Page:Air-ships and Flying-Machines.pdf/8

 727 only work in full light, in the open air, much perseverance and a little audacity—the audacity of which the swallow sets us an example when it tries its unaccustomed wings for the first time beyond its nest.

One is often astonished that the evolution of the air-ship should have required so many years, when other inventions have been perfected so rapidly. How should the air-ship make progress when in a half-century aëronauts have done nothing to aid it?

The balloon—at first a simple bag of inflated paper over a fire of straw,—created by the genius of Montgolfier, transformed into a silken sphere inflated with hydrogen, metamorphosed into an air-ship by the genius of Henry Gifford, who in 1852 gave the first demonstration of the great problem, having the sublime daring to carry a steam engine in his car—demands now for its final evolution the application of the naphtha motor, which already gives us a single horse power under a weight of six pounds.

When modern industry places at our disposal the treasure of energy stored up in petroleum (10,000 calories transformable into force in one kilogramme of this precious fluid), I ask myself what do the "aviators," torpid with passive waiting for a light motor, demand? And what are the aëronauts doing, spending twenty years in the application to aëronautics of the electric motor, which it is impossible to conceive of as applied to aërial navigation, since, with its generator (battery or accumulator), it is the heaviest of known motors.

More than all I am astonished that empirics, always mired in the ruts of routine, insist obstinately on controlling the spheric balloon only by emptying their sacks of ballast, since it is a buoy as refractory to direction as to equilibrium, over which for more than half a century generations of amateurs and professionals have lost their time.

I think that in the last four years I have demonstrated amply that a petroleum motor does not necessarily set fire to the hydrogen of an air-ship. That is, indeed, among the possibilities; balloons can burn in the air as well as ships in the water. But I maintain that one can, without taking leave of one's senses, raise a balloon with petroleum.

Why in this case not attempt this very simple matter of making a screw revolve in the air by the same motive power which