pe a couple of months with Sir Peter
Rumchase. My uncle found part of the money for these developments; he
was growing interested and competitive in this business because of
Lord Boom's prize and the amount of reclame involved, and it was at his
request that I named my first navigable balloon Lord Roberts Alpha.

Lord Roberts A very nearly terminated all my investigations. My idea
both in this and its more successful and famous younger brother, Lord
Roberts B, was to utilise the idea of a contractile balloon with a rigid
flat base, a balloon shaped rather like an inverted boat that should
almost support the apparatus, but not quite. The gas-bag was of the
chambered sort used for these long forms, and not with an internal
balloonette. The trouble was to make the thing contractile. This I
sought to do by fixing a long, fine-meshed silk net over it that
was fastened to be rolled up on two longitudinal rods. Practically I
contracted my sausage gas-bag by netting it down. The ends were too
complex for me to describe here, but I thought them out elaborately and
they were very carefully planned. Lord Roberts A was furnished with a
single big screw forward, and there was a rudder aft. The engine was the
first one to be, so to speak, right in the plane of the gas-bag. I lay
immediately under the balloon on a sort of glider framework, far away
from either engine or rudder, controlling them by wire-pulls constructed
on the principle of the well-known Bowden brake of the cyclist.

But Lord Roberts A has been pretty exhaustively figured and described in
various aeronautical publications. The unforeseen defect was the badness
of the work in the silk netting. It tore aft as soon as I began to
contract the balloon, and the last two segments immediately bulged
through the hole, exactly as an inner tube will bulge through the
ruptured outer cover of a pneumatic tire, and then the sharp edge of the
torn net cut the oiled-silk of the distended last segment along a weak
seam and burst it with a loud report.

Up to that point the whole thing had been going on extremely well. As a
navigable balloon and before I contracted it, the Lord Roberts A was an
unqualified success. It had run out of the shed admirably at nine or
ten miles an hour or more, and although there was a gentle southwester
blowing, it had gone up and turned and faced it as well as any craft of
the sort I have ever seen.

I lay in my customary glider position, horizontal and