rely have descended to
fame with that of Cayley it has been lost, together with all record
of any later performances of the machine, which unquestionably
embodied some of the basic principles of our modern aircraft, though
it antedated the first of these by nearly a century.

[Illustration: Giffard's Dirigible.]

We may pass over hastily some of the later experiments with dirigibles
that failed. In 1834 the Count de Lennox built an airship 130 feet
long to be driven by oars worked by man power. When the crowd that
gathered to watch the ascent found that the machine was too heavy to
ascend even without the men, they expressed their lively contempt for
the inventor by tearing his clothes to tatters and smashing his
luckless airship. In 1852, another Frenchman, Henry Giffard, built a
cigar-shaped balloon 150 feet long by 40 feet in diameter, driven by
steam. The engine weighed three hundred pounds and generated about 3
H.-P.--about 1/200 as much power as a gas engine of equal weight would
produce. Even with this slender power, however, Giffard attained a
speed, independent of the wind, of from five to seven miles an
hour--enough at least for steerage way. This was really the first
practical demonstration of the possibilities of the mechanical
propulsion of balloons. Several adaptations of the Giffard idea
followed, and in 1883 Renard and Krebs, in a fusiform ship, driven by
an electric motor, attained a speed of fifteen miles an hour. By this
time inventive genius in all countries--save the United States which
lagged in interest in dirigibles--was stimulated. Germany and France
became the great protagonists in the struggle for precedence and in
the struggle two figures stand out with commanding prominence--the
Count von Zeppelin and Santos-Dumont, a young Brazilian resident in
Paris who without official countenance consecrated his fortune to, and
risked his life in, the service of aviation.

CHAPTER III

THE SERVICES OF SANTOS-DUMONT

In his book _My Airships_ the distinguished aviator A. Santos-Dumont
tells this story of the ambition of his youth and its realization in
later days:

I cannot say at what age I made my first kites, but I remember
how my comrades used to tease me at our game of "pigeon flies."
All the children gather round a table and the leader calls out
"Pigeon Flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!" and so on; and
at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers