'Only those who are acquainted with practical aeronautics can appreciate the difficulties of attempting the first trials of a flying machine in a 25-mile gale. As winter was already well set in, we should have postponed our trials to a more favourable season, but for the fact that we were determined, before returning home, to know whether the machine possessed sufficient power to fly, sufficient strength to withstand the shock of landings, and sufficient capacity of control to make flight safe in boisterous winds, as well as in calm air. When these points had been definitely established, we at once packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.'
THE AEROPLANE AND THE AIRSHIP
The age of the flying machine had come at last. A power-driven aeroplane had been built, and had been flown under the control of its pilot. What remained to do was to practise with it and test it; to improve it, and perfect it, and put it on the market. The time allowed for all this was not long; in less than eleven years, if only the world had known it, the world would be at war, and would be calling for aeroplanes by the thousand.
Romance, for all that it is inspired by real events, is never quite like real life. It makes much of prominent dates and crises, and passes lightly and carelessly over the intervening shallows and flats. Yet these shallows and flats are the place where human endurance and purpose are most severely tested. The problem of flight had been solved; the people of the world, it might be expected, springing to attention, would salute the new invention, and welcome the new era. Nothing of the kind happened. America, which is more famous for journalistic activity than any other country on earth, remained profoundly inattentive. The Wrights returned to their home at Dayton, and there continued their experiments.
A legend has grown up that these experiments were conducted under a close-drawn veil of secrecy. On the contrary, the proceedings of the brothers were singularly public—indeed, for the preservation of their title to their own invention, almost dangerously public. 'In the spring of 1904,' says Wilbur Wright,through the kindness of Mr. Torrence Huffman, of Dayton, Ohio, we were permitted to erect a shed, and to continue experiments, on what is known as the Huffman Prairie, at Simms Station, eight miles east of Dayton. The new machine was heavier and stronger, but similar to the one flown at Kill Devil Hill. When it was ready for its first trial every newspaper in Dayton was notified, and about a dozen representatives of the Press were present. Our only request was that no pictures be taken, and that the reports be unsensational, so as not to attract crowds to our experiment grounds. There were probably fifty persons altogether on the ground. When preparations had been completed a wind of only three or four miles was blowing—insufficient for starting on so short a track—but since many had come a long way to see the machine in action, an attempt was made. To add to the other difficulty, the engine refused to work properly. The machine, after running the length of the track, slid off the end without rising into the air at all. Several of the newspaper men returned again the next day, but were again disappointed. The engine performed badly, and after a glide of only sixty feet the machine came to the ground. Further trial was postponed till the motor could be put in better running condition. The reporters had now, no doubt, lost confidence in the machine, though their reports, in kindness, concealed it. Later, when they heard that we were making flights of several minutes' duration, knowing that longer flights had been made with airships, and not knowing any essential difference between airships and flying machines, they were but little interested.'
The indifference and scepticism of the public and the press provided a very effective veil of secrecy, and the brothers prosecuted their researches undisturbed.In 1904 they made more than a hundred flights, practising turning movements and complete circles, and learning how to handle the machine so as to prevent it from 'stalling', that is, from losing flying speed and falling to earth out of control when the air resistance caused by its manœuvring reduced its speed. In 1905 they built another machine and resumed their experiments in the same field. They did not want to attract a crowd. The cars on the electric line adjoining the field ran every thirty minutes, and they timed their flights between the runs. The farmers living near by saw the flying, but their business was with the earth, not the air, and after looking on for two years they lost what little interest they had. On the 5th of October 1905 one of them, from a neighbouring field, saw the great white form rushing round on its circular course in the air. 'Well,' he remarked, 'the boys are at it again'; and he kept on cutting corn. The season's work is summarized by Mr. Orville Wright in a letter dated the 17th of November 1905, and communicated to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain:
'Up to September 6 we had the machine on but eight different days, testing a number of changes which we had made since 1904.... During the month of September we gradually improved in our practice, and on the 26th made a flight of a little over eleven miles. On the 30th we increased this to twelve and one-fifth miles, on October 3 to fifteen and one-third miles, on October 4 to twenty and three-fourth miles, and on the 5th to twenty-four and one-fourth miles. All of these flights were made at about thirty-eight miles an hour, the flight of the 5th occupying thirty minutes three seconds.... We had intended to place the record above the hour, but the attention these flights were beginning to attract compelled us suddenly to discontinue ourexperiments in order to prevent the construction of the machine from becoming public.
'The machine passed through all of these flights without the slightest damage. In each of these flights we returned frequently to the starting-point, passing high over the heads of the spectators.'
A young druggist called Foust, a friend of the Wrights, was present at the flight of the 5th of October. He was told not to divulge what he had seen, but his enthusiasm would not be restrained, and he talked to such effect that next day the field was crowded with sightseers and the fences were lined with photographers. Very reluctantly the brothers ended their work for the year. They took apart their flyer, and brought it back to the city.
From this time on, for a period of almost three years, the brothers disappear from view. The secrets which it had cost them so much time and effort to discover might, by a single photograph, be made into public property. They were bound to do what they could to assert their claim to their own invention. Their first task was to secure patent rights in their machine; and, after that, to negotiate with the American, French, and British Governments for its purchase. The bringer of so great a gift as flight is worthy of his reward; but the attitude of the brothers to their hard-won possession was not selfish or commercial. They thought more of their responsibilities than of their profits; and in attempting to dispose of their machine they handled the matter as if it were a public trust. These years were full of disappointment, much unlike the earlier years of progress and open-air holiday and happiness. No one, except a few intimates and disciples, believed in the Wrights' achievements. The American Government would not touch their invention. When it was thrice offered to the British Government, between the years 1906 and1908, it was thrice refused, twice by the War Office and once by the Admiralty. At an earlier period the French Government, more active than the other two, sent Captain Ferber, who had made many gliding experiments of his own, to report after viewing the machine at Dayton. The Wrights refused to show it to him, but their account of what they had done impressed him by its truthfulness, and he reported in their favour, though he told them that there was not a man in all France who believed that they had done what they claimed. The French Government would not buy; and things were at a standstill, until Mr. Hart O. Berg, a good man of business who had helped the Wrights to secure their patents, urged on them the necessity of putting in an appearance in Europe and showing what they could do. By this time they had made various improvements, especially in their engine, and had supplied themselves with two machines. With one of these, in the summer of 1908, Wilbur Wright came to France; with the other Orville Wright was to attempt to secure the contract in America for an army aeroplane. A French syndicate had agreed to buy the Wright patents and a certain number of machines on condition that two flights of not less than fifty kilometres each should be made in a single week, the machines to carry a passenger or an equivalent weight, and the flights to be made in a wind of not less than eleven metres a second, that is, about twenty-five miles an hour. The conditions for the American army contract were no less severe. The machine was to remain in continuous flight for at least an hour; it was to be steered in all directions; and was to land, without damage, at its starting-point. The place chosen for the French tests was the Hunaudières racecourse, near Le Mans. There Wilbur Wright set up his shed, and, from the 8th of August onward, made many little flights, showinghis complete control of his machine by the elaborate manœuvres which he performed in the air. On the 9th of September there came the news that Orville Wright had flown for over an hour at Fort Myer in America. This liberated Wilbur Wright, who had been holding back in order to give America the precedence, and on the 21st of September he flew for more than an hour and a half, covering a distance of over sixty miles. About three weeks later he fulfilled the conditions of his test by successive passenger-carrying flights. Encouraged by his example, two distinguished French pioneers, Henri Farman and Léon Delagrange, soon began to make long flights on French machines, and from this time onwards the progress of flying was rapid and immense. A great industry came into being, and, after a short time, ceased to pay any tribute whatever to the inventors. Merely to secure recognition of their priority, it became necessary for the Wrights to bring actions at law against the infringers of their patents. The tedious and distasteful business of these law-suits troubled and shortened the days of Wilbur Wright, who died at Dayton on the 30th of May 1912. In 1913, by arrangement between the parties, a test action was begun against the British Government. When the war broke out, and the trial of this action was still pending, the supporters of the Wrights hastily met, and offered to forgo all their claims for fifteen thousand pounds, a sum substantial enough to establish the Wrights' priority, yet merely nominal as a payment for the benefits conferred. So the matter was settled. The last thoughts of Wilbur Wright were given, not to financial profits, but to further developments of the art of flight. He was constantly meditating on the possibility of soaring flight, which should take advantage of the wind currents, and maintain the machine in the air withbut little expenditure of power. In a letter written not many days before he died, and addressed to a German aviator at the Johannisthal flying camp, he says, 'There must be a method whereby human beings can remain in the air once they really find themselves aloft.... The birds can do it. Why shouldn't men?' The coming of the war, with its peremptory demand for power and yet more power, did much to develop strong flight, but postponed experiment on this delicate and fascinating problem.
