MY AIRSHIPS
MY AIRSHIPS
The Story of My Life
BY
ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
1904
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURG
CONTENTS
PAGE Introductory Fable 1 CHAPTER I. The Coffee Plantation 10 II. Paris—Professional Balloonists—Automobiles 24 III. My First Balloon Ascent 33 IV. My "Brazil"—smallest of Spherical Balloons 42 V. The Real and the Imaginary Dangers of Ballooning 51 VI. I yield to the Steerable Balloon Idea 63 VII. My First Air-Ship Cruises (1898) 74 VIII. How it feels to Navigate the Air 82 IX. Explosive Engines and Inflammable Gases 100 X. I go in for Air-Ship Building 114 XI. The Exposition Summer 133 XII. The Deutsch Prize and its Problems 153 XIII. A Fall before a Rise 164 XIV. The Building of my "No. 6" 180 XV. Winning the Deutsch Prize 190 XVI. A Glance Backward and Forward 205 XVII. Monaco and the Maritime Guide Rope 217 XVIII. Flights in Mediterranean Winds 232 XIX. Speed 243 XX. An Accident and its Lessons 256 XXI. The First of the World's Air-Ship Stations 264 XXII. My "No. 9," the Little Runabout 282 XXIII. The Air-Ship in WarLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE Alberto Santos-Dumont Frontispiece Santos-Dumont Coffee Plantation—Railway 11 Santos-Dumont Coffee Plantation—The Works 15 Henriques Santos-Dumont 25 The "Brazil"—Smallest of Spherical Balloons 43 Motor of "No. 1" 62 The "Santos-Dumont No. 1"—First Start 75 "No. 4"—Free Diagonal Movement up 83 "No. 6"—Free Diagonal Movement down 86 "The Housetops look so Dangerous" 94 Over the Bois de Boulogne. "An Ocean of Greenery soft and safe" 97 The Question of Physical Danger 101 "No. 9" catches Fire over the Ile de Puteaux 111 Accident to "No. 2," May 11, 1899 (First Phase) 115 Accident to "No. 2," May 11, 1899 (Second Phase) 119 Accident to "No. 2," May 11, 1899 (Third Phase) 123 Accident to "No. 2," May 11, 1899 (Finale) 127 Start of "No. 3," November 13, 1899 131 "No. 4" 135 Motor of "No. 4" 139 Visit of Professor Langley 143 "No. 4"—Flight before Professor Langley 147 "Santos-Dumont No. 5" 152 "No. 5" leaving Aëro Club Grounds, July 12, 1901 158 "No. 5" returning from the Eiffel Tower 161 "No. 5"—Accident in the Park of M. Edmond de Rothschild 165 An Accident 170 Phase of an Accident 175 "No. 6"—First Trip 181 An Accident to "No. 6"MY AIRSHIPS
INTRODUCTORY FABLE
THE REASONING OF CHILDREN
Two young Brazilian boys strolled in the shade, conversing. They were simple youths of the interior, knowing only the plenty of the primitive plantation where, undisturbed by labour-saving devices, Nature yielded man her fruits at the price of the sweat of his brow.
They were ignorant of machines to the extent that they had never seen a waggon or a wheelbarrow. Horses and oxen bore the burdens of plantation life on their backs, and placid Indian labourers wielded the spade and the hoe.
Yet they were thoughtful boys. At this moment they discussed things beyond all that they had seen or heard.
"Why not devise a better means of transport than the backs of horses and of oxen?" Luis argued. "Last summer I hitched horses to a barn door, loaded it with sacks of maize, and hauled in one load what ten horses could not have brought on their backs. True, it required seven horses to drag it, while five men had to sit around its edges and hold the load from falling off."
"What would you have?" answered Pedro. "Nature demands compensations. You cannot get something from nothing or more from less!"
"If we could put rollers under the drag, less pulling power would be needed."
"Bah! the force saved would be used up in the labour of shifting the rollers."
