after four years of invention, construction, and constant experiment, has been navigating a cigar-shaped balloon with a sixteen horse-power petroleum motor under it, capable of making way against any wind that is less than forty kilometers (twentyfive miles) an hour. What this means may be imagined when it is remembered that a wind of fifty kilometers an hour is called a storm.

At the outset, a word should be allowed the inventor concerning two very different factors of his success-inventing and managing a dirigible balloon. Indeed, the factors are three, inventing, constructing, and managing, as inventors on paper are likely to discover before they find themselves navigating the air. M. Santos-Dumont has occupied four years with invention and construction. Now he is learning to manage the perfected air-ship.

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Suppose you buy a new bicycle or automobile," he says. "You will have a perfect machine to your hand; but it does not necessarily mean that you will go spinning with it over the highways. You may be so unpractised that you fall off the bicycle or blow up the automobile. The machine is all right, but you must learn to run it. That is what I am doing with my air-ship."

This is what the crowds of Parisians who have been following M. Santos-Dumont's aërial evolutions take but imperfectly into account; and the readers of the daily papers in far-off lands, who hear of his trials and narrow escapes only by way of garbled and hurriedly written cable despatches, are still less likely to appreciate it. Everything about the navigation of the air is new; newest of all is the art-practised only by this daring

the complicated and novel task of putting an air-ship through its best paces, much must necessarily be at the mercy of chance details. Thus a trial trip whose start and finish were witnessed by scarcely twenty-five persons was much more satisfactory than the succeeding day's official trial before the Technical Committee of the Deutsch Prize Foundation and a brilliant tout-Paris assemblage.

On this occasion (the morning of July 13, 1901) M. Santos-Dumont sped straight through the air above western Paris to the Eiffel Tower, turned round it, and returned to his starting-point, a distance of eleven kilometers (nearly seven miles), in thirtynine minutes, and this in spite of a new petroleum motor that was discovered to be working imperfectly shortly after starting. The day before, while going over the same course, he found that his right-hand rudderguide had become loose. This happened near the Eiffel Tower. Without sacrificing a cubic inch of gas, he descended to the ground by means of his shifting-weights; that is to say, he pointed the nose of his cigar-shaped balloon obliquely downward and navigated to the surface of the earth by means of his propeller. There he procured a ladder and repaired his rudder-guide. Then he mounted into the air and resumed his course without sacrificing a pound of ballast; that is to say, he pointed the balloon's nose obliquely upward by means of the shiftingweights, and so navigated on high again by the force of his propeller.

To those who know anything about dirigible balloons, these evolutions, simple as they appear, constitute M. Santos-Dumont's greatest triumph. They have never been

accomplished by any other aëronaut. The ease and precision with which he executes them have called forth the special admiration of competent authorities. Thus M. Armengaud jeune, the engineer, who, with the late M. Hureau de Villeneuve, was one of the founders of the Société de Navigation Aérienne, and was for a long time its vicepresident, owns frankly: "I can say that what most strikes me is the ease with which M. Santos-Dumont, by inclining his aërostat at will, is able to dive or rise so readily in the air, and thus bring himself on a level with the more favorable layers of the atmosphere by crossing through contrary currents."

How M. Santos-Dumont made his sensational trips between St. Cloud and the Eiffel Tower, to show Paris what he could do, and incidentally to win the Deutsch Prize of one hundred thousand francs for the first dirigible balloon or flying-machine that should make the round trip in half an hour, is a matter of common knowledge. At the first official trial he missed winning the prize by only nine minutes. At the second he covered the distance from St. Cloud to the Eiffel Tower in eight minutes fifty seconds, turned the tower in forty seconds more, and in twelve minutes from his start was over the Bois de Boulogne on his return, with eighteen minutes to spare for the short distance remaining, when an accident, which might have been tragic, brought him to the ground with a wrecked air-ship.

The fact that M. Santos-Dumont really navigates the air is in itself the all-sufficient explanation of the universal chorus of wonderment that has gone up in response to the news of his performances. In Paris they have also excited recriminations from friends of the official military balloonists of the Chalais-Meudon Park, reaching to denial of the new air-ship's novelty of invention and superiority of action. These military balloonists have been for many years the supposed possessors of the secret of dirigible ballooning. In a spirit of emulation more admirable than their first move ment of detraction, they now announce the rapid construction of a steerable balloon of their own, expected to offer "great resistance to the wind" and to be "capable of facing any weather." In this way the young inventor will have to his honor not only his own performances, but the renewed efforts to which they shall have excited others. As for himself, he is occupied with his new balloon, the "Santos-Dumont No. 6," his perfected model embodying all that he has

learned from experimenting with the five which preceded it.