The name of the Wrights is so much the greatest name in the history of flying that it is only fair to give their achievements a separate place. In 1905 they were in possession of a practical flying machine. In 1908 they proved their powers and established their claims in the sight of the world. During these three years events had not stood still; European inventors were busy with experiments. There were rumours of the American success, but the rumours were disbelieved, and the problem was attacked again from the beginning. Long after the Wrights had circled in the air, at their own free will, over the Huffman Prairie, European inventors were establishing records, as they believed, by hopping off the ground for a few yards in machines of their own construction.
The earliest of these European pioneers was Mr. I. C. H. Ellehammer, a Danish engineer, who had built motor-cycles and light cars. In 1904 he built a flying machine, and having prepared a ground in the small Danish island of Lindholm, suspended the machine by a wire attached to a central mast, and tested its lifting power. In the course of his experiments he increased his engine-power, and added to the first bird-like pair of wings a second pair placed above them. With this improved machine he claims to have made, on the 12th of September 1906, the firstfree flight in Europe, travelling in the air for forty-two metres at a height of a metre and a half. With later machines he had some successes, but the rapid progress of French aviation left him behind, and his latest invention was an application to the aeroplane of a helicopter, to raise it vertically in the air. The helicopter idea continues to fascinate some inventors, and it would be rash to condemn it, but the most it seems to promise is a flight like that of the lark—an almost vertical ascent and a glide to earth again. A machine of this kind might conceivably, at some future time, become a substitute, in war, for the kite balloon; it is not likely to supersede the aeroplane.
Of all European countries France was the most intelligent and the most alert in taking up the problem of flight. The enduring rivalry between the airship and the flying machine is well illustrated in the history of French effort. Long before the first true flying machine was built and flown balloons of a fish-like shape had been driven through the air by mechanical airscrews. A bird is much heavier than the air it displaces; a fish is about the same weight as the water it displaces; and the question which of the two examples is better for aircraft, whether flying or swimming is the better mode, remained an open question, dividing opinion and distracting effort. The debate is not yet concluded. It is now not very hazardous to say that both methods are good, and that the partisans of the one side and the other were right in their faith and wrong in their heresy-hunting. National rivalry certainly quickened the competition between the two modes; the early progress of aviation in France gave a great impulse to the development of the Zeppelin in Germany. But the two modes are so entirely distinct that they are better treated separately. None of the chief nations of the world has dared wholly to neglect either; from the verybeginning the two have grown up side by side, and interest has been concentrated now on the one and now on the other. When, in 1912, Great Britain took in hand the creation of an air force, military and naval, France was already furnished with a very large number of aeroplanes, organized for service with the army, and Germany was provided with airships of unprecedented power and range. France also had some airships, and Germany, alarmed by the progress of French aviation, had begun to turn her attention to aeroplanes, but the pride of Germany was in her airships, and the pride of France was in her aeroplanes. These were the conditions with which Great Britain had to reckon; they had grown up rapidly in the course of a few years; and it will be convenient to speak first of the airship, which, invented by France, was adopted and improved by Germany; and then of the aeroplane, which was made by France into so formidable a military engine that Germany had no choice but to imitate again. Meantime Great Britain, during the earlier years of these developments, entrusted her aerial fortunes to a few balloons, which were operated by the Royal Engineers and were not very favourably regarded by the chiefs of the army. The unpreparedness of Great Britain in all national crises is a time-honoured theme. The Englishman, if he does not wholly distrust science, at least distrusts theory. Facts excite him, and rouse him to exertion. In an address delivered in 1910, Mr. R. B. Haldane, who consistently did all that he could to promote and encourage science, uttered a prophecy which deserves record. 'When a new invention,' he said, 'like the submarine or the motor, comes to light, the Englishman is usually behind. Give him a few years and he has not only taken care of himself in the meantime, but is generally leading. As it was with these inventions, so I suspect it will prove to be with aircraft.'
