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Aircraft and Submarines. Abbot Willis John
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Автор произведения Abbot Willis John
Жанр Зарубежная классика
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After winning the Deutsch prize, Santos-Dumont continued for a time to amuse himself with dirigibles. I say "amuse" purposely, for never did serious aeronaut get so much fun out of a rather perilous pastime as he. In his "No. IX." he built the smallest dirigible ever known. The balloon had just power enough to raise her pilot and sixty-six pounds more beside a three-horse-power motor. But she attained a speed of twelve miles an hour, was readily handled, and it was her owner's dearest delight to use her for a taxicab, calling for lunch at the cafés in the Bois, and paying visits to friends upon whom he looked in, literally, at their second-story windows. He ran her in and out of her hangar as one would a motor-car from its garage. One day he sailed down the Avenue des Champs Élysées at the level of the second-and third-story windows of the palaces that line that stately street. Coming to his own house he descended, made fast, and went in to déjeuner, leaving his aërial cab without. In the city streets he steered mainly by aid of a guide rope trailing behind him. With this he turned sharp corners, went round the Arc de Triomphe, and said: "I might have guide-roped under it had I thought myself worthy." On occasion he picked up children in the streets and gave them a ride.
Though before losing his interest in dirigibles Santos-Dumont carried the number of his construction up to ten, he cannot be said to have devised any new and useful improvements after his "No. VI." The largest of his ships was "No. X.," which had a capacity of eighty thousand cubic feet – about ten times the size of the little runabout with which he played pranks in Paris streets. In this balloon he placed partitions to prevent the gas shifting to one part of the envelope, and to guard against losing it all in the event of a tear. The same principle was fundamental in Count Zeppelin's airships. In 1904 he brought a dirigible to the United States expecting to compete for a prize at the St. Louis Exposition. But while suffering exasperating delay from the red-tape which enveloped the exposition authorities, he discovered one morning that his craft had been mutilated almost beyond repair in its storage place. In high dudgeon he left at once for Paris. The explanation of the malicious act has never been made clear, though many Americans had an uneasy feeling that the gallant and sportsman-like Brazilian had been badly treated in our land. On his return to Paris he at once began experimenting with heavier-than-air machines. Of his work with them we shall give some account later.
Despite his great personal popularity the airship built by Santos-Dumont never appealed to the French military authorities. Probably this was largely due to the fact that he never built one of a sufficient size to meet military tests. The amateur in him was unconquerable. While von Zeppelin's first ship was big enough to take the air in actual war the Frenchman went on building craft for one or two men – good models for others to seize and build upon, but nothing which a war office could actually adopt. But he served his country well by stimulating the creation of great companies who built largely upon the foundations he had laid.
First and greatest of these was the company formed by the Lebaudy Brothers, wealthy sugar manufacturers. Their model was semi-rigid, that is, provided with an inflexible keel or floor to the gas bag, which was cigar shaped. The most successful of the earlier ships was 190 feet long, with a car suspended by cables ten feet below the balloon and carrying the twin motors, together with passengers and supplies. Although it made many voyages without accident, it finally encountered what seems to be the chief peril of dirigible balloons, being torn from its moorings at Châlons and dashed against trees to the complete demolition of its envelope. Repaired in eleven weeks she was taken over by the French Department of War, and was in active service at the beginning of the war. Her two successors on the company's building ways were less fortunate. La Patrie, after many successful trips, and manœuvres with the troops, was insecurely moored at Verdun, the famous fortress where she was to have been permanently stationed. Came up a heavy gale. Her anchors began to drag. The bugles sounded and the soldiers by hundreds rushed from the fort to aid. Hurled along by the wind she dragged the soldiers after her. Fearing disaster to the men the commandant reluctantly ordered them to let go. The ship leaped into the black upper air and disappeared. All across France, across that very country where in 1916 the trenches cut their ugly zigzags from the Channel to the Vosges, she drifted unseen. By morning she was flying over England and Wales. Ireland caught a glimpse of her and days thereafter sailors coming into port told of a curious yellow mass, seemingly flabby and disintegrating like the carcass of a whale, floating far out at sea.
Her partner ship La République had a like tragic end. She too made many successful trips, and proved her stability and worth. But one day while manœuvring near Paris one of her propellers broke and tore a great rent in her envelope. As the Titanic, her hull ripped open by an iceberg, sunk with more than a thousand of her people, so this airship, wounded in a more unstable element, fell to the ground killing all on board.
Two airships were built in France for England in 1909. One, the Clement-Bayard II., was of the rigid type and built for the government; the other, a Lebaudy, was non-rigid and paid for by popular subscriptions raised in England by the Morning Post. Both were safely delivered near London having made their voyages of approximately 242 miles each at a speed exceeding forty miles an hour. These were the first airships acquired for British use.
In the United States the only serious effort to develop the dirigible prior to the war, and to apply it to some definite purpose, was made not by the government but by an individual. Mr. Walter Wellman, a distinguished journalist, fired by the effort of Andrée to reach the North Pole in a drifting balloon, undertook a similar expedition with a dirigible in 1907. A balloon was built 184 feet in length and 52 feet in diameter, and was driven by a seventy-to eighty-horse-power motor. A curious feature of this craft was the guide rope or, as Wellman called it, the equilibrator, which was made of steel, jointed and hollow. At the lower end were four steel cylinders carrying wheels and so arranged that they would float on water or trundle along over the roughest ice. The idea was that the equilibrator would serve like a guide rope, trailing on the water or ice when the balloon hung low, and increasing the power of its drag if the balloon, rising higher, lifted a greater part of its length into the air. Wellman had every possible appliance to contribute to the safety of the airship, and many believe that had fortune favoured him the glory of the discovery of the Pole would have been his. Unhappily he encountered only ill luck. One season he spent at Dane's Island, near Spitzenberg whence Andrée had set sail, waiting vainly for favourable weather conditions. The following summer, just as he was about to start, a fierce storm destroyed his balloon shed and injured the balloon. Before necessary repairs could be accomplished Admiral Peary discovered the Pole and the purpose of the expedition was at an end. Wellman, however, had become deeply interested in aeronautics and, balked in one ambition, set out to accomplish another. With the same balloon somewhat remodelled he tried to cross the Atlantic, setting sail from Atlantic City, N. J., October 16, 1911. But the device on which the aeronaut most prided himself proved his undoing. The equilibrator, relied upon both for storage room and as a regulator of the altitude of the ship, proved a fatal attachment. In even moderate weather it bumped over the waves and racked the structure of the balloon with its savage tugging until the machinery broke down and the adventurers were at the mercy of the elements. Luckily for them after they had been adrift for seventy-two hours, and travelled several hundred miles they were rescued by the British steamer Trent. Not long after Wellman's chief engineer Vanniman sought to cross the Atlantic in a similar craft but from some unexplained cause she blew up in mid-air and all aboard were lost.
Neither Great Britain nor the United States has reason to be proud of the attitude of its government towards the inventors who were struggling to subdue the air to the uses of man. Nor has either reason to boast much of its action in utterly ignoring up to the very day war broke that aid to military service of which Lord Kitchener said, "One aviator is worth a corps of cavalry." It will be noted that to get its first effective dirigible Great Britain had to rely upon popular subscriptions drummed up by a newspaper. That was in 1909. To-day, in 1917, the United States has only one dirigible of a type to be considered effective in the light of modern standards, though our entrance upon the war has caused the beginning of a considerable fleet. In aviation no less than in aerostatics the record of the United States is negligible. Our country did indeed produce the Wright