s soon as it
was well in the air, the ship caught fire and fell flaming to the
ground, killing Dr. Woelfert and his assistant. Later in the same year
the first completely rigid dirigible was built by a German called David
Schwarz; it was made of thin aluminium sheeting, internally braced by
steel wires, and was driven by a twelve horse-power Daimler motor which
worked twin airscrews, one on either side. It took the air near Berlin
on the 3rd of November 1897, but something went wrong with the airscrew
belts, and it was seriously damaged in its hasty descent. Thereupon the
crowd of people who had assembled to applaud it fell upon it, and
wrecked it. The behaviour of the crowd deserves a passing mention in any
history of flight; it was not the least of the ordeals of the early
aeronaut. The aeroplane or airship pilot who disappointed the
expectations of his public found no better treatment than Christian and
Faithful met with in Bunyan's Vanity Fair. There is here no question of
national weaknesses; in France and Germany, in England and America, the
thing has happened again and again. If an ascent was announced, and was
put off because the weather was bad, the crowd jeered, and hooted, and
threw stones. On more than one occasion a pilot has been driven by the
taunts of the crowd to attempt an impossible ascent; and has met his
death. If a damaged machine fell to earth, the crowd often wreaked their
vengeance on it, as deer fall upon a wounded comrade. The men who made
up the crowd were most of them kind and trustworthy in their private
relations, and in matters that they understood were not unreasonable or
inconsiderate. But aerial navigation was a new thing, and their attitude
to it was wholly spectacular. They came to see it because they craved
excitement, and under the influence of that cruel passion they were
capable of the worst excesses of the Roman populace at a gladiatorial
show.

In the years that joined the centuries, that is, from 1898 to 1903,
aviation seemed a forlorn hope, but there was great activity in the
construction of airships, and something like a race for supremacy
between France and Germany. In 1898 the Brazilian, Alberto Santos
Dumont, made his first gallant appearance in an airship of his own
construction. Born in 1873, the son of a prosperous coffee-planter of
San Paulo in Brazil, Santos Dumont was a young and wealthy amateur,
gifted with mechanical genius, and insensible to danger. The accidents