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Santos-Dumont's success in aerial navigation is due largely to the gasoline motor, which generated great power in proportion to its weight. A gasoline motor works by a series of explosions, which make the noise that is now heard on every hand. From the gasoline tank, which is always of sufficient capacity for a good long run, a pipe is connected with a device called the carbureter.
The balloon was so much larger that the less expensive but heavier illuminating gas could be used instead of hydrogen. When the air-ship "Santos-Dumont No. 3" collapsed and dumped its navigator into the trees, Santos-Dumont's friends took it upon themselves to stop his dangerous experimenting, but he said nothing, and straightway set to work to plan a new machine.
The story of Santos-Dumont's experiments, however, his adventures and his successes, will show that the problem was not so simple as it seemed. Santos-Dumont was built to jockey a Pegasus or guide an air-ship, for he weighed but a hundred pounds when he made his first ascensions, and added very little live ballast as he grew older.
Imagine a great bag of yellow oiled silk, cigar-shaped, fully inflated with hydrogen gas, but swaying in the morning breeze, and tugging at its restraining ropes: a vast bubble eighty-two feet long, and twelve feel in diameter at its greatest girth. Such was the balloon of Santos-Dumont's first air-ship.
Santos-Dumont's machine consisted essentially of two box-kites, forming the main wings, one on each side of the body, in which the pilot stood, and at the front extremity of which was another movable box-kite to act as elevator and rudder.
Gravity was controlled by shifting weights worked by a cord; rudder and propeller were both placed at the stern. In Santos-Dumont's book there is a certain amount of confusion between the No. 4 and No. 5 airships, until he explains that 'No. 5' is the reconstructed 'No. 4. It was with No. 5 that he won the Encouragement Prize presented by the Scientific Commission of the Paris Aero Club.
The student of dirigible construction is recommended to Santos-Dumont's own book not only as a full record of his work, but also as one of the best stories of aerial navigation that has ever been written.
It was a big box-kite-like machine; this was the second power-driven aeroplane in Europe to fly, for although Santos-Dumont's first machine produced in 1905 was reckoned an unsuccessful design, it had actually got off the ground for brief periods.
The second trial for the Deutsch prize like the first ended in failure, but that failure was so much more dramatic even than the success which attended the third effort that it is worth telling and can best be told in M. Santos-Dumont's own words. The quotation is from his memoir, My Airships: And now I come to a terrible day 8th of August, 1901.
All inventors profit, or should profit, by the experience of others, whether such experience be gained by success or failure. It was found that Santos-Dumont's air-ship lost a considerable amount of gas when driven through the air, and on several occasions the whole craft was in great danger of collapse. To keep the envelope inflated as tightly as possible Mr.
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