The New Airships.

Progress, Volume III, Issue I, 1 November 1907, Page 7

The New Airships.

\\ iTHOb r information as to the trials at Jamestown, it is not possible to arrive at any very definite conclusion as to the progress attained to-day in

the flying"art. The fact is' that, while enthusiasts are gloating over predicted results — Mr. Stead, for instance, says that successful construction of airships will destroy war quicker than the Hague Conference, and General Baden - Powell agrees with him to almost the whole extent of his contention — practical men are rather coming to griet with their newest ventures. For example, Mr. Wellman's dirigible balloon and the military balloons 1 a Patrie and Nulh Secundus — the iirst the work of the War Department of France, the second the fruit of years of experimenting by the military balloon department of the British army — are evidently the prize individuals of the balloon flotilla of the world. The great dirigible developed from the designs of Count Zeppelin for the German army, and known as Parseval, is of the same type of " assured " successes, and the Russians have announced another. Now Mr. Wellman's dirigible' and the English War Department balloons were both smashed to pieces the other day by a hurricane. In plain English their discomfiture has demonstrated that these craft are not what at sea would be termed seaworthy. They are built stiffer than the first of their kind, and they carry more power, thanks to the inventions of the period that has elapsed since the first demonstration. But they are no whit better for practical purposes than the dirigible of Captain Renard, of the French army, which made such a sensation in the year 1885 by achieving a flight of 21 miles an hotir, half of it against a head wind. The others have carried prune ministers and explorers, but they have none of them done more than the dirigible of Captain Renard. In the dirigible class the problem of constructing a' craft that shall keep*the air m all weathers has yet to be solved. It is of course nearer solution than it was twenty-two years ago, but the distance from practical dependability still represents, apparently, a vast gulf. On the other hand the champion of the aeroplanes, M. Santos Dumont, who flew last year so well in Paris has again taken up the dirigible and confessed to a deplorable failure of his aeroplane, and is at present hidden under the shadow of a promise to do something. The brothers Wright, at the same time from whom so much was expected and who have been the centre of much prophetic devotion in the United States, have not been heard from. The Dominion, in the person of a Dunedin citi7en has added to the hopes of the world its mite, with a machine of which not even the journalist who described it has faintest idea. For the present then the outlook in the matter of the mastery of the air by enterprising man is not of the best. Some balloons during the present year flew some hundreds of miles. ( But 1 their round unsteerable predecessors did the' same 1 thing a century ago. How reliable they were as guides was discovered by the unfortunate Andre in 1597, in his attempt on the Pole.