"The rollers might be attached to the drag at fixed points by means of holes running through their centres," mused Luis. "Or why should not circular blocks of wood be fixed at the four corners of the drag?... Look, Pedro, yonder along the road. What is coming? The very thing I imagined, only better! One horse is pulling it at a good trot!"
The first waggon to appear in that region of the interior stopped, and its driver spoke with the boys.
"These round things?" he answered to their questions; "they are called wheels."
"There must be some hidden defect in the device," he insisted. "Look around us. Nowhere does Nature employ the device you call the wheel. Observe the mechanism of the human body; observe the horse's frame; observe...."
"Observe that horse and man and waggon with its wheels are speeding from us," replied Luis, laughing. "Cannot you yield to accomplished facts? You tire me with your appeals to Nature. Has man ever accomplished anything worth having except by combating Nature? We do violence to her when we chop down a tree! I would go further than this invention of the waggon. Conceive a more powerful motive force than that horse...."
"Attach two horses to the waggon."
"I mean a machine," said Luis.
"A mechanical horse with powerful iron legs!" suggested Pedro.
"No; I would have a motor waggon. If I could find an artificial force I would cause it to act on a point in the circumference of each wheel. Then the waggon could carry its own puller!"
"You might as well attempt to lift yourself from the ground by pulling at your boot straps!" laughed Pedro. "Listen, Luis. Man is subject to certain natural laws. The horse, it is true, carries more than his own weight, but by a device of Natures own—his legs. Had you the artificial force you dream of you would have to apply it naturally. I have it! It would have to be applied to poles to push your waggon from behind!"
"I hold to applying the force to the wheels," insisted Luis.
"By the nature of things you would lose power," said Pedro. "A wheel is harder to force on from a point inside its circumference than when the motive power is applied to that circumference directly, as by pushing or pulling the waggon."
"To relieve friction I would run my power waggon on smooth iron rails, then the loss in power would be gained in speed."
"Smooth iron rails!" laughed Pedro. "Why, the wheels would slip on them. You would have to put notches all round their circumference and corresponding notches in the rails. And what would there be to prevent the power waggon slipping off the rails even then?"
The boys had been walking briskly. Now a shrieking noise startled them. Before them stretched in long lines a railway in course of construction, and from among the hills came toward them, at what seemed immense speed, a construction train.
"It is an avalanche!" cried Pedro.
"It is the very thing that I was dreaming of!" said Luis.
The train stopped. A gang of labourers emerged from it and began working on the road-bed, while the locomotive engineer answered the boys' questions and explained the mechanism of his engine. The boys discussed this later wonder as they wended their way homeward.
"Could it be adapted to the river men might become lords of the water as of the land," said Luis. "It would be only necessary to devise wheels capable of taking hold of the water. Fix them to a great frame like that waggon body and the steam-engine could propel it along the surface of the river!"
"Now you talk folly," exclaimed Pedro. "Does a fish float on the surface? In the water we must travel as the fish does—in it, not over it! Your waggon body, being filled with light air, would upset at your first movement. And your wheels—do you imagine they would take hold of so liquid a thing as water?"
"What would you suggest?"
"I would suggest that your water waggon be jointed in half-a-dozen places, so that it could be made to squirm through the water like a fish. Listen! A fish navigates the water. You desire to navigate the water. Then study the fish! There are fish that use propeller fins and flippers too. So you might devise broad boards to strike the water, as our hands and feet strike it in swimming. But do not talk about waggon wheels in the water!"
They were now beside the broad river. The first steamer to navigate it was seen approaching from the distance. The boys could not yet well distinguish it.
"It is evidently a whale," said Pedro. "What navigates the water? Fish. What is the fish that sometimes is seen swimming with its body half way above the surface? The whale. See, it is spouting water!"
"That is not water, but steam or smoke," said Luis.
"Then it is a dead whale, and the steam is the vapour of putrefaction. That is why it stays so high in the water—a dead whale rises high on its back!"