THE YEARS OF PREPARATION.

THIS young Brazilian inventor works for the love of the thing, not for lucre. He has never felt moved to apply for a single patent. He is a son of the "Coffee King" of Brazil, the proprietor of the Santos-Dumont plantations of São Paulo, the friend of the former Emperor Dom Pedro, and the benefactor and adviser of whole populations. SantosDumont, the father, although a Brazilian by birth and nationality, was French by descent, and had his technical education at the École Centrale (Arts and Industries) in Paris. Thanks to this education, he was the first to apply scientific methods to Brazilian coffee-culture, so that his plantations became the most flourishing in the land, having four million coffee-plants, occupying nine thousand laborers, comprising towns, manufactories, docks, and steamships, and served by one hundred and forty-six miles of private railroads. It was on these railroads that the young Santos-Dumont, before he was twelve years of age, drove locomotive-engines for his pleasure, and developed the taste for mechanics and invention which saved him, coming young and rich to Paris, from a life of mere sporting leisure. Until eighteen years of age, when he completed his education at the University of Rio de Janeiro, he remained in Brazil, always returning in vacation-time to the wild back-country of the plantation, where he became a mighty hunter, killing wild pigs and small tigers by preference, and great snakes out of a sense of duty.

Arriving in Europe in 1891, he made a tourist trip and ascended Mont Blanc. A part of 1891 and 1892 he spent between London and Brighton, perfecting his English, which he now speaks as well and as often as French; but he always returned to Paris, where in 1892 he was already driving automobiles. In 1894 he made a short trip to the United States, visiting New York, Chicago, and Boston. He did not begin ballooning until 1897, in the summer of which year he made his first ascent in company with the late M. Machuron. In the same year he made twenty other ascensions, a number of them unaccompanied, and became a reliable pilot of spherical balloons. He has, indeed, an ideal figure for the sport, uniting remarkable strength, agility, and coolness to his jockey's weight of scarcely one hundred pounds. For this reason he was

able to lower the volume of the "Brazil," his first spherical balloon, to the unusual minimum of one hundred and thirteen cubic meters. The little "Brazil” was always filled with hydrogen, and after each ascension he never failed to bring it back with him in his valise.

This Brazilian has neither the structure, the complexion, nor the exuberant gestures of the men of his country. He is pale, cold, and phlegmatic, even, if the word may be applied to one so active. In his moments of greatest enthusiasm and of most lively disappointment he is always the same; and he is as free from affectation as a child. He has a weakness for driving dog-cart tandems, and-something which has had a vital influence over his career as a balloonist-he has been an intrepid automobile chauffeur from the first.

He began with a Peugeot roadster of two and a half horse-power. He has since owned and driven half a dozen automobiles of continually increasing speed and power, his longest trip without stop being taken in 1898, between Nice and Paris, and accomplished with a six horse-power Panhard in fifty-four hours. Latterly he has abandoned petroleum in favor of electricity, in a dainty light-running American buggy manufactured in Chicago. It serves him, he says, better than the more troublesome teuf-teuf for his morning spin through the Bois and his afternoon errands from the balloonmaker's at Vaugirard to his apartment in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and from the Aéro Club's ground at St. Cloud to the Automobile Club in the Place de la Concorde. "I was once enamoured of petroleum automobiles, because of their freedom," he explains. "You can buy the essence everywhere; and so, at a moment's notice, one is at liberty to start off for Rome or St. Petersburg. But when I discovered that I did not want to go to Rome or St. Petersburg, but only to take short trips about Paris, I went in for the electric buggy.

"I got my first idea of putting an automobile motor under a cigar-shaped balloon filled with hydrogen gas while returning from the ParisAmsterdam automobile race in 1897," he said when he began giving me this interview. "From the beginning everybody was against the idea. I was told that an explosive gasengine would ignite the hydrogen in the balloon above it, and that the resulting explosion would end the experiment with my life. Lachambre, my balloon-constructor, went to work without enthusiasm. So far

from others 'convincing me that their notions were worth taking up,' as has been said, I met with nothing but discouragement."

Such a categorical statement ought to dispose of the legend of a young "Mæcenas of balloon-builders," who "does not set up himself to invent machines, only to judge of those which inventors bring to him, and of the work done by the mechanics he employs."1 Colonel Renard's assertion that M. Santos-Dumont is not a man of science, bút un sportsman de l'aérostation qui a beaucoup de crânerie (an aërostatic sportsman who has a great deal of swagger), is equally inexact. Sufficiently at home in mathematical mechanics to make the calculations which necessarily preceded not only the construction of his various air-ships, but their very idea, sufficiently practised and ingenious to make his own models, the young inventor owes no more to his constructors and hired mechanics than he does to his theoretical friends.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE INVENTION.

"I ORDERED my first dirigible balloon from Lachambre in the summer of 1898," M. Santos-Dumont said. "It was in the form of a cylinder terminated at each end by a cone; it was eighty-two feet long and almost six feet in diameter, with a capacity of sixtyfour hundred cubic feet of gas, which gave it a lifting-power of four hundred and fifty pounds. Being of varnished Japanese silk, it weighed only sixty-six pounds. This left me some three hundred and eighty pounds for basket, motor and other machinery, ballast, and my own weight.

"There was a time when any piece of silk of seemingly good quality was accepted in balloon-construction, without subjecting it to preliminary tension; to-day each piece is experimented with, and if its dynamometric resistance does not attain the number of kilograms necessary to offset the maximum force of gas dilatation, it is pitilessly rejected. It is the same for all ropes and cords; they are tried with the dynamometer up to the greatest strain that may ever come to be put on them."

This minute painstaking in the construction of his air-ships has served M. SantosDumont to good purpose more than oncemost of all in the accident of August 6, 1901, when nothing but a long and slender "keel" of thin pine scantlings and piano1 London "Truth," July 18, 1901.

wire, resting its extremities on the roofs of two houses, interposed between him and a fall of eight flights to the ground.

"While the balloon envelop was being minutely pieced together," continued M. Santos-Dumont, "I succeeded in getting the rest of the air-ship completed. Hanging beneath the cigar-shaped balloon, it consisted simply of a light basket containing motor, propeller, ballast, and myself. The motor was one of the De Dion-Bouton tricycles, of an early type, with one cylinder, and giving about one and a half horse-power. You know how they work? Reduced to their greatest simplicity, you may say that there is gasolene in a receptacle. Air passing through it comes out mixed with gasolene gas, ready to explode. You give a whirl to a crank, and the thing begins working automatically. The piston goes down, sucking combined gas and air into the cylinder. Then the piston comes back and compresses it. Then it goes down again, striking an electric spark. There is an immediate explosion; and the piston goes up again, discharging the used-up gas. Thus there was one explosion for every two turns of the piston. In order to get the most power out of the least weight, I joined two of these cylinders end to end, and realized a three and a half horse-power motor."

"I have heard that joining end to end spoken of as a most ingenious invention," I said.

"I was rather proud of it at the time; but it heated too rapidly, and I abandoned the idea in subsequent constructions. The motor, being fixed at the back of the basket, acted directly on the screw-propeller placed below it, but projecting a few feet out. Basket and machinery weighed one hundred and forty pounds, while I weighed one hundred pounds. This left one hundred and forty pounds for ballast and my primitive shifting-weights; for I saw from the beginning that if I would navigate the air seriously I must be able to dive and mount without expending gas and ballast. Otherwise the very life of my little air-ship would be oozing away with every evolution. A rope hung down from the fore part of the cigar-shaped balloon and another from the after part. I had in the basket with me a rather heavy bag of ballast. When I wished to point the balloon's nose upward, I had only to pull in the after rope and attach the bag of ballast to it. When I wished to point it downward, I had only to pull in the forward rope and attach the bag to it. In either case the center of gravity was changed, and the horizontal

cigar-shaped balloon inclined as desired. The device worked well from the first day, and has since become one of the essential features of my air-ship.

"My 'Santos-Dumont No. 1,' as I called it, foreseeing that it was going to be the first of a series of constructions, was torn at the start, getting caught in a tree at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. It was from this pleasureground in the Bois that I made my first ascents, because it had a gas-plant to serve its own captive balloon. During the second trial, which was successful, the little airpump on which I depended to keep the balloon taut refused to work. Condensation and dilatation are the two enemies of ballooning, the former causing the gas in the balloon to shrink and the latter to expand too rapidly. Caused by changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure, they continually react upon each other in the ordinary spherical balloon, necessitating continual losses of ballast and gas.

"Suppose you are in equilibrium at five hundred meters height. All at once a little cloud, almost imperceptible, masks the sun for a few seconds. The temperature of the gas in your balloon cools down a little; and if, at the very moment, you do not throw out enough ballast to correspond to the ascensional force lost by the condensation of the gas, you will begin descending. Imagine that you have thrown out the ballastjust enough, for if you throw too much, you will become too light and go too high. The little cloud ceases to mask the sun. Your gas heats up again to its first temperature and regains its old lifting-power. But, having less to lift by the amount of ballast thrown out, it now shoots higher into the air, and the gas in the balloon dilates still more, and either escapes through the safety-valve or has to be deliberately sacrificed to prevent the balloon going too high. Then, the balloon having overshot its equilibrium and lost too much gas, it begins descending,-to condense its gas again,-when more ballast must be sacrificed, and the trouble recommences. These montagnes-russes (or 'shootthe-chutes') vagaries of spherical ballooning must be avoided to the utmost with my air-ship.

