Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 of Popular Literature and Science

Excerpt

AMERICAN AËRONAUTS.

Scattered here and there in this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake, with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle to horse and ride off Somewhere seeking Something—just as occasional trilobites, lonely and misshapen, are found in ages subsequent to the Silurian. Of such stuff are our Arctic and African explorers made; the men who run the lightning-expresses have a touch of it; it crops out in steeple-climbers, cave-explorers, beast-tamers; it makes men assault cloud-piercing and ice-mantled mountain-peaks and launch their frail canoes for voyages down earth-riving cañons and across continent sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets—perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear with the Palæozoic.

Aëronauts have been free and accepted members of this order of modern knights-errant, from hot-headed, ill-fated Pilâtre de Rozier down to Gaston Tissandier, the man who still edits La Nature in the lower strata of an ocean into the treacherous upper depths of which he has risen seven miles. Your true aëronaut is not an inventor of flying-machines, not much concerned about what is known as the "problem of aërial navigation." He is content to take the wings of the morning and be carried away to the uttermost parts of the earth. Problems he leaves to the scientists: he wooes the wilderness he cannot subdue. He is an explorer of unknown regions, a beauty-worshipper at a shrine whose pearly, sun-kissed portals open to him alone. People travel thousands of miles horizontally to rest their eyes on scenes infinitely less novel, beautiful and grand than one perpendicular mile of vantage would open to them, little matter whence taken.

Having accepted the wind for his pilot, our argonaut seeks no improvement upon his aërial raft. Like the bow and arrow, it long ago reached perfection, and, though he may cherish some choice and secret recipe for varnish or be the inventor of an improved valve, he generally builds with a birdlike reliance on instinct and tradition. Gas-bag, netting, concentrating-ring, basket, valve, anchor, drag-rope and exploding cord,—what has the century of ballooning added to its essentials? how can coming centuries improve this perfection of simplicity? Aërial navigation is altogether another thing. A swallow does not rise by displacing a volume of air whose specific gravity is greater than its own, but by using the atmosphere as a fulcrum. Otherwise it must possess a bulk which its tiny wings would be powerless to impel against the opposing breeze. Mr. Grimley, the aëronaut, writing of some experiments he has recently been making at Montreal with an ingenious arrangement of revolving fans invented by two gentlemen of that city, says: "The Cowan and Paje propelling and steering apparatus worked as well as could be expected, but the air will never be navigated by balloons driven by machinery. It is opposed to common sense." Few fully appreciate the extreme mobility of the atmosphere or the intensity of the force which wind exerts on surfaces opposed to its action. A child with a palm-leaf fan can drive a balloon in equilibrium about at will in an atmosphere entirely quiet, while the same balloon, under the impulse of a lively gale, will tear itself loose from the aggregated avoirdupois of all who can lay hands upon it, and wrench great branches from the forest giants over which it skims. Doubtless, to the disheartening influence of a practical knowledge of the real difficulties in the way of aërial navigation is due the fact that the great mass of those who have attempted it have been scientists without practice, or fools without either scientific training or experimental data.

However strongly, as devout utilitarians, we may feel it our duty to disapprove, officially, of a class so little necessary to the body politic, aëronauts are interesting talkers, being able, like Shakespeare's Moor, to speak of "most disastrous chances, of moving accidents by flood and field, of antres vast and deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven."

Among American aëronauts none possessed a larger fund of such thrilling incident or greater enthusiasm for his calling than he who recently paid that last penalty which ever hovers over its followers—the venerable John Wise....