"No," said Luis; "it is really a steam water waggon."
"With smoke coming from fire in it, as from the locomotive?"
"Yes."
"But the fire would burn it up...."
"The body is doubtless iron, like the locomotive."
"Iron would sink. Throw your hatchet in the river and see."
The steam-boat came to shore, close to the boys. Running to it, to their joy, they perceived on its deck an old friend of their family, a neighbouring planter.
"Come, boys!" he said, "and I will show you round this steam-boat."
After a long inspection of the machinery the two boys sat with their old friend on the foredeck in the shade of an awning.
"Pedro," said Luis, "will not men some day invent a ship to sail in the sky?"
The common-sense old planter glanced with apprehension at the youth's face, flushed with ardour.
"Have you been much in the sun, Luis?" he asked.
"Oh, he is always talking in that flighty way," Pedro reassured him. "He takes pleasure in it."
"No, my boy," said the planter; "man will never navigate a ship in the sky."
"But on St John's Eve, when we all make bonfires, we also send up little tissue-paper spheres with hot air in them," insisted Luis. "If we could construct a very great one, big enough to lift a man, a light car, and a motor, might not the whole system be propelled through the air, as a steam-boat is propelled through the water?"
"Boys, never talk foolishness!" exclaimed the old friend of the family hurriedly as the captain of the boat approached. It was too late. The captain had heard the boy's observation; instead of calling it folly he excused him.
"The great balloon which you imagine has existed since 1783," he said; "but, though capable of carrying a man or several men, it cannot be controlled—it is at the mercy of the slightest breeze. As long ago as 1852 a French engineer named Giffard made a brilliant failure with what he called a 'dirigible balloon,' furnished with the motor and propeller Luis has dreamed of. All he did was to demonstrate the impossibility of directing a balloon through the air."
"The only way would be to build a flying machine on the model of the bird," spoke up Pedro with authority.
"Pedro is a very sensible boy," observed the old planter. "It is a pity Luis is not more like him and less visionary. Tell me, Pedro, how did you come to decide in favour of the bird as against the balloon?"
"Easily," replied Pedro glibly. "It is the most ordinary-common sense. Does man fly? No. Does the bird fly? Yes. Then if man would fly let him imitate the bird. Nature has made the bird, and Nature never goes wrong. Had the bird been furnished with a great air bag I might have suggested a balloon."
"Exactly!" exclaimed both captain and planter.
But Luis, sitting in his corner, muttered, unconvinced as Galileo: "It will move!"
CHAPTER I
THE COFFEE PLANTATION
From the way in which the partisans of Nature have fallen on me I might well be the uninformed and visionary Luis of the fable, for has it not been
Does not the final condemnation of the common-sense Pedro continue to weigh on me?
After steering my ship through the sky at will I am still told that flying creatures are heavier than the air. A little more and I should be made responsible for the tragic accidents of others who had not my experience of mechanics and aeronautics.
On the whole, therefore, I think it is best to begin at the coffee plantation where I was born in the year 1873.
SANTOS-DUMONT COFFEE PLANTATION IN BRAZIL
Inhabitants of Europe comically figure those Brazilian plantations to themselves as primitive stations of the boundless pampas, as innocent of the cart and the wheelbarrow as of the electric light and the telephone. There are such stations far in the interior. I have been through them on hunting trips, but they are not the coffee plantations of Sao-Paulo.
I can hardly imagine a more stimulating environment for a boy dreaming over mechanical inventions. At the age of seven I was permitted to drive our "locomobiles" of the epoch—steam traction-engines of the fields with great broad wheels. At the age of twelve I had conquered my place in the cabs of the Baldwin locomotive engines hauling train-loads of green coffee over the sixty miles of our plantation railway. When my father and brothers would take pleasure in making horseback trips far and near, to see if the trees were clean, if the crops were coming up, if the rains had done damage, I preferred to slip down to the Works and play with the coffee-engines.