The airship, like the balloon, was a French invention. When the balloon first came into vogue many attempts were made to deflect or guide its course by the use of oars. Those who made these attempts were almost unanimous in declaring that the use of oars enabled them to alter the course of a balloon by several points of the compass. Another method of steering employed sails, held up to the wind by the drag of a guide-rope on the ground. The control to be obtained by means like these was pathetically small, and the real problem was soon seen to be the problem of a motor. The spherical balloon is obviously unsuited for power-navigation; in 1784, only a year after the invention of the balloon, General Meusnier, of the French army, made designs for an egg-shaped power-balloon to be driven by three airscrews, supported on the rigging between the car and the balloon. To keep the balloon fully inflated and stiff, in order to drive it against the wind, he planned a double envelope, the inner space to contain hydrogen, the outer space to be pumped full of air. He may thus be said to have invented the ballonet, or air-chamber of the balloon, and to be the father of later successful airships. His designs were mere descriptions; they could not be carried out; there was at that time no light engine in existence, and his own suggestion that the airscrews should be worked by manual labour may be called a design for an engine that weighs something over half a ton for every horse-power of energy exerted. In 1798 the French author Beaumarchais recommended the construction of airships in the long shape of a fish. As the years passed, models were made on this plan. In 1834 Mr. Monck Mason exhibited at the Lowther Arcade in London a model airship, thirteen and a half feet long, and six and a half feet in diameter; its airscrew was operated by a spring; it was fitted with horizontal planes for setting its course;and in its very short flights it attained a speed of something over five miles an hour. A larger model, with two airscrews driven by clockwork, was exhibited in 1850 by M. Jullien, a clockmaker of Paris, and flew successfully against a slight breeze. The first successful man-carrying airship was built in 1852 by Henry Giffard, the French engineer, and was flown at Paris on the 24th of September in that year. It was spindle-shaped, with a capacity of 87,000 cubic feet, and a length of 144 feet. The airscrew, ten feet in diameter, was driven by a steam-engine of three horse-power, and the speed attained was about six miles an hour. It would take long to record all the unsuccessful or partially successful experiments in the history of the airship—the elaborately constructed ships which never rose from the ground, the carefully thought out devices which did not work. Progress was very slow and gradual, a mere residue in a history of failures. The first use of the gas-engine was in an Austrian dirigible, which made a single captive ascent at Brunn in 1872, and developed a speed of three miles an hour. After 1870 the reconstituted French Government showed itself willing to encourage aeronautics, and in 1872, at the cost of the State, a large dirigible was built by Dupuy de Lôme, the inventor of the ironclad. This ship, with an airscrew driven by manpower, attained a speed of five and a half miles an hour. The first really successful power-driven airship, that is, the first airship to return to its starting-point at the end of a successful voyage, was built in 1884 for the French army by Captain Krebs and Captain Charles Renard, who subsequently became director of the French department of military aeronautics. This dirigible, namedLa France, was fish-shaped; its length was a hundred and sixty-five feet; its greatest diameter, near the bows, was twenty-seven and a half feet, or one-sixth of its length; it wasfitted with an electric motor of eight and a half horse-power which operated an airscrew of twenty-three feet in diameter, situated in front of the car; it was steered by vertical and horizontal rudders, and made several ascents in the neighbourhood of Meudon. It was the progenitor and type of all later non-rigid dirigibles.
The success ofLa Francebrought Germany into the field. Towards the close of the century a German engineer called Wölfert constructed a dirigible rather smaller than the French airship, with a slightly more powerful engine, and two airscrews of twelve feet in diameter. This was in one respect a forerunner of the most famous of the German airships, for the car, instead of hanging loose, was rigidly connected to the envelope by means of struts. The trials took place in 1896 at Tempelhof, near Berlin; the airship was held captive by ropes; it answered well to its rudders, and attained a speed of about nine miles an hour. Encouraged by this experiment, Dr. Wölfert in the following year built a second smaller dirigible, fitted with a Daimler benzine motor, and made a free ascent in it on the 14th of June 1897, near Berlin. As soon as it was well in the air, the ship caught fire and fell flaming to the ground, killing Dr. Wölfert and his assistant. Later in the same year the first completely rigid dirigible was built by a German called David Schwarz; it was made of thin aluminium sheeting, internally braced by steel wires, and was driven by a twelve horse-power Daimler motor which worked twin airscrews, one on either side. It took the air near Berlin on the 3rd of November 1897, but something went wrong with the airscrew belts, and it was seriously damaged in its hasty descent. Thereupon the crowd of people who had assembled to applaud it fell upon it, and wrecked it. The behaviour of the crowd deserves a passing mention in any historyof flight; it was not the least of the ordeals of the early aeronaut. The aeroplane or airship pilot who disappointed the expectations of his public found no better treatment than Christian and Faithful met with in Bunyan's Vanity Fair. There is here no question of national weaknesses; in France and Germany, in England and America, the thing has happened again and again. If an ascent was announced, and was put off because the weather was bad, the crowd jeered, and hooted, and threw stones. On more than one occasion a pilot has been driven by the taunts of the crowd to attempt an impossible ascent; and has met his death. If a damaged machine fell to earth, the crowd often wreaked their vengeance on it, as deer fall upon a wounded comrade. The men who made up the crowd were most of them kind and trustworthy in their private relations, and in matters that they understood were not unreasonable or inconsiderate. But aerial navigation was a new thing, and their attitude to it was wholly spectacular. They came to see it because they craved excitement, and under the influence of that cruel passion they were capable of the worst excesses of the Roman populace at a gladiatorial show.
In the years that joined the centuries, that is, from 1898 to 1903, aviation seemed a forlorn hope, but there was great activity in the construction of airships, and something like a race for supremacy between France and Germany. In 1898 the Brazilian, Alberto Santos Dumont, made his first gallant appearance in an airship of his own construction. Born in 1873, the son of a prosperous coffee-planter of San Paulo in Brazil, Santos Dumont was a young and wealthy amateur, gifted with mechanical genius, and insensible to danger. The accidents and perils that he survived in his many aerial adventures would have killed a cat. One of his airships collapsed and fell with him on tothe roofs of Paris. Another collapsed and fell with him into the Mediterranean. A third caught fire in the air, and he beat out the flames with his Panama hat. He survived these and other mishaps, unhurt, and after making more than a hundred ascents in airships, turned his attention to aeroplanes, and was the first man to rise from French soil in a flying machine. From his boyhood mechanisms had attracted him; he was well acquainted with all the machines on his father's plantation, and he records an observation that he made there—the only bad machine on the plantation, he says, was an agitating sieve; the good machines all worked on the rotary principle. He became a champion of the wheel, and of the rotary principle. There was something of the fierceness of theological dispute in the controversies of these early days. The wheel, it was pointed out, is not in nature; it is a pedantic invention of man. Birds do not employ it to fly with, nor fish to swim with. The naturalist school of aeronauts declared against it. In 1892 M. A. le Compagnon made experiments, not very successfully, in Paris, with a captive dirigible balloon driven by a pair of oscillating wings. As late as 1904 Mr. Thomas Moy, in a paper read to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, maintained that the greatest hindrances to the solution of the problem of mechanical flight have always been the balloon and the airscrew. Mr. William Cochrane, in a paper read a few months earlier, laid it down that the airscrew must give place to a more efficient form of propulsion. Utterances like these help to explain the fervour with which Santos Dumont, in the book calledMy Airships(1904), defends the rotary principle, which is the life of machines. Like the Wrights, he believed in practice, and was a skilled and experienced balloonist before he attempted to navigate an airship. His first airship was almost absurdly small; it had littlemore than six thousand feet of cubic capacity, was cigar-shaped, and was driven by a three and a half horse-power petrol motor. The others followed in rapid succession. M. Deutsch de la Meurthe had offered a prize of a hundred thousand francs for the first airship that should rise from the Aero Club ground at St. Cloud and voyage round the Eiffel Tower, returning within half an hour to its starting-point. On the 19th of October 1901 the prize was won by Santos Dumont in the sixth of his airships. The ship had over twenty-two thousand feet of cubic capacity; its length was more than five times its diameter; and it was driven by a twelve horse-power petrol motor. It travelled six and three-quarter miles within the half-hour, part of the journey being accomplished against a wind of about twelve miles an hour. This achievement quickened interest in airships and gained a European fame for Santos Dumont. His later airships were modelled on the egg rather than the cigar; the smallest of these was so perfectly under control that he was able, he says, to navigate it by night through the streets of Paris.
