CHAPTER IV
THE COUNT VON ZEPPELIN
The year that witnessed the first triumphs of Santos-Dumont saw also the beginning of the success of his great German rival, the Count von Zeppelin. These two daring spirits, struggling to attain the same end, were alike in their enthusiasm, their pertinacity, and their devotion to the same cause. Both were animated by the highest patriotism. Santos-Dumont offered his fleet to France to be used against any nation except those of the two Americas. He said: "It is in France that I have met with all my encouragement; in France and with French material I have made all my experiments. I excepted the two Americas because I am an American."
Count Zeppelin for his part, when bowed down in apparent defeat and crushed beneath the burden of virtual bankruptcy, steadily refused to deal with agents of other nations than Germany—which at that time was turning upon him the cold shoulder. He declared that his genius had been exerted for his own country alone, and that his invention should be kept a secret from all but German authorities. A secret it would be to-day, except that accident and the fortunes of war revealed the intricacies of the Zeppelin construction to both France and England.
Santos-Dumont had the fire, enthusiasm, and resiliency of youth; Zeppelin, upon whom age had begun to press when first he took up aeronautics, had the dogged pertinacity of the Teuton. Both were rich at the outset, but Zeppelin's capital melted away under the demands of his experimental workshops, while the ancestral coffee lands of the Brazilian never failed him.
Of the two Zeppelin had the more obstinacy, for he held to his plan of a rigid dirigible balloon even in face of its virtual failure in the supreme test of war. Santos-Dumont was the more alert intellectually for he was still in the flood tide of successful demonstration with his balloons when he saw and grasped the promise of the airplane and shifted his activities to that new field in which he won new laurels.
Zeppelin won perhaps the wider measure of immediate fame, but whether enduring or not is yet to be determined. His airships impressive, even majestic as they are, have failed to prove their worth in war, and are yet to be fully tested in peace. That they remain a unique type, one which no other individual nor any other nation has sought to copy, cannot be attributed wholly to the jealousy of possible rivals. If the monster ship, of rigid frame, were indeed the ideal form of dirigible it would be imitated on every hand. The inventions of the Wrights have been seized upon, adapted, improved perhaps by half a hundred airplane designers of every nation. But nobody has been imitating the Zeppelins.
The Giant and the Pigmies.
Painting by John E. Whiting.
That, however, is a mere passing reflection. If the Zeppelin has not done all in war that the sanguine German people expected of it, nevertheless it is not yet to be pronounced an entire failure. And even though a failure in war, the chief service for which its stout-hearted inventor designed it, there is still hope that it may ultimately prove better adapted to many ends of peace than the airplanes which for the time seem to have outdone it.