I think it is not generally understood how scientifically a Brazilian coffee plantation may be operated. From the moment when a railway train has brought the green berries to the Works to the moment when the finished and assorted product is loaded on the transatlantic ships, no human hand touches the coffee.
You know that the berries of black coffee are red when they are green. Though it may complicate the statement, they look like cherries. Car loads of them are unloaded at the central works and thrown into great tanks, where the water is continually renewed and agitated. Mud that has clung to the berries from the rains, and little stones which have got mixed up with them in the loading of the cars, go to the bottom, while the berries and the little sticks and bits of leaves float on the surface and are carried from the tank by means of an inclined trough, whose bottom is pierced with innumerable little holes. Through these holes falls some of the water with the berries, while the little sticks and pieces of leaves float on.
THE SANTOS-DUMONT COFFEE PLANTATION IN BRAZIL
The fallen coffee berries are now clean. They are still red, about the size and look of cherries. The red exterior is a hard pod or polpa. Inside of each pod are two beans, each of which is covered with a skin of its own. The water which has fallen with the berries carries them on to the machine called the despolpador, which breaks the outside pod and frees the beans. Long tubes, called "dryers," now receive the beans, still wet, and with their skins still on them. In these dryers the beans are continually agitated in hot air.
Coffee is very delicate. It must be handled delicately. Therefore the dried beans are lifted by the cups of an endless-chain elevator to a height, whence they slide down an inclined trough to another building because of the danger of fire. This is the coffee machine house.
The first machine is a ventilator, in which sieves, shaken back and forth, are so combined that only the coffee beans can pass through them. No coffee is lost in them and no dirt is kept by them, for one little stone or stick that may still have been carried with the beans would be enough to break the next machine.
Another endless-chain elevator carries the beans to a height, whence they fall through an inclined trough into this descascador or "skinner." It is a highly delicate machine; if the spaces between are a trifle too big the coffee passes without being skinned, while if they are too small they break the beans.
Another elevator carries the skinned beans with their skins to another ventilator, in which the skins are blown away.
Still another elevator takes the now clean beans up and throws them into the "separator," a great copper tube two yards in diameter and about seven yards long, resting at a slight incline. Through the separator tube the coffee slides. As it is pierced at first with little holes the smaller beans fall through them. Farther along it is pierced with larger holes, and through these the medium-sized beans fall, and still farther along are still larger holes, for the large round beans called "Moka."
The machine is a separator because it separates the beans into their conventional grades by size. Each grade falls into its hopper, beneath which are stationed weighing scales and men with coffee sacks. As the sacks fill up to the required weight they are replaced by empty ones, and the tied and labelled sacks are shipped to Europe.
As a boy I played with this machinery and the driving engines that furnished its motive force, and before long familiarity had taught me how to repair any part of it. As I have said, it is delicate machinery. In particular, the moving sieves would be continually getting out of order. While they were not heavy, they moved back and forth horizontally at great speed and took an enormous amount of motive power. The belts were always being changed, and I remember the fruitless efforts of all of us to remedy the mechanical defects of the device.
Now is it not curious that those troublesome shifting sieves were the only machines at the coffee works that were not rotary? They were not rotary, and they were bad. I think this put me as a boy against all agitating devices in mechanics and in favour of the more easily-handled and more serviceable rotary movement.
It may be that half-a-century from now man will assume mastery of the air by means of flying machines heavier than the medium in which they move. I look forward to the time with hope, and at the present moment I have gone further to meet it than any other, because my own air-ships (which have been so reproached on this head) are slightly heavier than the air. But I am prejudiced enough to think that when the time comes the conquering device will not be flapping wings or any substitute of an agitating nature.