The development of the airship continued for many years to pay toll in wreckage and loss of life. In 1902 three notable airships were built and flown in France; two of these were destroyed in the air above Paris, within a few minutes of their first ascent. Senhor Augusto Severo, a Brazilian, made a spindle-shaped airship, ninety-eight feet long, driven by two airscrews, placed one at each end of a framework which formed the longitudinal axis of the airship. It ascended on the 12th of May, and when it had reached a height of thirteen hundred feet, exploded in flames. Senhor Severo and his assistant perished in it. The other ship was designed by Baron Bradsky, secretary to the German Embassy in Paris; its total weight was made exactly equivalent to the weight of the air that itdisplaced, and it was to be raised by the operation of an airscrew rotating horizontally under the car. By the action of this screw the car itself began to rotate, and to drag the ship round with it; the resistance of the air on the body of the ship put too great a strain on the steel wires by which the car was suspended; they broke, and from a height of many hundred feet Baron Bradsky and his engineer, M. Morin, fell to earth with the car, and were killed. This second disaster happened on the 13th of October 1902, at Stains, near Paris. Twelve days later, on the 25th of October, a much more fortunate airship, the dirigible built for the brothers Lebaudy, made its first ascent at Moisson. This vessel was more successful than any of its predecessors, and became the model for airships of the semi-rigid type. It was fish-shaped, with a capacity of more than eighty thousand cubic feet, and was driven by a forty horse-power Daimler petrol motor, which worked two airscrews, eight feet in diameter, at a rate exceeding a thousand revolutions a minute. The lower part of the envelope was flat, and secured to a rigid metal framework; six steel tubes, attached to this framework, supported the car below, and, besides distributing the load, conveyed the thrust of the airscrew to the ship above. In the course of a year the ship made twenty-eight return journeys, covering distances up to twenty-two miles. In November 1903 it broke all records, first by making the longest voyage that had ever been made by a navigable balloon, that is, from Moisson to Paris, a distance of about forty miles, and next, a week later, by successfully combating a wind of more than twenty miles an hour. 'Aerial navigation', said Colonel Renard, who witnessed this trial, 'is no longer a Utopia.' After a time the ship was taken over by the French army, and its immediate Lebaudy successors,La Patrieof 1906 andLa Républiqueof 1908, also became militaryairships. Both were wrecked after a short career, but the military airship had made good its promise, and three new airship-building firms were established in France. In 1902 the Astra Company, in 1909 and 1910 the Zodiac Company and the Clément-Bayard Company, began to build airships, some for the French army and some for foreign powers.
Meanwhile, at the time when Santos Dumont was gaining credit for the smallest airship ever known, the largest known airship had been designed and launched in Germany. On the 2nd of July 1900 the first Zeppelin made its trial trip from the floating shed at Manzell, near Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance. When the Great War shall be only a faded memory, when the sufferings of millions of men and women shall be condensed into matter for handbooks, and their sacrifices shall be expressed only in arithmetical figures, certain incidents and names, because they caught the popular imagination, will still be narrated and repeated. The names that will live are the names that symbolize the causes for which they stood. Edith Cavell will never be forgotten; when she persevered in her work of mercy, and calmly faced the ultimate cruelties of a monstrous system, all that was best in the war seemed to find expression in that lonely passion. She was brought home to England in a warship, and was carried to her grave on a gun-carriage, under the Union Jack, because her cause was her country's cause, and England claimed a title in her sacrifice. It is a far cry from Edith Cavell to the old soldier who gave Germany the giant airship, but the Zeppelin will also be remembered, because the popular imagination, which is often both just and fanciful, found a symbol of Germany's cause in this engine of terror, so carefully and admirably planned down to the minutest detail, so impressive by its bulk, so indiscriminate in its destructive action, andso frail. Its inventor was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a Lieutenant-General in the German army. His first balloon ascent had been made during the American Civil War, in one of the military balloons of the Federal army. Later on, in the Franco-Prussian War, he distinguished himself by his daring cavalry reconnaissances in Alsace. At about that time there was in Alsace a Frenchman named Spiess, who had drawn a design for a rigid airship not unlike the later Zeppelin, and had endeavoured, without success, to patent it. The suggestion has been made, but with no proof, that Count Zeppelin may have seen Spiess's plans, and borrowed from them. If so, the borrowed idea took long in maturing. It was not until 1898 that the Count went to work on a large scale, and formed a company with a capital of a million marks. It was not until 1908, after ten years of struggle and disaster, that the German Government made him a grant for the continuance of his experiments, and the German people, impressed by his pertinacity and courage in misfortune, raised for him a subscription of three hundred thousand pounds, to enable him to build the great airship works at Friedrichshafen. From this time the Zeppelin was a national ship. Sheds to harbour airships were built at strategic points on the western and eastern fronts, and plans were set on foot to house naval Zeppelins at Heligoland, Emden, and Kiel. With characteristic German thoroughness a network of weather stations on German soil, and, it is believed, of secret weather reports from other countries, was provided for the guidance of airship pilots. All this was a monument to the perseverance, which might almost be called obstinacy, of the indomitable Count. He built enormous and costly airships, one after another; one after another they were wrecked or burnt, and then he built more. The German people watchedhim as King Robert the Bruce watched the spider, with a scepticism that was gradually turned into wonder, till, in the end, when disaster after disaster found him willing patiently to begin again, they resolved to make him their teacher and to take a lesson from him.
Count Zeppelin was about sixty years old when he began to make airships; he had been long studying the problem and preparing his plans; so that his many airships do not much differ among themselves in general design, and a description of the first gives a fair enough idea of its successors. It was a pencil-shaped rigid structure, about four hundred and twenty feet long, with a diameter almost exactly one-eleventh part of its length. The framework, built of aluminium, consisted of sixteen hoops, connected by longitudinal pieces, and kept rigid by diagonal wire stays. Before it was covered it resembled a vast bird-cage, and looked as frail as a cobweb, but was stronger and stiffer than it looked. It was divided by aluminium bulkheads into seventeen compartments; of these all but the two end compartments contained separate balloons or gas-bags. Two or three of these might collapse without completely destroying the buoyancy of the ship. The whole structure was covered with a fabric of rubberized cotton. A triangular latticed aluminium keel ran along below, to give strength to the ship, and to furnish a passage-way from end to end. At points about a third of the way from either end of the ship spaces in the keel were made for the two cars, in each of which was a sixteen horse-power Daimler motor driving two small high velocity airscrews, one on each side of the ship. The lateral steering was done by a large vertical rudder, placed aft. The longitudinal balance was controlled in several ways. In the first ship a heavy sliding weight in the keel was moved at will, fore and aft. This wassupplemented or superseded in later ships by four sets of elevating planes, two sets in the fore-part and two sets aft. An advantage of the rigid ship is that she can tilt herself without danger from the pressure of the gas on the higher end. Moreover, she can be driven at a very high speed, and the gas-bags, being housed in the compartments and protected from the outer air, are less liable to sudden contraction and expansion caused by variations of temperature.
