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Updated: May 11, 2025
Hour after hour, above the glassy Sargasso Sea, the battle went on, the aeroplane ducking and diving and gliding and skimming whenever the dirigible got a good chance to send a fatal projectile into her. From time to time, also, Ben got a chance to send a bullet crashing into the dirigible's gas-bag, and from the actions of the men aboard her they were evidently badly worried by this.
However, as Ben knew, the gas-bag of the dirigible was constructed in sections and the gas manufactured by Constantio was so buoyant that if even one section remained intact it would still serve to sustain the dirigible in the air. But no fight of such a character can endure long. Sooner or later one or the other of the combatants is bound to succumb, and so it was in this case.
It was evident from their implicit obedience that Malvoise was master on the dirigible. As the engine was set going and the ship forged ahead, leaving behind it the wrecked aeroplane and the watery grave of Sanborn, Malvoise called the boys' attention, in a half-joking way, to the damage Ben Stubbs' bullets had done to the gas-bag.
He had never realised before that an airship was not one simple continuous gas-bag containing nothing but gas. Now he saw far above him the backbone of the apparatus and its big ribs, "like the neural and haemal canals," said Kurt, who had dabbled in biology. "Rather!" said Bert appreciatively, though he had not the ghost of an idea what these phrases meant.
Once the airship had been fouled, the aviator would merely have to drive ahead, dragging the wire and its charge across the gas-bag until at last one of the contact levers of the mine was moved by being dragged against some part of the vessel, when the mine would be exploded.
But Ned was not in the regular race, and nobody noticed him. "They've got it," called the excited girls. "It's Harry!" "No, it's Bert!" "'Tisn't either it's Ned!" called John, as the only poor boy in the crowd proudly touched the big empty gas-bag! "Three cheers for Ned!" called Uncle Daniel, for he and Mr. Bobbsey had joined in the crowd.
One of these excursions, made in the autumn of 1875 from Waynesburg, Greene county, Pennsylvania, sufficiently demonstrates, if any demonstration is needed, that a boy's luck and pluck are equal to anything. It had been raining the proverbial pitchforks all day, and the hydrogen oozed into the gas-bag with even more than its accustomed sluggishness.
I left the old man after a hearty hand-shake, a So long! just as in his book, and returned to Philadelphia. Full of the day, I told my policeman at the ferry that I had seen Walt. "That old gas-bag comes here every afternoon.
An airship has no wires and can at the same time slow down and even shut off its engine, so that it need be no more noisy than a motor-car. Engine failure also is not so serious as in an airplane, for the gas-bag will always keep the ship up until there has been a chance for repairs. Up to the present, too, the airship is less of a fair-weather flier than the airplane.
The former was 510 feet in length, cylindrical in form, with a diameter of 48 feet, and divided into 19 gas-bag compartments. The motive power consisted of two 200 horse-power Wolseley engines.
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