Stories of Inventors: The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers

by Russell Doubleday

The theory seems so simple that it strikes one as strange that the problem of aerial navigation was not solved long ago. The story of Santos-Dumont's experiments, however, his adventures and his successes, will show that the problem was not so simple as it seemed.

Santos-Dumont was built to jockey a Pegasus or guide an air-ship, for he weighed but a hundred pounds when he made his first ascensions, and added very little live ballast as he grew older.

Weight, of course, was the great bugbear of every air-ship inventor, and the chief problem was to provide a motor light enough to furnish sufficient power for driving a balloon that had sufficient lifting capacity to support it and the aeronaut in the air. Steam-engines had been tried, but found too heavy for the power generated; electric motors had been tested, and proved entirely out of the question for the same reason.

Santos-Dumont has been very fortunate in this respect, his success, indeed, being largely due to the compact and powerful gasoline motors that have been developed for use on automobiles.

Even before the balloon for the first air-ship was ordered the young Brazilian experimented with his three-and-one-half horse-power gasoline motor in every possible way, adding to its power, and reducing its weight until he had cut it down to sixty-six pounds, or a little less than twenty pounds to a horse-power. Putting the little motor on a tricycle, he led the procession of powerful automobiles in the Paris-Amsterdam race for some distance, proving its power and speed. The motor tested to his satisfaction, Santos-Dumont ordered his balloon of the famous maker, Lachambre, and while it was building he experimented still further with his little engine. To the horizontal shaft of his motor he attached a propeller made of silk stretched tightly over a light wooden framework. The motor was secured to the aeronaut's basket behind, and the reservoir of gasoline hung to the basket in front. All this was done and tested before the balloon was finished—in fact, the aeronaut hung himself up in his basket from the roof of his workshop and started his motor to find out how much pushing power it exerted and if everything worked satisfactorily.

On September 18, 1898, Santos-Dumont made his first ascension in his first air-ship—in fact, he had never tried to operate an elongated balloon before, and so much of this first experience was absolutely new. Imagine a great bag of yellow oiled silk, cigar-shaped, fully inflated with hydrogen gas, but swaying in the morning breeze, and tugging at its restraining ropes: a vast bubble eighty-two feet long, and twelve feel in diameter at its greatest girth. Such was the balloon of Santos-Dumont's first air-ship. Suspended by cords from the great gas-bag was the basket, to which was attached the motor and six-foot propeller, hung sixteen feet below the belly of the great air-fish.

Many friends and curiosity seekers had assembled to see the aeronaut make his first foolhardy attempt, as they called it. Never before had a spark-spitting motor been hung under a great reservoir of highly inflammable hydrogen gas, and most of the group thought the daring inventor would never see another sunset. Santos-Dumont moved around his suspended air-ship, testing a cord here and a connection there, for he well knew that his life might depend on such a small thing as a length of twine or a slender rod. At one side of a small open space on the outskirts of Paris the long, yellow balloon tugged at its fastenings, while the navigator made his final round to see that all was well. A twist of a strap around the driving-wheel set the motor going, and a moment later Santos-Dumont was standing in his basket, giving the signal to release the air-ship. It rose heavily, and travelling with the fresh wind, the propellers whirling swiftly, it crashed into the trees at the other side of the enclosure. The aeronaut had, against his better judgment, gone with the wind rather than against it, so the power of the propeller was added to the force of the breeze, and the trees were encountered before the ship could rise sufficiently to clear them. The damage was repaired, and two days later, September 20, 1898, the Brazilian started again from the same enclosure, but this time against the wind. The propeller whirled merrily, the explosions of the little motor snapped sharply as the great yellow bulk and the tiny basket with its human freight, the captain of the craft, rose slowly in the air. Santos-Dumont stood quietly in his basket, his hand on the controlling cords of the great rudder on the end of the balloon; near at hand was a bag of loose sand, while small bags of ballast were packed around his feet. Steadily she rose and began to move against the wind with the slow grace of a great bird, while the little man in the basket steered right or left, up or down, as he willed. He turned his rudder for the lateral movements, and changed his shifting bags of ballast hanging fore and aft, pulling in the after bag when he wished to point her nose down, and doing likewise with the forward ballast when he wished to ascend—the propeller pushing up or down as she was pointed. For the first time a man had actual control of an air-ship that carried him. He commanded it as a captain governs his ship, and it obeyed as a vessel answers its helm.