The great disadvantage of the rigid type has hitherto been that in bad weather the airship cannot land. A non-rigid airship in a nasty wind can land and deflate itself at once by ripping the panel in the envelope, at no greater price than the loss of its gas, and probably some damage to its car. To land in a rigid ship is at best a ticklish business; indeed, the rigid airship is in exactly the same case as a large sea-going vessel; its chief dangers are from the land, which it cannot touch with impunity. Its troubles have been greatly diminished, since the war, by the development of the mooring-mast, which does away with the necessity of housing the ship after every flight. The prevailing type of weather in this country is unsettled, and the changes in the force and direction of the wind are rapid and numerous. The landing and housing of an airship demands hundreds of men for its performance, and is not safely to be undertaken in a wind that blows more than eighteen miles an hour. A staff of from eight to ten men is sufficient to anchor a large airship to a mooring-mast, where it has been proved by experiment that she can safely ride out a wind that blows fifty miles an hour. At Pulham, our largest airship station, which was taken over from the Royal Air Force by the Controller-General of Civil Aviation in December 1920, a number of valuable experiments have since been carried out with an improvised mooring-mast, and it has beenshown that with a properly designed and constructed mast, fitted with adequate receiving gear and hauling apparatus, there will be no difficulty in landing the largest rigid airships in a wind of from thirty-five to forty miles an hour. This spells an immense advance. Sheds will still be necessary for overhauls and repairs, as a dry dock is necessary for sea-going vessels. But an airship on service may be moored to the mast, as a sea-going vessel is moored to a quay, and can take on board or discharge cargo, passengers, and fuel.
The trial trip of the first Zeppelin was short, because of accidents to the steering-gear, but on the whole was not unsuccessful. The ship was perfectly stable, and in its voyage of three and a half miles proved that it could make headway against a wind of sixteen miles an hour. A second ascent, lasting for an hour and twenty minutes, was made on the 17th of October 1900. These trials were of value in discovering the faults of the ship; in the following year it was broken up, and Count Zeppelin went to work again. In his second ship of 1905 the power of each engine was increased to eighty-five horse-power, and other improvements were made. This ship suffered many minor mishaps. At last, in January 1906, it ascended over Lake Constance to a height of 1,800 feet; then the motors failed, the helm jammed; when the ship attempted to descend the ground was frozen and the anchors would not hold, it was driven against some trees, and a high wind arising in the night made it a total wreck.
The following list shows the number of Zeppelin airships built up to the outbreak of the war, and the fate of each of them:
The list is full of wreckage; what it does not show is the immense progress made in a few years. As early as 1907 Count Zeppelin made a voyage of eight hours in his third airship, covering 211 miles. In 1909 he voyaged, in stages, from Friedrichshafen to Berlin, landing at Tegel in the presence of the Emperor on the 29th of August, and returning safely to Friedrichshafen by the 2nd of September. But the growing efficiency of the Zeppelin and the growing confidence of the German public are best seen in the records of passenger-carrying flights. The Zeppelin Company, being founded and supported by national enterprise, did not sell any ships to foreign powers. For passenger-carrying purposes it supplied ships to the subsidiary company usually called the Delag (that is, the Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien-Gesellschaft), which had its headquarters at Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Delag acquired six Zeppelin airships, which, unlike the military and naval ships, bore names. A record of the voyages made by theViktoria Luise, theHansa, and theSachsenwill show how rapidly the German people were familiarized with the Zeppelin, and how safe air-travel became, when safety was essential, as it is in all passenger-carrying enterprises. TheViktoria Luisemade her first trip on the 4th of March 1912, with twenty-three passengers on board, from Friedrichshafen to Frankfort-on-the-Main—a distance of about two hundred miles, which she covered in seven and a half hours. She made her hundredth trip on the 23rd of June 1912; her two-hundredth on the 21st of October in the same year; in the following year her three-hundredth trip was made on the 30th of June, and her four-hundredth on the 26th of November. In these four hundred trips she carried 8,551 persons and travelled 29,430 miles. Some of them were made over the sea; on the 27th of June, for instance,she left Hamburg in the morning, and reached Cuxhaven in about two hours. There she picked up with a Hamburg-America liner starting for New York, and accompanied the steamer for some distance; then she steered for Heligoland, and flying round the island very low was greeted with cheers by the inhabitants. Part of her return journey was made against a head-wind of sixteen miles an hour, and she reached Hamburg after a voyage of eight hours, during which she had covered a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles. TheHansa, beginning in July 1912, by the end of 1913 had made two hundred and seventy-five trips, carrying 5,697 persons and travelling 22,319 miles. TheSachsen, beginning in May 1913, before the end of the year had made two hundred and six trips, carrying 4,857 persons and travelling about 13,700 miles. A wrecked Zeppelin is such a picture of destruction, such a vast display of twisted metal and rags lying wreathed across a landscape, that those who see it are apt to get an exaggerated idea of the dangers of airship travel. With all his misfortunes, it was Count Zeppelin's luck for many years that no life was lost among those who travelled in his ships.
In May 1906, before Count Zeppelin's enterprise had received the stamp of Imperial and national approval, there was formed, under the inspiration of the German Emperor, a society for airship development. The success of the Lebaudy airship in France prompted the construction in Germany of two types of semi-rigid airship—the Parseval and the Gross. Only four of the latter type were built, and all four suffered mishap; the last and best of them, built in 1911, is said to have shown a better performance than the best contemporary Zeppelin. The Parseval was designed in 1906 by Major August von Parseval, of the Third Bavarian Infantry Regiment, whoretired from the German army in 1907 in order to devote himself entirely to scientific work. He was already famous for the kite balloon, which he had invented in collaboration with Hauptmann Bartsch von Sigsfeld, who died in 1906. The Parseval kite balloon was adopted or imitated by all other nations during the war. The Parseval airship was as good an airship, of the non-rigid type, as had ever been built; it was supplanted, later on, by the rigid type, because an airship's lift depends on its size, and very large airships could not be built without a rigid framework. The society for airship development bought up Major von Parseval's plans, and began to construct Parseval airships. The statutes of the society forbade it to sell ships for profit, so an allied company was formed, the Luftfahrzeugbau-Gesellschaft, with works at Bitterfeld, and a subsidiary company, the L.V.G., or Luftverkehrs-Gesellschaft, to exploit Parseval airships for passenger-carrying, with its headquarters at Berlin and sheds at Johannisthal. Two passenger-carrying ships were built, theStollwerkin 1910, and theCharlottein 1912. The Parseval ships, perhaps because, being non-rigid, they were held to be inferior to the Zeppelins, were freely sold to foreign powers—one to the Austrian army in 1909, one to the Russian and one to the Turkish army in 1910, one to the Japanese army in 1912, another to the Russian and two to the Italian army in 1913; last of all, in the same year, one to the British Admiralty. Some eighteen Parseval airships were built and launched between 1909 and 1913. The third great airship-building company in Germany was the Schütte-Lanz Company, with its factory in Mannheim. It was named from Heinrich Lanz, the founder of machine works near Mannheim, who supplied the money, and Professor Schütte, of theTechnical University, Danzig, who supplied the skill. Its rigid airships were made of wood; they were built from 1912 onwards expressly for the uses of the army and navy, and they played a great part in the war.
