Her partner ship _La République_ had a like tragic end. She too made many successful trips, and proved her stability and worth. But one day while manoeuvring near Paris one of her propellers broke and tore a great rent in her envelope. As the _Titanic_, her hull ripped open by an iceberg, sunk with more than a thousand of her people, so this airship, wounded in a more unstable element, fell to the ground killing all on board.
Two airships were built in France for England in 1909. One, the _Clement-Bayard II._, was of the rigid type and built for the government; the other, a _Lebaudy_, was non-rigid and paid for by popular subscriptions raised in England by the _Morning Post_. Both were safely delivered near London having made their voyages of approximately 242 miles each at a speed exceeding forty miles an hour. These were the first airships acquired for British use.
In the United States the only serious effort to develop the dirigible prior to the war, and to apply it to some definite purpose, was made not by the government but by an individual. Mr. Walter Wellman, a distinguished journalist, fired by the effort of Andrée to reach the North Pole in a drifting balloon, undertook a similar expedition with a dirigible in 1907. A balloon was built 184 feet in length and 52 feet in diameter, and was driven by a seventy-to eighty-horse-power motor. A curious feature of this craft was the guide rope or, as Wellman called it, the equilibrator, which was made of steel, jointed and hollow. At the lower end were four steel cylinders carrying wheels and so arranged that they would float on water or trundle along over the roughest ice. The idea was that the equilibrator would serve like a guide rope, trailing on the water or ice when the balloon hung low, and increasing the power of its drag if the balloon, rising higher, lifted a greater part of its length into the air. Wellman had every possible appliance to contribute to the safety of the airship, and many believe that had fortune favoured him the glory of the discovery of the Pole would have been his. Unhappily he encountered only ill luck. One season he spent at Dane's Island, near Spitzenberg whence Andrée had set sail, waiting vainly for favourable weather conditions. The following summer, just as he was about to start, a fierce storm destroyed his balloon shed and injured the balloon. Before necessary repairs could be accomplished Admiral Peary discovered the Pole and the purpose of the expedition was at an end. Wellman, however, had become deeply interested in aeronautics and, balked in one ambition, set out to accomplish another. With the same balloon somewhat remodelled he tried to cross the Atlantic, setting sail from Atlantic City, N. J., October 16, 1911. But the device on which the aeronaut most prided himself proved his undoing. The equilibrator, relied upon both for storage room and as a regulator of the altitude of the ship, proved a fatal attachment. In even moderate weather it bumped over the waves and racked the structure of the balloon with its savage tugging until the machinery broke down and the adventurers were at the mercy of the elements. Luckily for them after they had been adrift for seventy-two hours, and travelled several hundred miles they were rescued by the British steamer _Trent_. Not long after Wellman's chief engineer Vanniman sought to cross the Atlantic in a similar craft but from some unexplained cause she blew up in mid-air and all aboard were lost.