Then while the crews of three destroyers watched, the G-1 swung slowly over the destroyer’s deck. One sailor caught the line held it while a second filled the coffee pot, and a third attached a load of sandwiches. Then the airship sailors hauled away, radioed their thanks, set off for the 200 mile trip back to Lakehurst, while hundreds of sailors below waved their white caps and cheered, a little inter-ship courtesy between sky and sea which all hands will long remember.
CHAPTER IV
The Beginnings of Flight
In the spring of 1783, as the American Revolution was nearing a successful conclusion, two brothers named Montgolfier sitting before a fire at a little town in France found themselves wondering why smoke went up into the air.
That was just as foolish as Newton wondering why an apple, detached from the tree, fell down. Smoke had always gone up and apples had always come down. That was all there was to it.
But when men wonder momentous events may be in the making. In these instances epochal discoveries resulted: the law of gravitation and the possibility of human flight.
The legends of Icarus and the narrative of Darius Green are symbols of the long ambition of earth-bound men, even before the days of recorded history, to leave the earth and soar into the air. The Montgolfiers had found the key.
But a hundred years would pass before the discovery would be put to use. It was in 1903 that another pair of brothers, the Wrights, made their first flight from Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina. The first Zeppelin took off from the shores of Lake Constance in 1900.
The Montgolfiers wasted no time testing out their conclusion that smoke rose because it was lighter than the air. They built a great paper bag 35 feet high, hung a brazier of burning charcoal under it, and off it went. Annonnay is a small town but the story of that miracle spread far and wide. The Academy of Science invited them to the capital to repeat the experiment.
But while they were building a new bag a French physicist, Prof. J. A. C. Charles, stole a march on them. He knew that hydrogen was also lighter than air, so constructed a bag of silk, inflated it with hydrogen, sent it aloft before the Montgolfiers were ready.