After four preliminary ascensions the great air ship started from Moisson to her destination at Farnborough, having on board Henri Julliot, Louis Capazza, the pilot, Alexander Bannerman, director of the aëronautic military school at Aldershot, and five other men. It was a triumphant and glorious voyage, one of the most splendid in the history of aërostation. Piloted by aid of chart and compass, and by signal fires and captive balloons arranged along her route, the vessel followed a direct course, without check or hindrance, crossing a wide part of the English Channel and arriving before the hangar at Aldershot, where the British soldiers awaited her, and where she was safely landed, having made the whole voyage of 230 miles in 5.5 hours, at a level varying between five hundred and two thousand feet. As shown by the accompanying map, about one third of the route lay over the Channel, or, more accurately, 78 miles, which was traversed in two hours. Thus the whole journey was accomplished at an average speed of nearly forty-two miles an hour, or in less time than it could be effected in any other way than through the air.
FIG. 25.—ROUTE OF BRITISH MILITARY DIRIGIBLES FROM FRANCE TO ENGLAND, 1910.]
The United States War Department, in 1908, started an aërial squadron by purchasing from Thomas S. Baldwin, for $10,000, a tiny air ship of the flexible type, a trifle larger than Santos-Dumont’s _Runabout_, but in fact the smallest military dirigible then in existence. It had a rubberized gray silk cylindrical hull slightly tapering toward the rear and terminating in ogival ends, its length being 96 feet, its major diameter 19½ feet. From this was suspended, by means of netting and steel cables, a longish car having at the rear a double rudder working about a vertical hinge, at the front an elevating plane and an 11-foot wooden screw driven by a Curtiss 20-horse-power water-cooled engine. With two men aboard, this vessel readily attained over twenty miles an hour in a straightaway course, and at times more nearly thirty miles an hour. Its total ascensional force was 1,350 pounds, of which 500 were available for men, ballast and supplies.
Santos-Dumont’s most strenuous disciples outside of France were found among the German military officers. These advocated and promoted both the semirigid and the flexible types of auto balloon, with such ability as to match the best productions of the foremost French designers. The most successful pioneers of these two types in Germany were respectively, Major von Gross, commander of the balloon battalion at Tegel, near Berlin, and Major Von Parseval of the Bavarian army, and director of the Society for the Study of Motor Air Ships.