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One, the Clement-Bayard II., was of the rigid type and built for the government; the other, a Lebaudy, was non-rigid and paid for by popular subscriptions raised in England by the Morning Post. Both were safely delivered near London having made their voyages of approximately 242 miles each at a speed exceeding forty miles an hour. These were the first airships acquired for British use.
The under side of the balloon consists of a flat rigid framework, to which the planes are attached, and from which the car, the engine, and propeller are suspended. As the rigid type of dirigible is chiefly advocated in Germany, so the semi-rigid craft is most popular in France. The famous Lebaudy air-ships are good types of semi-rigid vessels.
France had to wait for the Lebaudy brothers, just as Germany had to wait for Zeppelin and Parseval. Two German experimenters, Baumgarten and Wolfert, fitted a Daimler motor to a dirigible balloon which made its first ascent at Leipzig in 1880.
In the same year Paul Haenlein, working in Vienna, produced an airship which was a direct forerunner of the Lebaudy type, 164 feet in length, 30 feet greatest diameter, and with a cubic capacity of 85,000 feet.
The desert caravan trade is not what it was since the French occupied Timbuctoo and closed the oases of Tuat; but I saw some caravans arrive from the interior one of them from the sandy region where Mons. Lebaudy has set up his kingdom. How happy men and beasts seemed to be.
On May of the following year, the Lebaudy was brought out for a flight, but, in landing, the guide rope fouled in trees and sheds and brought the airship broadside on to the wind; she was driven into some trees and wrecked to such an exteent that rebuilding was considered an impossibility.
For the great airships with which Germany attacked New York in her last gigantic effort for world supremacy before humanity realized that world supremacy was a dream were the lineal descendants of the Zeppelin airship that flew over Lake Constance in 1906, and of the Lebaudy navigables that made their memorable excursions over Paris in 1907 and 1908.
Among them are the semi-rigid Parseval and Gross types which found great favour among the military authorities during the war. The latter is merely an adaptation of the highly successful French ship the Lebaudy, but the Parseval is the result of a slow evolution from an ordinary balloon.
The vessel was eventually taken over by the French Government and may be counted the first dirigible airship considered fit on its tests for military service. Later vessels of the Lebaudy type were the 'Patrie' and 'Republique, in which both size and method of construction surpassed those of the two first attempts.
The increase in power of the engines fitted to airships has made steady progress from the outset; Haenlein's engine developed about 6 horse-power; the Santos-Dumont airship of 1898 was propelled by a motor of 4 horse-power; in 1902 the Lebaudy airship was fitted with an engine of 40 horse-power, while, in 1910, the Lebaudy brothers fitted an engine of nearly 300 horsepower to the airship they were then constructing 1,400 horse-power was common in the airships of the War period, and the later British rigids developed yet more.
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