The conquest of the heavens

CLAUDE ANET

Memories of a time when men were little Lucifers, and a dirigible was a high adventure

∎I have known skies that men had never roamed in swift, sure flight; I can remember a day when the whirring of a motor had never been heard above the earth; neither dirigibles nor airplanes flew over my head when I was a child. Sometimes—but infrequently—a non-dirigible balloon, perilously trailing a tiny wicker car, rose above the banks of the Seine near Saint Cloud, and floated like a cake of soap in the liquid, pearly mists above Paris—blown here and there by the winds, now motionless for a long moment over the crowded roofs of Paris, now drifting tranquilly into space.

For more than a hundred years, even then, men had dreamed of flying by means of a balloon inflated with hot air—later, with gas. But a balloon, however fascinating, was—once it left the earth—the plaything of the winds. The Larousse dictionary in 1783, after recalling the sensational attempts of the Montgolfiers, who were the first men to fly in this fashion, added the melancholy comment; "Nothing seems to indicate that it will ever be possible to steer a balloon."

"Never" is a distasteful word to the men of our times. Once an inventor sights, far beyond him, a possible achievement, every obstacle in his path is ruthlessly swept aside, and he strides on, unerring, to his goal . . . whether it be the automobile, the airplane, the dirigible, wireless telegraph and telephone, or the phonograph. What wonders has he not accomplished? Has invention ever made such tremendous progress in so short a time? What will the historians of the future have to say of these rich and breathless days in which we, now, are living?

I confess that it was not until 1900 that I realized I was a part of such a passionately interesting epoch. I had always been curious about the future, however, and was not overattracted by the past deeds of men long dead which my studies obliged me to consider. I read a great many newspapers; and one day, I learned that a Colonel Renard,—a madman, no doubt—was trying to build a dirigible shaped like a cigar and propelled by a screwpropeller. They said, too, that a wealthy young Brazilian, another dreamer probably, was deeply interested in this project, and had sunk a fortune in it.

■ All this seemed, to us who read of it, wildly impractical. As far as we were concerned, the sky could remain unvisited, as it had remained since the beginning of time—since that dim and distant day when man, weak and unequipped in the midst of elements over which he had no control, of wild beasts swifter and stronger than himself, first walked the earth; a hostile earth it was, which he alone was to conquer through the obscure but indomitable idea in his awakening mind of determining the relation of cause and effect in those strange phenomena of the world which, to the other animals, still seemed isolated and independent of each other.

For us, then, the sky was empty—empty of men, empty of dreams; and it could remain so. None of us would claim it. This old idea of flying dated from Icarus. . . . And yet, when I read, in 1901, that Santos-Dumont was going to leave Saint Cloud the next day in a dirigible, fly twice around the Eiffel Tower and return to his point of departure, I had a curious feeling that that day would make history; and I resolved that nothing should keep me from looking on at this attempt.

I arose early, took my bicycle—there were no automobiles in those days—and rode to the Trocadero, where I might have a good view of the courageous and reckless flight of this new dreamer, Santos-Dumont.

* The chief thing with which his small dirigible would have to contend was, of course, the wind. To-day, a dirigible is a sensitive and docile instrument in the hands of the pilot; but for that of Santos-Dumont, the slightest breeze—scarcely enough to ruffle the waters of the Seine—was enough to threaten it with destruction. Moreover, the aviator had counted upon the approach of summer and fine weather; already, without ceremony or show, he had quietly left Longchamps one morning at dawn, set on winning the first prize of the Aero Club. But a sullen fate had decreed, that day, that he should be forced to land for repairs in the gardens of the Trocadero, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower; and although he did eventually reach Saint Cloud after having twice circled the Eiffel Tower, he was declared ineligible for the prize, since the conditions of the contest were that the trip be made without landing.

At seven o'clock the next day, July thirteenth, Santos-Dumont took off in a second attempt. He was entirely confident; he had failed once, but he would yet succeed. The motor was running smoothly, its stability was perfect, the balloon responded sensitively to the rudder.

At half past six, I was on the terrace of the Trocadero which looks over the Eiffel Tower. The day was fine, a little foggy, perhaps, and a light breeze had risen out of the west. When I had waited for about half an hour, I heard the low whirring of a motor, and out of the silver mist a curiously shaped thing that looked like a bobbin cleft the -air above Auteuil. Nearer and nearer it came, at an astonishing rate of speed. Nothing could have been stranger to the startled eyes of a man in 1901 than that silhouette of the first dirigible to fly over Paris.

