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Updated: September 7, 2025
VI." with which Santos-Dumont won the Deutsch prize may fairly be taken as his conception of the finished type of dirigible for one man. In fact his aspirations never soared as high as those of Count Zeppelin, and the largest airship he ever planned called "the Omnibus" carried only four men.
He realised that many things must be learned before he could handle successfully the much more delicate and sensitive elongated gas-bag. In general, Santos-Dumont worked on the theory of the dirigible balloon that is, one that might be controlled and made to go in any direction desired, by means of a motor and propeller carried by a buoyant gas-bag.
The walls bore lightly framed photographs of men famous in the annals of flying, from Santos-Dumont and the Wrights to Gruynemer and Nosworthy; also pictures of famous machines the Spad, Bristol Fighter, Sopwith Pup, 120-135, and others. More conspicuous than any of these was a framed copy of the International Air Commission's latest condensed rules. Signs of recent occupancy were not wanting.
But setting aside for the time the work done by Santos-Dumont with machines heavier than air, let us consider his triumphs with balloons at the opening of his career. He had come to France about forty years after Henry Giffard had demonstrated the practicability of navigating a balloon 144 feet long and 34 feet in diameter with a three-horse-power steam-engine.
Despite his great personal popularity the airship built by Santos-Dumont never appealed to the French military authorities. Probably this was largely due to the fact that he never built one of a sufficient size to meet military tests. The amateur in him was unconquerable.
In these works there may also be seen the frame of the famous Santos-Dumont air-ship, referred to later in this book. In general appearance the first Spencer air-ship was very similar to the airship flown by Santos-Dumont; that is, there was the cigar-shaped balloon, the small engine, and the screw propellor for driving the craft forward.
With but three minutes left and some distance to go, the great dirigible balloon got up speed and rushed for the goal. At eleven and a half minutes past three, twenty-nine minutes and thirty-one seconds after starting, Santos-Dumont crossed the line, the winner of the Deutsch Prize. And so the young Brazilian accomplished that which had been declared impossible.
Alberto Santos-Dumont, even in those early days, was sure that if man did not fly then he would some day. Many an imaginative boy with a mechanical turn of mind has dreamed and planned wonderful machines that would carry him triumphantly over the tree-tops, and when the tug of the kite-string has been felt has wished that it would pull him up in the air and carry him soaring among the clouds.
The Voisins, like the Wrights, based their designs largely on the experimental work of Lilienthal, Langley, Chanute, and others, though they also carried out tests on the lifting properties of aerofoils in a wind tunnel of their own. Their first machines, like those of Santos-Dumont, showed the effects of experimenting with box-kites, some of which they had built for M. Ernest Archdeacon in 1904.
Santos-Dumont stood quietly in his basket, his hand on the controlling cords of the great rudder on the end of the balloon; near at hand was a bag of loose sand, while small bags of ballast were packed around his feet. Steadily she rose and began to move against the wind with the slow grace of a great bird, while the little man in the basket steered right or left, up or down, as he willed.
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