THE ZEPPELIN AERIAL MACHINE.
PRE interest taken by human beings in their own efforts to fly, or rather to travel through the air, is untiring and incurable by' experience. Ever since the first kite was flotvn,-probably on the plains of Chaldfea, the attempt has been constantly renewed, and has always failed ; but the steadiness of failure has hardly discouraged, much less ex- tinguished, hope. • What the inventors propose to gain by success they rarely or never state, but they go on inventing all the same, and the world reads about their inventions with insatiable ' appetite and a certain sense of disappointment when, as usually happens, the last Icarus comes to grief. Nobody particularly pities him, but most men are sorry for his ill success. The truth is the imagination is touched by an effort which seems intended to lift man out of the apparently fixed conditions of his being, and men are set dreaming as therwould be if they discovered in themselves previously un- revealed powers. If they could fly they would seem to them- selves men and something more, the idea at the bottom of the fancy that angels must have wings. That is a rather feeble fancy, Homer and theHindoo poets having ages ago suggested the nobler one that the speed of gods results from their own volition ; but as no one can paint a thought, the wings have'eUslirined themselves in art, and so live on. We do not wonder, therefore, that every newspaper in Europe has recorded Count Zeppelin's. experiments on the Lake of Constance, and shall not wonder if he is declared to have " begun an epoch," to have " realised a dream," and to have " affected the future destiny of humanity." The facts, however, as yet hardly justify such big words. Supposing the record of the recent experiments to be fairly accurate, they seem to show that Count Zeppelin, a Bavarian noble of a mechanical turn, has made no new discovery, but has by dint of large expendi- ture so utilised the known lifting power of balloon's that by using thirty of them at once he is able to raise a vessel of aluminium big. enough and strong enough to allow him to drive it by steel machinery with the exploding force of benzine as driving power. The machine being very big and strong, and independent of the balloons, which, though thirty in number, only lift, he can guide the whole structure, which is more than 400 ft. long, just as the steersman of a sailing vessel guides the ship with all its sails and top hamper. They are the drivers, but they drive as the rudder directs.. No new force whatever has been developed, and no new application of forces, only such a multiplication of old and known appliances that the -car is no longer at the mercy of the balloon, but can make the balloon go its way. That being stated, let us see how far, if the -accounts of the experiments are true. the mechanicians have now got. Clearly there is no reason as yet for the alarm which has often been excited by the accounts of similar par- tially successful experiments. There is, to begin with, no grand secret in the matter, nothing which an evil-minded capitalist or ambitious Government could use while right- minded capitalists or Governments remained ignorant how to manufacture the new weapon. Any one with the means and the control of skilled mechanics could build a similar aerial ship just as he could build a gunboat, and the richer the State the more of such machines it could keep at its disposal. They will be very costly to build, they will take time in build- ing, and they can hardly, when Governments are once awake to their existence, be built in perfect secrecy. Certainly none could build them without official observation, a final, check upon Anarchists, who, moreover, never possess much capital. The machines cannot carry large bodies of men or large quantities of munitions, and we may, we think, lay aside the idea of their use for a sudden and great invasion as imprac- ticable. They would not be more useful for a raid than heavily armed cruisers are. If the recently passed rules against dropping dynamite from balloons were disregarded they Might effect a certain amount of destruction, but not of the kind which Governments seek for because it will help on conquest. For similar reasons the chance of .the 'Zeppelin machine greatly furthering the relief or storm of beleaguered places may be put out of the mind. It could help in one way, as we shall directly point out, but not in the way of carrying reinforcements or food for a population, or of carrying away a beleaguered garrison. Sir Redvers Buller, for example, could not have cleared Ladysmith by the use of such machines, or even have removed the sick. As for con- tests in the air, the " grappling of aerial navies in the blue," that would, even if the dream were realised, make little differ. ence, all Governments equally possessing the machines, and the chances with cruisers in the air being the same as the chances with cruisers in the water. Armed aerial machines seem no doubt to demand braver crews than armed sea-going machines, but there are a great many people in the world' whom balloons do not frighten, and the difference between death by drowning and death by a fall from a great height is not very perceptible. Escalading a 'castle seems to the imaginative or the timid an awful operation, but soldiers picked at random have done marvels in that way, and, curiously enough, have not impressed the imaginations of mankind as much as charging cavalry or the steady plod, plod of infantry under a heavy fire has often done. One would think it would be otherwise, but somehow people do not fully realise what fighting on the upper rungs of a fifty-foot ladder unfastened really means. Soldiers have not shrunk from it in history, and neither would they shrink from fighting in the air.
What, then, do we seriously think will be the use of the new machine if it succeeds ? It will, we think, have one main result, a great increase of the power of observation both in peace and war. The balloons can be so made as to remain many days in air, and very wild lands, even the .regions round the Poles, or the sources of the Niger and the Yangtse, may therefore be accurately surveyed. The ice difficulty, the forest difficulty, and the .difficulty presented by broken or moun- tainous country will all alike be gradually overcome. We do not know that the happiness of mankind is greatly increased by such knowledge any more than it has been by the tele- graph, but still it is a sort of duty to explore this little planet of ours, and the Zeppelin machine or an improvement on it will help us to perform the duty. And it will certainly alter one condition of warfare, as it will enable a besieger to see the interior of a besieged city, and all the shifting chances of a great pitched battle over, say, twenty square miles. The present balloon is a help to generals even now, but its use is limited, because it is either a captive or drifts about at the mercy of the wind. The Zeppelin machine will be an observatory, hellographing accounts _ of every movement every five. minutes. The effect of that will doubtless be to increase greatly the brain-power of any good tactician in command, for he will be able. to see the early movements of his enemy and the exact position of his own widely scattered troops. No doubt the advantage will le given to both sides, but it will be more n=^ful to the one which has the- abler and more decided commandant. The
influence of mind on war, that is, will be decidedly increased, which, if war is for the future to be mainly a struggle with the half-civilised and the barbarian, must be beneficiaL One would like, if we are to besiege Pekin, to be able to see into every street. Even in Europe it is the keener brain which will be the more assisted, and—though the remark is almost too broad—it is for the better in the long run that successful soldiers should be men of mind. Science is quite as often malignant as benevolent, but we see no particular reason for regretting Count Zeppelin's new application of old dis- coveries.
Previous page
