Courtesy of Flying Magazine.The R-34, the British rigid dirigible.The R-34 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, New York, a distance of 3,300 miles, in 108 hours and 10 minutes, and returned to Pulham, Norfolk, England, in 75 hours and 3 minutes, non-stop flight.
Courtesy of Flying Magazine.The R-34, the British rigid dirigible.The R-34 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, New York, a distance of 3,300 miles, in 108 hours and 10 minutes, and returned to Pulham, Norfolk, England, in 75 hours and 3 minutes, non-stop flight.
Courtesy of Flying Magazine.
The R-34, the British rigid dirigible.
The R-34 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, New York, a distance of 3,300 miles, in 108 hours and 10 minutes, and returned to Pulham, Norfolk, England, in 75 hours and 3 minutes, non-stop flight.
“It is unquestionably her long endurance and great weight-carrying capacity which gives the airship her chief advantage over the aeroplane,” says W. L. Marsh, the eminent authority on dirigibles previously referred to. “It will no doubt be conceded that in spite of the stimulus of war the airship is little further advanced in development than the aeroplane was at the beginning of 1915; and already airships have visited this country”—England—“which could with ease fly from England to America, carrying a considerable load of merchandise. A present-day Zeppelin has a gross lift of sixty-five tons, of which some 58 per cent is available for crew, fuel, ballast, merchandise, and so on. If we take the distance across the Atlantic in a direct line as two thousand miles we get the following disposition of our load of thirty-eight tons:
“This leaves eighteen tons available for freight. These figures are based on the ship maintaining a constant speed of fifty miles an hour, at which she would do the journey in forty hours, consuming 650 pounds of gasoline an hour.
“This represents what a rigid airship of slightly over capacity can do to-day, and is given as an indication of what is possible in a comparatively early stage of development.
“No one who has considered rigid airship design and studied rapid strides which aeroplanes have made in the last three and a half years can doubt for a moment that an airship could be built in the course of the next two years which would have a disposal lift—or,in aeroplane parlance, a ‘useful load’—of over two hundred tons, giving it an endurance of anything up to three weeks at a speed of forty to forty-five miles an hour.
“I am endeavoring to state the case as moderately as possible, and am therefore purposely putting the speed at a low figure. I believe I am correct in estimating the full speed of a modern Zeppelin at seventy-five miles an hour. I shall not be too optimistic in claiming eighty miles as a conservative figure for the future. There is little doubt that a ship of some 800,000 cubic feet should be able to carry twenty or thirty passengers, having a full speed of about seventy miles an hour, which it could maintain for two days or more, the endurance at forty-five miles an hour being probably in the neighborhood of five or six days. This ship would be able to cross the Atlantic. A present-day Zeppelin could carry some eighteen tons of freight across to America, and the really big ship—it must be remembered that up to the present we have been talking of lighter-than-air midgets—could transport at least 150 tons the same distance.”
But Mr. Marsh is not the only British authority on aerodynamics who has gone on record as to the practicability of transnavigation of the Atlantic. The British Aerial Transport Committee, consisting of some of the most representative men of Great Britain, such as G. Holt-Thomas, Tom Sopwith, H. G. Wells, Brigadier-General Brancker, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Lord Northcliffe—to mention only a few—inits report of November, 1918, to the Air Council of the British Parliament, says:
“Airships now exist with a range of more than 4,000 miles, and they can travel at a speed of 78 miles an hour. By running their engines slower a maximum range of 8,000 miles can be obtained. On first speed Cape Town, South Africa, is to-day aerially only a little more than three days from Southampton. This ship could fly across the Atlantic and return without stopping. The committee points out that the airship will soon develop a speed of 100 miles an hour, that it will be fitted with ample saloons, staterooms, an elevator to a roof-garden, and it will be able to remain in the air for more than a week.”
Mr. Ed. M. Thierry, Berlin correspondent of the N. E. A., under date of December, 1918, says: “I recently visited the immense works outside Berlin at Staaken. The new super-Zeppelin which is now building has a gas capacity of 100,000 cubic metres. It will have nine engines and eight propellers. This transatlantic Zeppelin is 800 feet in length. It will cost nearly $1,000,000, and it will have a carrying capacity of 100 passengers and forty-five tons of mail and baggage, and thirty tons of petrol, oil, and water and provisions. The first machine for the transatlantic service is to be completed in July, 1919. For maintenance of the service planned, eight active machines and four reserved will be required. As soon as the international situation is clarified it is proposed to establish the service with a hangar in New York.”
Major Thomas S. Baldwin, U. S. A. C., considered one of the best authorities in regard to balloons and dirigibles in the United States, said that the Germans had constructed aircraft that could stay in the air for two weeks and could make upward of 75 miles an hour. Major Baldwin stated that the relatively small American Blimps were capable of 60 miles an hour. Only recently one of these flew from Akron, Ohio, to New York without stopping, a distance of more than 300 miles, and the Naval NC-1 flew from New York to Pensacola, Florida, a distance of over 1,000 miles, stopping at Norfolk, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia.