Those who were responsible for the development of the airship in Germany took the people into partnership, and devoted themselves largely to passenger-carrying. The airship became popular; and the officers and men who worked it were practised in navigation all the year round. The people, for their part, regarded the Zeppelin with the enthusiasm of patriotic fervour. France had taken the lead and had shown the way with the dirigible, but Germany, by recruiting the people for the cause, soon out-distanced her. The passenger ships served as training-ships for crews, and, if occasion should arise, were readily convertible to warlike purposes. Yet things changed and moved so fast, that before the war broke out, although the German people still believed that the Zeppelin gave them the sovereignty of the air, the German Government had been troubled by doubts, had changed its policy, and was striving hard to overtake the French in the construction and manning of army aeroplanes. The consequence was that the war found Germany better provided with aeroplanes for use on the western front than with airships for operations oversea. The German Emperor, speaking to a wounded soldier, is reported to have said that he never willed this war. One proof that this war was not the war he willed may be found in the state of preparation of the German air force. If war with England had been any part of the German plan, German airships would have been more numerous, and would have been ready for immediate action, as the armies that invaded Belgium were ready. TheGerman theory was that England was not prepared for war, which, with certain brilliant and crucial exceptions, was true, and that therefore England would not go to war, which proved to be false. The French were supplying themselves with a great force of aeroplanes, and for all that could be known, air operations on the western front might determine the fortunes of the campaign. So the German Government turned its attention to machines that are heavier than air.
What had brought about this situation was the rapid and surprising development of the aeroplane by France. Here it is necessary to go back and take up the story again at the beginning of those few and headlong years.
French aviation derives directly from Lilienthal and collaterally from the Wrights. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; but the martyrs, for the most part, die in faith, without assurance of the harvest that is to come. When Lilienthal was killed he can hardly have known that his example and his careful records would so soon bear fruit in other countries. He was regarded by his fellow-countrymen as a whimsical acrobat, who took mad risks and paid the price. But as soon as he was dead, the story of what he had done got abroad, and began to raise up for him disciples and successors, who carried on his experiments. The chief of these in France was Captain F. Ferber, an officer of artillery and a student of science, who from 1896 onwards was a teacher in the military school at Fontainebleau. It was in 1898 that he first came across an account of Lilienthal; the reading of it impressed him as deeply as it impressed the Wrights. Here was a man, he thought, who had discovered the right way of learning to fly; if only the way were followed, success was sure. Like the Wrights, Ferber lays stress chiefly on practice. It was he, not Lilienthal,who was the author of the saying, 'To design a flying machine is nothing; to build one is nothing much; to try it in the air is everything'. In the book on aviation which he wrote shortly before his death in 1909 he expounds his creed and narrates his experiences. His mathematical knowledge, he says, served him well, for it saved him from being condemned as an empiric by those dogmatic men of science, very numerous in France (and, he might have added, in the universities of all countries), who believe that science points the way to practice, whereas the most that science can do, says Ferber, is to follow in the wake of practice, and interpret it. So he set himself to work on a plan as old as the world—first to create the facts, and then to expound them in speech and writing.
He began to build gliders, but had no success with them until he found out for himself what he had not gathered from his reading of Lilienthal—that an up-current of wind is necessary for a prolonged glide. His first successful flight was made with his fourth glider on the 7th of December 1901. He got into touch with Mr. Chanute, another of Lilienthal's scattered disciples, and through him was supplied with papers and photographs concerning the gliding experiments of the Wrights. These were a revelation to him, and he used them in making his fifth glider, which was a great improvement on its predecessors. He lectured at Lyons to the Aero Club of the Rhone on the progress of aviation by means of gliding, and published his lecture in theRevue d'Artillerieof March 1904. About this time the air was full of rumours of flight. M. Ernest Archdeacon, of Paris, took up the subject with ardour, wrote many articles on it, and encouraged others to work at it. A young man, called Gabriel Voisin, who heard Captain Ferber lecture at Lyons, came on to the platform after the lecture and declared that hewished to devote his life to the cause of aviation. The next morning he started for Paris, and with the help of M. Archdeacon founded the earliest aeroplane factory in France—the firm of the brothers Voisin, which became the mainstay of early French aviation.
Ferber himself was carrying out a series of experiments at Nice with an aeroplane which he fitted with a six horse-power engine and suspended from a tall mast, when he was invited by Colonel Renard to help with the work of the official research laboratory at Chalais Meudon. He joined the staff, but found that the officials of a Government organization are as ill qualified as the theorists of a university for progress in practical invention. The lower members of the hierarchy are men under orders, who do what they are told to do; the higher members are hampered by having to work through subordinates, who often do not understand their aims and take no particular interest in the work in hand. Nevertheless, he improved his aeroplane, stabilizing it by means of a long tail, and fitting it with wheels for landing, in place of the skids which were used by the Wrights. Then, like those who had gone before him, he was held up by the question of the engine. Engineers are a conservative race of men, and perhaps the perfected aeroplane would still be waiting for a suitable engine if they had not been prompted to innovation by the fashion of motor-racing. There are strange links in the chain of cause and effect; the pneumatic tyre made the motor-bicycle possible; for motor-bicycle races a light engine was devised which later on was adapted to the needs of the aeroplane. Ferber made acquaintance with M. Levavasseur, who had invented an engine of eighty horse-power weighing less than five pounds per horse-power, and had won many races with it. This engine was named theAntoinettein honour of the daughter ofM. Gastambide, a capitalist, who had supplied the inventor with funds. The most famous of early French aviators, Santos Dumont, Farman, Blériot, Delagrange, and others, owed much to this engine. Ferber might have had it before any of them, for M. Levavasseur offered to build it for him—twenty-four horse-power with a weight of about a hundred and twelve pounds—but public moneys could not be advanced for an engine that did not exist, so the other pioneers, who had followed Ferber in gliding experiments, preceded him in flying. In 1906 Ferber obtained Government permission to join the Antoinette firm for a period, and by 1908 he was flying in an aeroplane of his own design. He was killed in September 1909, on the aerodrome of Beuvrequen, near Boulogne, by capsizing on rough ground in the act of alighting. His own estimate of his work was modest; he had acted, he said, as a ferment and a popularizer, and had helped to put France on the right track; but it was his pride that he belonged to the great school, the school of Lilienthal, Pilcher, Chanute, and the Wrights, who went to work by a progressive method of practical experiment, who combined daring with patience, and found their way into the air.