A quarter of a mile above the heads of the pygmy crowd who watched him the little South American maneuvered his air-ship, turning circles and figure eights with and against the breeze, too busy with his rudder, his vibrating little engine, his shifting bags of ballast, and the great palpitating bag of yellow silk above him, to think of his triumph, though he could still hear faintly the shouts of his friends on earth. For a time all went well and he felt the exhilaration that no earth-travelling can ever give, as he experienced somewhat of the freedom that the birds must know when they soar through the air unfettered. As he descended to a lower, denser atmosphere he felt rather than saw that something was wrong—that there was a lack of buoyancy to his craft. The engine kept on with its rapid "phut, phut, phut" steadily, but the air-ship was sinking much more rapidly than it should. Looking up, the aeronaut saw that his long gas-bag was beginning to crease in the middle and was getting flabby, the cords from the ends of the long balloon were beginning to sag, and threatened to catch in the propeller. The earth seemed to be leaping up toward him and destruction stared him in the face. A hand air-pump was provided to fill an air balloon inside the larger one and so make up for the compression of the hydrogen gas caused by the denser, lower atmosphere. He started this pump, but it proved too small, and as the gas was compressed more and more, and the flabbiness of the balloon increased, the whole thing became unmanageable. The great ship dropped and dropped through the air, while the aeronaut, no longer in control of his ship, but controlled by it, worked at the pump and threw out ballast in a vain endeavour to escape the inevitable. He was descending directly over the greensward in the centre of the Longchamps race-course, when he caught sight of some boys flying kites in the open space. He shouted to them to take hold of his trailing guide-rope and run with it against the wind. They understood at once and as instantly obeyed. The wind had the same effect on the air-ship as it has on a kite when one runs with it, and the speed of the fall was checked. Man and air-ship landed with a thud that smashed almost everything but the man. The smart boys that had saved Santos-Dumont's life helped him pack what was left of "Santos-Dumont No. 1" into its basket, and a cab took inventor and invention back to Paris.

In spite of the narrow escape and the discouraging ending of his first flight, Santos-Dumont launched his second air-ship the following May. Number 2 was slightly larger than the first, and the fault that was dangerous in it was corrected, its inventor thought, by a ventilator connecting the inner bag with the outer air, which was designed to compensate for the contraction of the gas and keep the skin of the balloon taut. But No. 2 doubled up as had No. 1, while she was still held captive by a line; falling into a tree hurt the balloon, but the aeronaut escaped unscratched. Santos-Dumont, in spite of his quiet ways and almost effeminate speech, his diminutive body, and wealth that permitted him to enjoy every luxury, persisted in his work with rare courage and determination. The difficulties were great and the available information meager to the last degree. The young inventor had to experiment and find out for himself the obstacles to success and then invent ways to surmount them. He had need of ample wealth, for the building of air-ships was expensive business. The balloons were made of the finest, lightest Japanese silk, carefully prepared and still more vigorously tested. They were made by the most famous of the world's balloon-makers, Lachambre, and required the spending of money unstintedly. The motors cost according to their lightness rather than their weight, and all the materials, cordage, metal-work, etc., were expensive for the same reason. The cost of the hydrogen gas was very great also, at twenty cents per cubic meter (thirty-five cubic feet); and as at each ascension all the gas was usually lost, the expense of each sail in the air for gas alone amounted to from $57 for the smallest ship to $122 for the largest.