THE STORY OF HIS MISHAP AT MONTE CARLO
facturing airships for sale, nor has he any rival records to distance. The trial, like all the others, was for his own information and experience; and as such it was not necessary to reduce its speed to miles per hour. Besides, the speed of the return, wonderfully aided by the wind, could bear no relation to the speed of the trip out, which was against the wind; and there is nothing to indicate that the force of the wind was constant, going and coming.
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It is true that, in the present instance, one of the greatest difficulties regularly standing in the way of such speed calculation—the ’’shoot the chutes’’ of ever-varying altitude—was very much done away with by the maritime guide-rope. On the other hand, the dragging of the guide-rope’s weight against the wind is something very different from its petty tugging in calm weather, and the absence of all such resistance, to say the least, when speeding before the wind, which sometimes bellies it like a sail. Again, while the maritime guide-rope affords the airship even a certain amount of lateral stability in presence of side gusts, this stability is by no means complete, and is purchased at the price of so much more dragging back, as of a brake. The fact that without the guide-rope the airship would be bound to lose time on a much more erratic course, to say nothing of the navigator’s extra labor, proves only that the device is, on the whole, immensely serviceable. In either case, with or without maritime guide-rope, the speed calculation has its own practically insurmountable difficulties.
From Monte Carlo to Cap Martin at two o’clock of a given afternoon may be quite another course than from Monte Carlo to Cap Martin at four P.M. of the same day; while from Monte Carlo to Cap Martin can never, except in perfect calm, be the same course as from Cap Martin to Monte Carlo. Nor is any accurate calculation to be based on the markings of the anemometer, an instrument which M. Santos-Dumont nevertheless carries. Out of simple curiosity he examined it on the trip mentioned. It seemed at the moment to be marking thirty-five miles an hour; but the wind, complicated by side gusts, acting at the same time on the airship and the wings of the anemometer windmill—that is, on two moving systems whose inertia cannot be compared—would be alone sufficient to falsify the result.
It is much more significant to dwell on the picture of the fast steam-launches overtaken and left far behind, one after the other, the Prince’s chaloupe utterly outdistanced, and the forty horse-power road racing automobiles keeping up with the airship only by being driven at their high speed.
During the manufacture of the hydrogen gas and the filling of the balloon, the new Aërodrome received the visits of a great number of