On December 12 an interesting experiment of launching a plane from a dirigible was conducted at Rockaway Beach, New York. The dirigible rose about one hundred feet above the sand-field near Fort Tilden. An aeroplane was attached to the roof. After discharging ballast and starting the motor the dirigible ascended to three thousand feet and released the aeroplane, which dived about one thousand feet and then flew off to Mineola. Lieutenant George Crompton, Naval Flying Corps, piloted the dirigible, assisted by J. L. Nichols and G. Cooper. The plane was piloted by A. W. Redfield.
In the flight of the British naval dirigible R-23 over the North Sea, in April, 1919, the aeroplane was hung suspended from the keel amidships and launched when near the British coast.
The above experiment is cited only as an indication of what the possibilities are of combining the aeroplanewith the dirigible in landing mail or express from dirigibles crossing the Atlantic. Undoubtedly aeroplanes weighing only a thousand pounds, with a flying radius of 600 miles and making 150 miles an hour, will be launched from superdirigibles 500 miles from the journey’s end, especially when airships are to be constructed with 10,000,000 cubic feet of gas, with a 60 per cent gross lift for crew, fuel, freight, and so on, as Mr. Marsh says is quite possible in the immediate future.
Experiments for launching aeroplanes from ocean-liners for a like purpose are already under way. The object is to fly the mail for London or New York from the ocean greyhounds as soon as they get within five hundred miles of either coast. This will, of course, cut the flight time from New York to London considerably. As a matter of fact the dirigible might fly over only the great expanse of water from land’s end to land’s end, while the aeroplanes negotiated the remainder of the distance. It is granted that for short flights over land the aeroplane is twice as fast as the Zeppelin, whereas the latter, because it can stay in the air for weeks, is the best adapted for long cruises over large bodies of water. Moreover, the removal of the weight of an aeroplane from a dirigible six hundred miles from its journey’s end would facilitate the remaining flight of the Zeppelin by just so much; it would be equivalent to throwing out ballast to keep a balloon in the air.
Perhaps of all the revolutionary scientific developmentsof the Great War—especially in the field of chemistry—the one that may perform the greatest service to mankind is the steps taken by the Bureau of Mines to produce helium, the non-inflammable gas which has 92 per cent of the lifting power of hydrogen, in sufficient quantities to be used in floating airships!
A non-inflammable gas with such a lifting capacity as helium has been the dream of the aeronaut and the dirigible engineer ever since the Robert brothers first conducted their experiments in France in 1784 and found that hydrogen had greater buoyancy than any other gas available in large quantities for balloons; for with it they could jump over the highest peaks of the Himalaya Mountains and the broadest expanses of the Pacific Ocean without danger of the gas igniting from the sun or the engine.
It will be recalled that we pointed out that the greatest danger to people riding in dirigibles was the possibility of heat expanding and exploding the hydrogen gas. One of the first airships to experience this fate simply passed through a cloud into the hot sun, whose rays expanded and exploded the gas, blowing the airship and its crew into smithereens before they could open the gauges and release the pressure. The same thing may have caused the explosion of the German dirigible L-2, which killed its crew of twenty-five; and the American airshipAkron, which blew up, destroying Vaniman and his companions. The substitution of helium entirely eliminates that danger and makes it possible to carry heating devices for thecomfort of passengers in high altitudes where it is so cold.
Of course, the lifting power of helium was known to students of aerostatics before the war, but the mechanical difficulties and cost involved in producing this gas on an industrial basis were so great that it would hardly pay to produce it for commercial purposes. Indeed, the largest amount of helium in any one container up to the beginning of 1918 was five cubic feet, and it cost between fifteen hundred and six thousand dollars, whereas under the new system it is expected that one thousand cubic feet can be produced for one hundred dollars!
In war, however, cost is nothing—results are everything. As there was a possibility that helium might be one of the chief factors in winning the war, the joint Army and Navy Board on Rigid Airships in August, 1917, provided the Bureau of Mines with the requisite funds to do the necessary experiment work.
This, however, is not the time or the place to go into a detailed description of this wonderful gas or how it was obtained, further than to state that apparatus had to be designed on entirely new lines for the liquefaction of nitrogen into natural gases, at temperatures as low as -317 degrees Fahrenheit; that the natural gas of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Ontario contains 1 per cent of helium; that a $900,000 building was constructed for the Navy Department at Fort Worth, Texas, and a ten-inch pipe-line ninety-four miles long was laid, at a cost of more than a milliondollars, from the wells at Petrolia, Texas, for supplying the plant with natural gas; and that the first production of it was in operation April 1, 1918.
