Robur the Conqueror

alloons. The cars furnished with propellers attached in 1852 to the aerostats of the elongated form introduced by Henry Giffard, the machi

of five or six yards a second they still moved. But nothing practical had been obtained. Against a miller's wind-nine yards a second-the machines had remained almost stationary. Against a fresh breeze-eleven yards a second-they would have advanced backwards. In a storm-twenty-seven to thirty-three yards a second-they would have been blown about like a feather. In a hurricane-sixty yards a second-they would have run th

ce of Dupuy de Lome, electric motors had gradually been substituted. The batteries of bichromate of potassium of the Tissandier brothers had given a speed of four yard

steam horse in a watch case. Gradually the results of the pile of which Captains Krebs and Renard had kept the secret had been

o refuse to admit the possibility of such a thing! If the aerostat finds support in the air it belongs to the medium in which it moves; u

ployed the composition of which was still a mystery, had been bought from its inventor, a Boston chemist up to then unknown. Calculations made with the greatest care, diagrams draw

was mag

ventor in return for his formal receipt the last installment of

d aeronaut of the United States, Harry W. Tinder, immortalized by three of his ascents out of a thousand, one in which he rose to a height of twelve thousand yards, higher than Gay Lussac, Coxwell, Sivet, Crocé-Spinelli, Tissandier, Glaisher; another in which he had crossed America from New York to San Francisco, exceeding by many hundred leagues the journeys of Nadar

the Turner yard at Philadelphia there reposed an enormous aerostat, whose strength ha

balloon at the 1878 Exhibition? Twenty-five thousand cubic meters. Compare these three aerostats with the aerial machine of the Weldon Institute,

elsior, a name which is rather too much held in honor among the citizens of America. No! It was called, simply, th

by the Weldon Institute, was nearly ready. In less than six wee

as the Tissandier brothers had done, or before as Captains Krebs and Renard had done. It is unnecessary to add that the partisans of the two systems had almost come to blows. The group of "Beforists" were e

or some time, unless the government interfered. But in the United States the gove

ts exchanged, fisticuffs succeeding the insults, cane thrashings succeeding the fisticuffs, revolver s

the storm of the meeting, approached the presidential desk. On it he placed

y for the presidential bell, for even the Kremlin clock

hat. Thanks to this extreme mea

nt, after taking a huge pinch from

nine voices, accidentally in

lleagues, asks to be ad

replied e

inued Uncle Prudent, "that to believe in guiding b

in! Let

s singular personage?" a

eplied Unc

d so quickly to the curious name was chiefly due to the Weldon Inst