to steer balloons by means of sails, like a boat, but they soon found that this was impossible. The effect of hoisting a sail at the side of a balloon was merely to swing the balloon round until the sail was in front, while meantime it continued its course unaltered. The use of a rudder and other means were also tried, but without success; nor can such methods ever hope to succeed so long as a balloon floats in the air at the same pace as the wind that carries it forward. A balloon travelling with the wind may be compared to a boat drifting idly with the tide. As long as she drifts she refuses to answer her rudder, which swings idly. But presently the boatman hoists a sail, and the wind carries the boat onwards faster than the tide, and then immediately the rudder comes into action. Or should there be no wind, he may accomplish the same thing by dragging an anchor or other weight in the water, and so slowing his boat down until it moves slower than the current; he will then again find that his boat will answer her helm.

To steer his course in a balloon, therefore, the aeronaut must so arrange that he is travelling faster or slower than the wind in which he finds himself. To travel faster, he must employ some sort of engine or motor to drive his craft onwards. To travel slower, he must trail something along the ground beneath to act as a drag.

Part of the equipment of every balloon is a long trail-rope, which, when the balloon is aloft, hangs some 300 feet below the car. The object of this rope is to break the force of the fall when the balloon comes down to the earth at the end of the voyage. In the greater number of cases a balloon, in its final swoop to the ground, falls the last few hundred feet with considerable, and often uncomfortable, speed. But when provided with a trail-rope, as it descends more and more of the heavy rope will lie along the ground, and so lighten the weight of the balloon, and lessen the shock of falling.

If then a trail-rope were used of such length that it would sweep along the ground while the balloon was flying in the air, the effect would be to put a drag or brake on the balloon, and so render it capable of being steered to some extent with a sail; and this is what has actually been done in all attempts of the kind. But since a long rope dragging rapidly across the country is a very dangerous object, capable of doing great damage, and also liable to catch in trees and other obstacles, such experiments can only be tried with safety over the sea, or, as in the case of Andrée’s voyage, over desert or uninhabited country.

The best way of steering a balloon, therefore, is to provide it with some mechanical power which shall urge it onwards at a greater speed than the wind; and when this is done, it has ceased to be a balloon in the popular sense of the word, and has become an “airship.”

There is a great deal of confusion between the terms “airship,” and “flying machine,” and the two words are often considered as meaning the same thing. But while, strictly speaking, neither word in itself has any very definite meaning, it is gradually becoming more general to apply them to two widely different objects. According to this plan, although both names stand for an aerial vessel capable of travelling in the sky by its own motion, an airship is a machine supported in the air by reason of its buoyancy, while a flying machine is kept aloft only by virtue of its onward movement.

In other words, part of the construction of an airship consists of a bag or balloon, filled with gas or hot air, which causes the whole to rise and maintain its position in the air. This balloon part is quite independent of the machinery which drives the airship forward, and indeed if the engine ceases working, the vessel becomes nothing more than an ordinary balloon in its nature, and will behave like one. An airship, therefore, is in principle an apparatus lighter than air.

A flying machine, on the contrary, is heavier than air, and maintains its position aloft merely by the power it obtains from its engines, assisted by its special construction. The inventors of flying machines take as their analogy the flight of birds. Birds are creatures heavier than air, which yet manage to rise and fly by reason of the strength and construction of their wings. In the same way the heavy flying machine essays to fly by the power of its machinery. And, as a bird aloft, if its wings became disabled, would instantly drop towards earth, so a flying machine would immediately commence to fall if its engine stopped or ceased to move with sufficient power. The airship and the flying machine, therefore, may be regarded as rival aerial vessels, and their inventors and advocates, sometimes known as “lighter-than-air-ites” and “heavier-than-air-ites,” though both working for the same end, are endeavouring to accomplish their aim by widely different methods.

Up to the present day the airship—to which we will first turn our attention—has been much more largely and successfully experimented with than the flying machine. It is, however, the opinion of many, including the great authority Sir Hiram Maxim, that in the future the flying machine will become the more important invention of the two. “In all Nature,” says Sir Hiram, “we do not find a single balloon. All Nature’s flying machines are heavier than air.” And from this he argues that, as Nature is ever our best guide and example, a flying machine heavier than air will be in the end most likely to succeed.

One of the earliest airships which achieved any success was invented by a Frenchman, M. Giffard, about the year 1852. He made his balloon of an elongated or cigar shape, a form adopted by airship inventors as offering less resistance to the air than the ordinary globular or pear shape. To this balloon, which was 104 feet long and 39 feet in diameter, he attached a steam-engine of three-horse power, weighing 462 lbs. and working a screw-propeller, which, by its rapid revolutions, urged the balloon onwards through the air, even as the screw of a steamship urges the vessel through the water. With this apparatus he succeeded on one occasion, for a very short while, in obtaining a speed of six and a half miles an hour. Twenty years later another Frenchman, M. Dupuy de Lôme, constructed another airship; but fearing to place an engine so near the gas of his balloon, he used the strength of eight men to work his screw. This was a very wasteful mode of supplying energy, for the weight of the men was very great in proportion to their strength, and this machine, during its trial, did not attain as great a speed as Giffard’s. Twelve years after a third Frenchman, M. Tissandier, took up the same experiments. His elongated balloon was smaller than the two previous, and his engine was an electric motor of one and a half horse-power. On one occasion a speed of nearly eight miles an hour was attained.