and perils that he survived in his many aerial adventures would have
killed a cat. One of his airships collapsed and fell with him on to the
roofs of Paris. Another collapsed and fell with him into the
Mediterranean. A third caught fire in the air, and he beat out the
flames with his Panama hat. He survived these and other mishaps, unhurt,
and after making more than a hundred ascents in airships, turned his
attention to aeroplanes, and was the first man to rise from French soil
in a flying machine. From his boyhood mechanisms had attracted him; he
was well acquainted with all the machines on his father's plantation,
and he records an observation that he made there--the only bad machine
on the plantation, he says, was an agitating sieve; the good machines
all worked on the rotary principle. He became a champion of the wheel,
and of the rotary principle. There was something of the fierceness of
theological dispute in the controversies of these early days. The wheel,
it was pointed out, is not in nature; it is a pedantic invention of man.
Birds do not employ it to fly with, nor fish to swim with. The
naturalist school of aeronauts declared against it. In 1892 M. A. le
Compagnon made experiments, not very successfully, in Paris, with a
captive dirigible balloon driven by a pair of oscillating wings. As late
as 1904 Mr. Thomas Moy, in a paper read to the Aeronautical Society of
Great Britain, maintained that the greatest hindrances to the solution
of the problem of mechanical flight have always been the balloon and the
airscrew. Mr. William Cochrane, in a paper read a few months earlier,
laid it down that the airscrew must give place to a more efficient form
of propulsion. Utterances like these help to explain the fervour with
which Santos Dumont, in the book called _My Airships_ (1904), defends
the rotary principle, which is the life of machines. Like the Wrights,
he believed in practice, and was a skilled and experienced balloonist
before he attempted to navigate an airship. His first airship was almost
absurdly small; it had little more than six thousand feet of cubic
capacity, was cigar-shaped, and was driven by a three and a half
horse-power petrol motor. The others followed in rapid succession. M.
Deutsch de la Meurthe had offered a prize of a hundred thousand francs
for the first airship that should rise from the Aero Club ground at St.
Cloud and voyage round the Eiffel Tower, returning within half an hour
to its star