Ferber, after his visit to America, had failed to induce the French authorities to purchase the Wright aeroplane, which he had never seen, but which, from descriptions and photographs, he was able to reconstruct, much as a geologist reconstructs an animal from fossil bones. The refusal of the French Government to purchase and the withdrawal of the Wrights from their public experiments gave France a period of respite for two years, during which time French aviation rapidly developed on lines of its own. At the back of this movement was M. Archdeacon, who as early as 1903 had established a fund and had offered a cup as a prize for the first officially recorded flight of more than twenty-five metres. The Voisin brothers, Gabriel andCharles, having set up their factory at Billancourt-sur-Seine, built machines for him, box-kites and aeroplanes. After a time the Voisin brothers went into business on their own account, and employed M. Colliex as their engineer. Their earliest customers, Léon Delagrange, who had been trained as a sculptor, and Henri Farman, who had combined the professions of cyclist, painter, and motor-racer, were distinguished early French flyers. That both these men had been artists seems to bear out the favourite contention of Wilbur Wright and of Captain Ferber. To be an artist a man must create or initiate; the accumulation of knowledge will do little for him. A politician or a lawyer can reach to high distinction in his profession without the power of initiating anything. It is enough for him to handle other men's ideas, to combine them and balance them, to study and conciliate other men, and to suggest a compromise. But the artist, like the scientific discoverer, must act on his own ideas, and do battle, single-handed, with the nature of things.
The earliest experiments of M. Archdeacon and the Voisins were made with man-carrying Hargrave box-kites, or with gliders made on the same principle, which were towed in the air behind a fast motor-boat travelling down the Seine. The next step was to fit an aeroplane with an engine and wheels so that it might attempt to rise from the ground. The Voisins collaborated with most of the early French aviators, with Louis Blériot and Robert Esnault-Pelterie, as well as with Farman and Delagrange. At one time they were closely associated with Blériot, at another time with Farman. Their first machines depended for lateral stability on the vertical panels of the box-kite structure. This was insufficient, and the French designers had to grapple, one by one, with all the difficulties that had been met and conquered by the Wrights. They had this advantage, that the design of the Wrights' machinewas, though not exactly, yet in its main features known to them. All the early aeroplanes which mounted their elevators in front of the machine may, without much doubt, be affiliated to the Wrights. The elevator is not best placed in front; its action in that position is too quick and violent, but it is under the eye of the operator, and with cool nerves he can learn to work it.
While the group of enthusiasts who gathered round the Voisins were designing and experimenting, Santos Dumont, having turned his attention to machines heavier than air, suddenly appeared among them, made the first successful flight over French soil, and carried off the Archdeacon prize. His machine was a biplane, built on the box-kite principle, with three vertical panels on each side between the planes, and a box-kite elevator projecting far in front. The wings were fixed at a considerable dihedral angle, and the engine was a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette. In his first trial, which took place at Bagatelle on the 23rd of July 1906, Santos Dumont attached a spindle-shaped balloon to the upper surface of the machine, to help it into the air. The combination of the two modes he soon found to be impossible; with the balloon attached to it the machine could not develop speed enough to support itself in the air. His next step was to practise the machine by running it down an inclined cable; then he discarded as much weight as he could, doubled the horse-power of the motor, and began to taxi freely along the ground. On a day in September the machine raised itself for a very short space into the air. The first officially witnessed flight, of about eighty yards, took place on the 23rd of October 1906, and gained the Archdeacon Cup. About a month later he made a flight of more than a furlong. Thereafter he established himself at Saint-Cyr and developed a machine of the monoplane type, with a long tail. But he was too far from the resources ofParis, and when, on the 13th of January 1908, Henri Farman overtook his records and won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a flight of one kilometre in a closed circuit, Santos Dumont lost his leading position in the world of aviation, after a brief and meteoric career which has stamped his name on history.
During these early years the Voisin brothers had the foresight and wisdom to put themselves wholly at the service of others. The promise of flight had taken hold of many minds in France and there was no lack of inventors and would-be inventors who wished to test their own ideas and to have machines built to their own designs. If the Voisins had refused to gratify them, these clients would have disappeared; and the work done for them, though much of it was done in the old blind alleys of horizontal elevating airscrews and wing-flapping machines, yet had this advantage, that it kept the workshop active and made it self-supporting. Inventors are a difficult and jealous people; they received every indulgence from the Voisins. The machines built for them were named after them, though most of the skill and experience that went to the making came from the factory. In the same way M. Archdeacon gave up all practical experiment after 1905 and was content to play the part of the good genius of aviation, presiding at the Aero Club, offering prizes for new achievements, bringing inventors together and encouraging the exchange of ideas. The rapidity of French progress was not a little due to this self-effacing and social instinct, so characteristic of the French spirit, which kept the patron and the engineers in the background, and brought order and progress out of the chaos of personal rivalry.
Progress was slow at first. The experiments made in 1906 by Blériot in conjunction with the Voisins were made, for safety, on the water of the Lake of Enghien, but it proved impossible to get up sufficient speed onthe water to rise into the air. In 1907 a greater success attended the experiments made at Vincennes, at Bagatelle, and at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where Henri Farman had obtained permission to use the army manœuvre ground and had built himself a hangar, or shed, for his aeroplane. On the 30th of March, at Bagatelle, the Delagrange aeroplane made a flight of sixty metres. A few months later, Farman, on a similar machine fitted with landing-wheels which worked on pivots, like castors, began to make short flights. On the 30th of September he flew for eighty metres. Seeing is believing, but many of those who saw Farman fly did not believe. The machine, they said, was only hopping into the air with the speed it had gathered on the ground; it would never fly. When, on the 26th of October, Farman made a flight of more than seven hundred metres the pessimists found another objection. The machine, they said, would never be able to turn; it could only continue in a straight line. They had hit on a real difficulty, but the Voisins and Farman himself, who, starting without any knowledge of aeroplanes or flying, had soon developed practical ideas of his own, were hard at work to meet it. The Wrights had simplified the handling of a machine by combining the control of the vertical rudder with the control of the wing-warping. In the early Voisin machines there was no wing-warping, and the pilots had to attempt to balance and turn the machine without it; but a rod with a wheel attached to it was used to control both the elevating plane in front and the vertical rudder behind. By turning the wheel the rudder was operated, by moving the rod the elevator was raised or lowered. It was on a machine of this kind that Farman began to practise gradual turning movements. The lateral inclination of the machine was feared and, as much as possible, avoided in these first experiments, though it is not only harmless in turning movements, but isnecessary for their complete success, just as the banking of a motor race-track is necessary to keep the machines on the course. Farman made rapid progress; and, as has been said, by the beginning of 1908 he gained the two thousand pound Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a closed circuit of one kilometre in length. The wonderful skill of this achievement will be fully appreciated only by the best modern pilots, who would not like to be asked to repeat it on a machine unprovided with ailerons (that is to say, hinged flaps on the trailing edge of the planes), and controlled only by the elevator and the rudder. There is nothing very extravagant in dating the conquest of the air, as some French writers have dated it, from the circular flights of Farman. It is true that the Wrights had attained a much higher skill in manœuvring, but they had retired, like Achilles, to their tent, whereas Farman's flight showed the way to many others. In the spring of the same year Delagrange began to execute turning flights; on the 6th of July Farman gained the prize offered by M. Armengaud, the president of the society of aerial navigation, for a flight of a quarter of an hour's duration, and after the arrival of Wilbur Wright at Le Mans progress became so rapid that records were broken week by week and almost day by day. In January 1909 the Aero Club of France issued their first list of pilots' certificates. Eight names, all famous, made up the list—Léon Delagrange, Alberto Santos Dumont, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Henri Farman, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright, Captain Ferdinand Ferber, Louis Blériot. To make this a list of the chief French pioneers, the names of the Wrights would have to be omitted, and the names of some who were not famous pilots but who did much for flying, especially the names of M. Ernest Archdeacon and Gabriel Voisin, would have to be included.
