Aircraft and Submarines

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.

Neither Great Britain nor the United States has reason to be proud of the attitude of its government towards the inventors who were struggling to subdue the air to the uses of man. Nor has either reason to boast much of its action in utterly ignoring up to the very day war broke that aid to military service of which Lord Kitchener said, "One aviator is worth a corps of cavalry." It will be noted that to get its first effective dirigible Great Britain had to rely upon popular subscriptions drummed up by a newspaper. That was in 1909. To-day, in 1917, the United States has only one dirigible of a type to be considered effective in the light of modern standards, though our entrance upon the war has caused the beginning of a considerable fleet. In aviation no less than in aerostatics the record of the United States is negligible. Our country did indeed produce the Wright Brothers, pioneers and true conquerors of the air with airplanes. But even they were forced to go to France for support and indeed for respectful attention.

So far as the development of dirigible balloons is concerned there is no more need to devote space to what was done in England and the United States than there was for the famous chapter on Snakes in Iceland.