"Thanks to my shifting-weights, I was never obliged to sacrifice gas or ballast to combat them; but condensation and dilatation are, on the other hand, peculiarly dangerous to a cigar-shaped balloon, which absolutely must keep its form. I had, therefore, placed a little compensating air-balloon

inside the other. It was connected with the air-pump by a tube, so that when the cigarshaped balloon began to shrink, I could swell it out again by pumping in atmospheric air. Hélas! the air-pump refused to work at the critical moment. The balloon began to double on itself as it grew flabby; and soon I was falling at the rate of sixteen feet per second. The air-ship fell thirteen hundred feet to the ground, and it would have ended fatally for me had I not called out to some people who had spontaneously caught hold of my guide-rope to pull hard in the direction opposite to that of the wind. By this manoeuver I diminished the final speed of the fall and the worst part of the shock."

All his friends remember this sensational trip in the autumn of 1898. The air-ship rose above us in the Jardin d'Acclimatation. For a while we could hear the motor spitting and the propeller churning the air. Then, when he had reached his equilibrium, we could still observe Santos manipulating the machinery and the ropes. Around and around he manoeuvered in great circles and figure 8's, showing that he had perfect control of his direction. Then, according to the program, he started in a straight line for the west. As the air-ship grew smaller in the distance, those who had opera-glasses began crying that it was "doubling up." We saw it coming down rapidly, growing larger and larger. Women screamed. Men called hoarsely to one another. Those who had bicycles or automobiles hastened to the spot where he must be dashed to the ground. Yet within an hour M. Santos-Dumont was among his friends again, unhurt, laughing nervously, and explaining all about the unlucky air-pump.

"I made a third trial with No. 1, this time with a long rope, like a captive balloon," he continued, "but I saw that I should have to build another. I built it, but never made a proper ascension in it. It was the same type as No. 1, but larger. After a few trials with the rope, I definitely abandoned this long and slender balloon model, so seductive from certain points of view, but so dangerous from others.

“My No. 3, which was completed in the summer of 1899, was a shorter and very much thicker balloon, sixty-six feet long and eleven and a half feet in its greatest diameter. Its gas capacity was seventeen thousand six hundred cubic feet, which gave it three times the lifting-power of No. 1, and twice that of No. 2. On the other hand, I had decided to fill it with common illuminat

ing-gas, whose lifting-power is not nearly so great as that of hydrogen. The hydrogenplant at the Jardin d'Acclimatation was badly served. It had cost me vexatious delays and no end of trouble. With illuminating-gas I should be more free. In this model I also suppressed the compensating air-balloon. I had gone through a bad experience with its air-pump already; and the changed form of the new balloon, so much shorter and thicker, would help to do away with the danger of doubling up. For the rest, I wanted to try the stiffening qualities of a thirty-foot bamboo pole fixed lengthwise to the suspension-cords above my head and directly beneath the balloon.

"This was my first keel. It supported basket and guide-ropes, and it brought the shifting-weights into play still more effectually.

"Being filled with ordinary illuminatinggas, the new balloon (No. 3) lifted basket, machinery, my own weight, and two hundred and thirty pounds of ballast-ballast which I might now reserve for great emergencies.

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"On November 13, 1899, I started from Lachambre's atelier in Vaugirard with the No. 3 on the most successful trip I had yet made. From Vaugirard I went directly to the Champ de Mars, over which I practised describing figure 8's. The air-ship obeyed the rudder beautifully. After circling round the Eiffel Tower a number of times, I made a straight course to the Parc des Princes at Auteuil; then, making a hook, I navigated to the manoeuver-grounds of Bagatelle, where I landed. At this time, remember, neither I nor the Aéro Club had a balloonpark to start from or return to. To go back to Lachambre's at Vaugirard, surrounded as it is by houses, presented too many dangers.

"Considerations like these made it desirable to have a plant of my own. The Aéro Club had now acquired some land on the newly opened Côteaux de Longchamps at St. Cloud; and I decided to become my own master by building on it a great shed, high enough to contain my air-ship with the balloon fully inflated, and furnished with a modern hydrogen-gas generator. Even here I had to contend with the conceit and prejudice of the Paris artisans, who had already given me so much trouble at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. It was declared that the high sliding-doors of my shed could not be made to slide. I had to insist. 'Follow my directions,' I said, 'and do not concern yourselves with their practicability. I will answer for the sliding.'