GATHERING UP THE WRECKAGE AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE AIRSHIP.
From a Photograph.
It might be supposed that nearly all the men on the ill-fated craft were killed; but, remarkable to relate, not one lost his life. Morrell himself sustained severe lacerations, and had both his legs broken by one of the propellers; Penfold, the persistent, had his right ankle and left instep broken; Rogers, an assistant engineer, suffered a broken right ankle; and another engineer met with broken ribs and ankles. Others were bruised or rendered unconscious by the gas.
Morrell ascribed the disaster to the fact that he was forced by impatient stockholders in the National Airship Company to make the attempted flight before he had worked out certain details of the vessel’s construction thoroughly. It is believed by those who saw the luckless craft that it was constructed flimsily of poor materials and not inflated sufficiently. The ill-starred aeronautic adventure not only cost many broken bones, but some forty thousand dollars (more than eight thousand pounds) in money.
It would naturally be supposed that so complete and disastrous a failure, after the expenditure of so large a sum of money, would have destroyed all confidence in Morrell as a designer of airships, and would have put him out of the business of aerial navigation for all time. But it was not so; the enthusiast still asserts that he has discovered the true principle of the navigation of the air, and that the National Airship Company is ready to proceed with the construction of another craft, much larger and costlier than the first one.
The new airship is to be seven hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet in diameter, equipped with eight gasolene engines, developing nearly three hundred and fifty horse-power and operating sixteen propellers. The inside bag will be of light silk and the outside bag of heavy silk interwoven with a material known as “flexible aluminium,” of which Morrell possesses the secret. The new balloon is to have more than a hundred compartments, many of which might be broken without disturbing the buoyancy or equilibrium of the vessel.
A rigid platform is to be substituted for the canvas and netting cage in which the unfortunate participants in the attempted ascent of the “Ariel” rode. The new vessel is to cost one hundred thousand dollars (more than twenty thousand pounds), and to be capable, if the inventor is to be believed, of a speed of a hundred miles an hour. The really marvellous things about the whole business are the unquenchable enthusiasm of the inventor and the unfailing credulity of those who believe in him.