These men, and those who worked for them, gave toFrance her own school of aviation. Louis Blériot and Robert Esnault-Pelterie broke away from what, since the days of Francis Wenham, had been accepted as the orthodox doctrine of the biplane, and, taking the bird for master, devised swift, light, and easily handled monoplanes. The Blériot monoplane, which first flew the Channel; the R.E.P. (or Robert Esnault-Pelterie) monoplane; the Antoinette monoplane, on which Hubert Latham performed his exploits; the small and swift Demoiselle monoplane, designed and flown by Santos Dumont; and the Tellier monoplane, which for a time held the record for cross-country flight—all these made history by their performances in the crowded years from 1908 to 1910. The monoplane is, without any doubt, the prettiest of machines in the air. When Captain Ferber gave this reason to Mr. Chanute for preferring it to the biplane, Mr. Chanute, he says, laughed a good deal at an argument so characteristically French. But there is sense and weight in the argument. No flying animal is half so ugly as the early Wright biplane. In the world of natural fliers beauty and efficiency are one. Purity of line and economy of parts are beautiful and efficient. A good illustration of this may be found in the question of the airscrew. The early French biplanes of the Voisin and Farman type were what would now be called 'pusher' machines; their airscrews operated behind the main planes, and their tails were supported by an open structure of wood or metal which left room for the play of the screw. In this ugly arrangement the loss of efficiency is easy to see. The screw works in a disturbed medium, and the complicated metal-work presents a large resistance to the passage of the machine through the air. The monoplane, from the first, was a 'tractor' machine; its airscrew was in front of the planes, and its body, or fuselage, was covered in and streamlined, so as to offer the least possible resistance to the air.A later difficulty caused by the forward position of the airscrew had nothing to do with flying. When the war came, and machine-guns were mounted on aeroplanes, a clear field was needed for forward firing. This difficulty was ultimately met by the invention of a synchronizing gear, which timed the bullets between the strokes of the airscrew-blades. In all but a few types of machine the airscrew is now retained in the forward position. The debate between monoplane and biplane is not yet concluded; the biplane holds its own because with the same area of supporting surface it is much stronger and more compact than the monoplane.
Instead of wing-warping, which puts a strain on the supporting surfaces and is liable to distort them, the French (to whom Blériot is believed to have shown the way) introduced ailerons, that is, small subsidiary hinged planes attached to the extremities of the wings. By controlling these, one up and the other down, in conjunction with the rudder, the pilot can preserve his lateral balance, and turn the machine to right or left. Later on, these ailerons, when they were borrowed by the Voisin and Farman biplanes, were not fitted to the extremities of the planes, but became hinged flaps forming the extreme section of the trailing edge; and this position they have kept in all modern aeroplanes. An even greater advance was made by the French school in its device for the control of the machine. The machine which Wilbur Wright flew in France was controlled by two upright levers, grasped by the pilot, one in either hand. The left-hand lever moved only backwards and forwards; it controlled the elevator and directed the machine upwards or downwards. The right-hand lever controlled the rudder and the warping of the wings. By moving it backwards or forwards the pilot turned the machine to right or left; by moving it sideways he warped the wings. There is nothing instinctive or natural in these correspondences;the backward and forward movement which in one lever spells up and down in the other spells right and left. It is a testimony to the extraordinary cool-headed skill of the Wrights, and to their endless practice and perseverance, that they were able to fly such a machine in safety, and to outfly their rivals. The French school centralized the control in a single lever with a universal joint attachment at the lower end. The movements of this lever in any direction produced the effects that would instinctively be expected; a backward or forward movement turned the machine upwards or downwards, a sideways movement raised one wing or the other so as to bank the machine or to bring it to a level position again. The vertical rudder was controlled either by a wheel attached to this central lever, or by the pressure of the pilot's feet on a horizontal bar. The French moreover improved the means of taking off and alighting. The early Wright machines were launched on rails, and alighted on skids attached to the machine like the skids of a sledge. To rise into the air again after a forced landing was impossible without special apparatus. By means of wheels elastically fixed to an undercarriage the French inventors made the aeroplane available for cross-country journeys. But the greatest difference between the two types of aeroplane, the American and the French, was their difference in stability. The Wright machine demanded everything of the pilot; it could not fly itself. If the pilot relaxed his attention for a moment, or took his hands from the levers, a crash was the certain result. The machine was a bird which flew with extended bill and without a tail; whereas the French machines had a horizontal tail-plane, which, being held rigidly at a distance from the main planes, gave to the machine a far greater measure of longitudinal stability.
All these advantages told in favour of French aviation, and secured for it progress and achievement.
A few dates and facts may serve to show its rapid progress at a time when it was making history week by week. On the 30th of September 1908 Henri Farman made the first cross-country flight, from Châlons to Rheims, a distance of twenty-seven kilometres, which he covered in twenty minutes. Three days later, at Châlons, he remained in the air for just under three-quarters of an hour, covering twenty-five miles, that is, about forty times the distance that had won him the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize in January. Between April and September of the same year Léon Delagrange had four times in succession raised the world's official records (which, of course, took no note of the Wrights) for duration of flight. On the 31st of October Louis Blériot made the first cross-country circuit flight, from Toury to Artenay and back, a distance of about seventeen miles, in the course of which flight he twice landed and rose again into the air. All these and many similar achievements were dwarfed by Wilbur Wright's performance at the Hunaudières racecourse near Le Mans. His first flight, on Saturday the 8th of August, lasted one minute and forty-seven seconds. Three days later, though he flew for only four minutes, the figures of eight and other manœuvres which he executed in the air caused M. Delagrange, who witnessed them, to remark, 'Eh bien. Nous n'existons pas. Nous sommes battus.' On the last day of the year he flew for two hours and twenty minutes, covering seventy-seven miles. In the intervening time he had beaten the French records for duration, distance, and height. Cross-country work he did not attempt; his machine at that time was ill-fitted for it. During the winter he went to Pau to instruct his first three pupils—the Count de Lambert and MM. Paul Tissandier and Alfred Leblanc.