I cannot say at what age I made my first kites, but I remember how my comrades used to tease me at our game of "Pigeon flies!" All the children gather round a table, and the leader calls out: "Pigeon flies!" "Hen flies!" "Crow flies!" "Bee flies!" and so on, and at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes, however, he would call out "Dog flies!" "Fox flies!" or some other like impossibility, to catch us. If anyone raised a finger he
Among the thousands of letters which I received after winning the Deutsch prize there was one that gave me particular pleasure. I quote from it as a matter of curiosity:
"... Do you remember the time, my dear Alberto, when we played together 'Pigeon flies!'? It came back to me suddenly the day when the news of your success reached Rio.
"'Man flies!' old fellow! You were right to raise your finger, and you have just proved it by flying round the Eiffel Tower.
"You were right not to pay the forfeit; it is M. Deutsch who has paid it in your stead. Bravo! you well deserve the 100,000 franc prize.
"They play the old game now more than ever at home, but the name has been changed and the rules modified—since October 19, 1901. They call it now 'Man flies!' and he who does not raise his finger at the word pays his forfeit.—
Your friend,Pedro."
This letter brings back to me the happiest days of my life, when I exercised myself in making light aeroplanes with bits of straw, moved by screw propellers driven by springs of twisted rubber, or ephemeral silk-paper balloons. Each year, on June 24th, over the St John bonfires, which are customary in Brazil from long tradition, I inflated whole fleets of these little Montgolfiers, and watched in ecstasy their ascension to the skies.
In those days, I confess, my favourite author was Jules Verne. The wholesome imagination of this truly great writer, working magically with the immutable laws of matter, fascinated me from childhood. In its daring conceptions I saw, never doubting, the mechanics and the science of the coming ages, when man should by his unaided genius rise to the height of a demigod.
With Captain Nemo and his shipwrecked guests I explored the depths of the sea in that first of all submarines, the Nautilus. With Phineas Fogg I went round the world in eighty days. In "Screw Island" and "The Steam House" my boyish faith leaped out to welcome the ultimate triumphs of an automobilism that in those days had not as yet a name. With Hector Servadoc I navigated the air.
I saw my first balloon in 1888, when I was about fifteen years old. There was a fair or celebration of some sort at the town of Sao-Paulo, and a professional made the ascent, letting himself down afterwards in a parachute. By this time I was perfectly familiar with the history of Montgolfier and the balloon craze, which, following on his courageous and brilliant experiments, so significantly marked the last years of the eighteenth, and the first years of the nineteenth, centuries. In my heart I had an admiring worship for the four men of genius—Montgolfier, and the physicist, Charles, and Pilâtre de Rozier, and the engineer, Henry Giffard—who have attached their names for ever to great steps forward in aerial navigation.
I, too, desired to go ballooning. In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, when the hum of insects, punctuated by the far-off cry of some bird, lulled me, I would lie in the shade of the verandah and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to raise your eyes to fall in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of the vast aerial ocean, I, too, devised air-ships and flying machines in my imagination.
These imaginations I kept to myself. In those days, in Brazil, to talk of inventing a flying machine or dirigible balloon would have been to mark oneself off as unbalanced and visionary. Spherical balloonists were looked on as daring professionals, not differing greatly from acrobats; and for the son of a planter to dream of emulating them would have been almost a social sin.
CHAPTER II
PARIS—PROFESSIONAL BALLOONISTS—AUTOMOBILES
In 1891 it was decided that our family should make a trip to Paris, and I rejoiced doubly at the prospect. All good Americans are said to go to Paris when they die. But to me, with the bias of my reading, France—the land of my father's ancestors and of his own education as an engineer at the École Centrale—represented everything that is powerful and progressive.
In France the first hydrogen balloon had been let loose and the first air-ship had been made to navigate the air with its steam-engine, screw propeller, and rudder. Naturally I figured to myself that the problem had made marked progress since Henry Giffard in 1852, with a courage equal to his science, gave his masterly demonstration of the problem of directing balloons.
I said to myself: "I am going to Paris to see the new things—steerable balloons and automobiles!"