t would take long
to record all the unsuccessful or partially successful experiments in
the history of the airship--the elaborately constructed ships which
never rose from the ground, the carefully thought out devices which did
not work. Progress was very slow and gradual, a mere residue in a
history of failures. The first use of the gas-engine was in an Austrian
dirigible, which made a single captive ascent at Brunn in 1872, and
developed a speed of three miles an hour. After 1870 the reconstituted
French Government showed itself willing to encourage aeronautics, and in
1872, at the cost of the State, a large dirigible was built by Dupuy de
Lome, the inventor of the ironclad. This ship, with an airscrew driven
by manpower, attained a speed of five and a half miles an hour. The
first really successful power-driven airship, that is, the first airship
to return to its starting-point at the end of a successful voyage, was
built in 1884 for the French army by Captain Krebs and Captain Charles
Renard, who subsequently became director of the French department of
military aeronautics. This dirigible, named _La France_, was
fish-shaped; its length was a hundred and sixty-five feet; its greatest
diameter, near the bows, was twenty-seven and a half feet, or one-sixth
of its length; it was fitted with an electric motor of eight and a half
horse-power which operated an airscrew of twenty-three feet in diameter,
situated in front of the car; it was steered by vertical and horizontal
rudders, and made several ascents in the neighbourhood of Meudon. It was
the progenitor and type of all later non-rigid dirigibles.

The success of _La France_ brought Germany into the field. Towards the
close of the century a German engineer called Woelfert constructed a
dirigible rather smaller than the French airship, with a slightly more
powerful engine, and two airscrews of twelve feet in diameter. This was
in one respect a forerunner of the most famous of the German airships,
for the car, instead of hanging loose, was rigidly connected to the
envelope by means of struts. The trials took place in 1896 at Tempelhof,
near Berlin; the airship was held captive by ropes; it answered well to
its rudders, and attained a speed of about nine miles an hour.
Encouraged by this experiment, Dr. Woelfert in the following year built a
second smaller dirigible, fitted with a Daimler benzine motor, and made
a free ascent in it on the 14th of June 1897, near Berlin. A