The tiny wicker basket swaying far beneath the great sphere of silk, the fuselage and the position of the motor within it, all gave the balloon an appearance of alarming fragility. How could so frail a bubble, we wondered, manage to struggle successfully against even the mildest wind? I looked eagerly through my field-glasses and quite clearly saw Santos-Dumont himself, bronzed and coatless, in the lower car of the balloon.

A hundred times during the successive attempts which had finally led to the construction of this dirigible, his fifth, he had come within an inch of breaking his neck. A hundred times, with incredible luck and skill, he had escaped. He was a blithe pioneer for whom the word "fear" had no meaning. And now he was to know the perfect satisfaction, the great honour of flying over his own Paris, of skimming lightly and proudly across the sky of which he was the first and only master. As he floated above the roofs, the smoke from their thousands of chimneys drifted slowly upward like incense burned in homage to him alone.

These were the romantic thoughts in my mind as I watched him; but they must have been far from the practical anxieties which occupied Santos-Dumont himself at that moment, as he listened attentively to the roar of his motor, frowned at the thought of possible failure, observed the sky and the clouds, and noticed the thin whistle of the rising wind in the fuselage. No thought of danger to himself would ever occur to this fearless crusader; he was absorbed only in the problem which lay before him, in his own deathless desire to succeed; for he had pledged himself to show the world that the genius of man could, and would, conquer the air.

■ The dirigible approached the Eiffel Tower from the south, rounded it, and on the way back passed before the Trocadero. I jumped on my bicycle and, pedalling furiously, rushed to Saint Cloud to see it land there. The wind was growing stronger; it cut my face as I flew down the road. When I could take my eyes off the ground, I looked up, over the tops of the houses, the tops of the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and I saw the little dirigible breathlessly tossed in the sky by the same cruel wind. And when, at length, I neared the race-course at Longchamps, a terrifying spectacle met my eyes.

Santos-Dumont was just over the landingfield, but he seemed to be in great difficulty. His motor was missing on four cylinders, and the frail contraption was struggling vainly against the wind. As skilfully as a ship's captain making port in the teeth of a gale, SantosDumont turned his ship head on into the wind, so as not to lose ground. It was a fearful thing to watch the struggle of this man and the fragile instrument of his own making against the savage element that slyly waited to snatch him into oblivion! What, we who looked on asked ourselves grimly, would happen to the dirigible and to its pilot if the wind proved to be too strong?

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Suddenly, a gust of wind caught the dirigible and dragged it violently toward Auteuil.

With marvelous coolness, SantosDumont pulled a rip-cord, and his parachute, released and half-inflated, fluttered in the air like a wounded bird. It was, then, just over the villa belonging to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, which is surrounded by a park giving on the race-courses on one side, the banks of the Seine on the other. Here, Santos-Dumont fell; and fell, with precision, into the exact centre of a chestnut tree in the park.

In no time, eight or ten of us had reached the foot of the tree; but the foliage was so thick that we could not see the top. What had happened to Santos-Dumont? Was he hurt . . . dead, perhaps? We called his name, shouting frantically, pressing vainly against the trunk of that fatal tree . . . and presently, were rejoiced to hear a calm voice float down to us from its topmost branches—a voice less shaken than our own. It did not call for help, spoke no complaint. It uttered only one urgent request; "Send me up a bottle of beer. I am dying of thirst."

A rope descended tranquilly from the tree; the caretaker of the villa ran to fetch the desired bottle. SantosDumont, still invisible, hoisted it up and, a few moments later, joined us peacefully upon the ground. He had not a scratch and, by some miracle, the dirigible in which he was more interested 'than in himself, had escaped with none but the slightest damage as well.

The next day the newspapers, with that curious lack of comprehension which they so often display before the spectacle of genius, made the single announcement, in small type;

M. SANTOS-DUMONT FAILS AGAIN

Yet from these patient, ingenuous and brave attempts of a man who never knew fear, what marvels have not resulted? I remember an autumn day in 1928 when a Zeppelin, coming from Europe, first stood out, sharply silver, against the sky of New York. As I watched the powerful monster sail slowly above the sky-scrapers on that day, I could not help thinking of the frail little dirigible which had so valiantly rounded the Eiffel Tower, twenty-seven years before.