Within a comparatively short time, then, we ought to see many companies organized in this country for aerial transnavigation of the globe by helium airship! Before the year 1919 has come to a close we ought to see aeroplanes and dirigibles jumping the Atlantic from shore to shore. Who knows, it may even come to pass that man shall become as much a creature of the air as the birds! As a world of exploration and travel the heavens offer him many adventures. It presents to him the shortest distance and the line of least resistance between any two given points on this planet. By the aircraft he has already designed he has penetrated to a height of 38,000 feet and flown a thousand miles in a straight line without stopping.
Is there any reason to doubt that in a very short time man will extend the capacity of these airships or the distance they can travel? The monetary and laudatory incentives are there. For affording to his fellow man and his chattels faster transportation, man’s reward has been great and commensurate with his success. In order to win that remuneration he has enslaved and domesticated the beasts of the fields; he has harnessed the river and the streams; he has sought out the secrets of nature and devised ways and means to make her hidden forces transport him up and down the highways and byways of the globe; for that reward he has invented machines and engines to rush him over the land and across the seven seas atan ever-increasing rate. When mountains have raised their ponderous bulk between him and his objective he has climbed over them or tunnelled under them or cut them down; when rivers, lakes, or oceans have intervened he has spanned them by bridges or boats; when isthmus or even continents have injected their lengths between him and his markets he has cut them asunder that his ships might pass through.
In short, transportation is the life-blood of commerce, and by it and through it the perishable fruits of India, Africa, and America are carried from the tropics to the remotest corners of the frigid zone; likewise the foods or minerals or other materials confined by nature to the temperate zone are taken to the balmy tropics. In fact, every instrument and every force in nature is enslaved so that man may enjoy all the blessings of the earth at one time and in one place. Taken all in all, the speed of transportation has increased man’s pleasures and years proportionately.
But how many people to-day realize that when aerial transportation of passengers and freight has become an actual accomplished fact in the sense that water and land transportation of man and his goods now is, a complete redistribution and reconcentration of the cities, people, and nations and a new internationalism in the form of customs and language will have become a historic fact! This statement may seem like an absurd phantasy, but if history repeats itself in the future as it has in the past this will take place as surely as the sun rises.
Ever since man transported his goods from oneplace to another he has followed the lines of least resistance and the greatest speed. For that reason rivers were his first natural highway. At the stopping-places along these routes and waterways he built for himself villages, towns, and cities. The biggest of these, however, have always been located at some favorable terminus or harbor. Nineveh, Babylon, Carthage, and Tyre were ancient cities that grew and flourished because they were either the termini or the harbors of advantageous trade routes or excellent stopping-places on great waterways. With the change in the rivers of commerce those cities decayed and passed away.
The rise of such cities as Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages, when they afforded the best ports for the sailing-vessels that connected the caravan routes which came across Asia from the East for their distribution of goods to Europe and the West, was due to the same cause. With the changing of those routes those cities lost their importance and prestige and became what they are to-day.
At the present time most of the largest cities of the world are located near inviting harbors or in river-mouths where the great ships of commerce come and go and find refuge. London, Liverpool, New York, Hamburg, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Calcutta, Bombay, Havana, Buenos Aires—to mention only a very few—depend primarily upon their strategic geographic position for their business and their very life.
If in time, then, the nearest points of land betweencontinents and countries become the great landing-places for the new passenger and freight ships of the air, it is quite conceivable that the great centres of population and commerce may grow up themselves round those havens.
Moreover, if, as the British Civil Aerial Transport Committee and most of the world’s aeronautical authorities are convinced, Cape Town, South Africa—to take but one example—is only three days’ flight by aircraft from Southampton, England, and if all the remotest capitals of the East are only hours or days instead of weeks away from those of the West, there will be such rapid and constant intercommunication that customs practices will become obsolete and one international language may have to be adopted for trade and convenience. Indeed, the only impediment originally put in the way of the Handley Page Company’s London-to-Paris air-line was the violation of customs practices, which is delaying the aeroplanes from making the round trip between breakfast and dinner.
Furthermore, with the coming of such rapid inter-communication it is conceivable that foggy and damp countries like the British Isles may be abandoned—save by the workers of minerals—as living and manufacturing places for more beautiful and delightful climates, such as France or Spain. Indeed, the pleasantly located gardens and plateaus of the world—like the one in Mexico, for instance—may be the favorite dwelling-places of the peoples of the world when all the fruits and foods and goods of the earth can beaerially transported to such places in a matter of hours.
Needless to say that when each country possesses a fleet of commercial aircraft numbered by tens of thousands, inherently convertible into bombers large enough to annihilate whole cities entirely—as French aeronautic military authorities have already stated they feared Germany would be able to do with ten thousand aeroplanes and Zeppelins in the next ten years unless she was limited in her construction programme—when many countries can be flown over in a matter of hours without anything to prevent them, then undoubtedly a league of nations will have been organized for self-preservation and war abolished as too horrible to contemplate. Thus by levelling boundaries and borders of nations and countries the aircraft promises to perform the greatest blessing of mankind by abolishing war, destroying nationalism, and establishing internationalism and the brotherhood of man throughout the world.