398 : The Atlantic 



stantial prize and world-wide recognition. By 1905 he was using a 

 more rigid structure equipped with two motors for propulsion. This 

 ship was able to travel at a speed of twelve miles per hour. 



Santos-Dumont was not the only man working on airships during 

 the last years of the last century. During these same years, across the 

 border in Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was also at work 

 on an airship. There was a strange though characteristic contrast 

 between these men. Santos-Dumont was small, slight of build, 

 quick of movement, alert, inventive, experimental in all his ap- 

 proaches, working as an individualist with private funds. Zeppelin 

 was an older man who had first observed balloons in America during 

 the Civil War. He was large, grave, not to say pompous, methodical. 

 He was working in the military interests of the German nation and, 

 when he could get them, using official subsidies in the development 

 of his projects. 



It was somehow in keeping with his character that he should be 

 the pioneer of the large and rigid airship. His work progressed slowly 

 and involved large expenditures. His first ship to take the air was 

 launched in 1900 and was soon wrecked. It was only after a number 

 of ships had developed and after the German government began to 

 support Zeppelin with heavy subsidies, which it did in 1908, that 

 the rigid dirigible was able to demonstrate its value. 



In the meantime an entirely different principle of controlled flight 

 had been demonstrated in the early airplanes. The airplane, or heav- 

 ier-than-air flying machine, was not strictly speaking a new invention. 

 As early as 1842 an Englishman by the name of William S. Henson 

 had made designs and plans for a monoplane type structure that was 

 to be driven through the air by aerial propellers deriving their power 

 from a steam engine. A few years later John Stringfellow demon- 

 strated in London a steam-driven model plane which was capable of 

 limited flight. 



From then on experimental planes were occasionally built and 

 often projected. Failures were so frequent that the wisest students of 

 flight, like Otto Lilienthal in Germany and Octave Chanute and the 

 Wright brothers in America, toward the end of the last century 

 turned to the building and flying of gliders or motorless planes. In 

 this way they sought to find out how the air behaved when it came 

 in contact with the plane surface. 



They sought also the answers to other questions: how much weight 

 various sizes and shapes of plane surface could support at constant 



