THE STORY OF HIS MISHAP AT MONTE CARLO
lifting power. The airship rose rapidly. There would have been no harm in this, had it not been for the presence of the heavy maritime guide-rope. The latter was lifted completely from contact with the waves, so that its whole weight re-ballasted the airship at a point where it upset the equilibrium of the system, causing the nose of the cigar-shaped balloon to point upward. As the balloon had not been sufficiently filled, the hot masses of hydrogen, by reason of their lesser density, flew to this up-pointing end of the balloon, and increased by that much its inclination. For a time it seemed to be pointing almost perpendicularly.
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The intrepid aëronaut, who had lost neither his cool head nor his balance, could still have righted himself had he not perceived with dismay that the up-pointing of the airship had caused the oil in the motor to overflow and the ballast itself to shift. To permit the flame-spitting motor to continue working under these circumstances would be to risk a fatal explosion. To stop the motor and remain in the air would mean the certainty of being cast by the wind on the telegraph wires, trees, and houses of Monte Carlo. He had to think quickly. The dilemma was a new one. He did the one thing that seemed safest; and, with the same sang-froid which gave him, on August 8, 1901, the audacity to destroy his balloon above the Trocadero Hotels to save himself from a worse fall, he now pulled the emergency rope which opens a great seam in the balloon. Like a wounded bird it fell, and in a few moments was floating on the waves.
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Balloon, keel, and motor were successfully fished out of the bay, and shipped off to Paris for repairs. The ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 7,’’ though well under way, was not yet completed. The over-sea experiments, therefore, came to an abrupt end.
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In the minds of those who have followed M. Santos-Dumont closely there is no doubt of the value of the lessons taught by the Monaco experiments. In the steady and determined progress of his experiments, all are equally valuable. The five flights which he made were not five isolated demonstrations of what he could do, but a single series of experiments for his own instruction. His plan is to continue trying, rejecting the weak and the ill-adapted, holding on to what has stood the test, and profiting by each error to avoid it in the future.
Thus he constructed five balloons before settling on the form of the balloon of his new ‘‘Santos-Dumont No. 7.’’
Thus the flight in which he missed winning the Deutsch Prize by only nine minutes taught him that the lubricating receptacles of motors created to propel automobiles over lever surfaces are liable to spill their oil and permit the
