Continuing that workshop was the canvas-work section. There, under the supervision of a foreman, women were sewing rubber-lined canvas on to the frames, which they then glued delicately. Further on, other workers were cutting metal wires, the tips of which they were fitting to swiveling or screw-threaded hooks. These supplied the stretchers, stays and braces that kept the assemblage rigid, making everything homogenous and in tension, but nevertheless flexible.
At the very end of the hall there was a sort of long corridor in the form of a tunnel, at the back of which a finished airplane was suspended. It was hanging from solid iron beams, supported to either side by steel-wire braces. At the opening of the corridor, an enormous machine, strange and stout—a giant ventilator—seemed to be aimed at the apparatus by means of am extremely long sheet-metal flag.
Henri Rozal, who was making a tour of the workshops, arrived in front of the tunnel just as the workers finished fixing the airplane in place. Addressing himself to the foreman, he said: “Ah, Larrieu, you’ve been able to put the new wings on today?”
“Yes, boss. If you want to stay for the experiment...?”
“Of course. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Boss. It’s only a matter of opening the iron door at the back to activate the air current.
On his order, a man ran forward. The sky became visible behind the airplane.
“Look out, everyone!” shouted the foreman.
The workmen took precautions. Immediately, the machine roared into life. The ventilator turned with a dull sound, progressively generating more and more power. At first, a tremor shook the aircraft; then the wings pulled on the steel braces; now, the entire framework was creaking under the formidable pressure of the wind that the ventilator was sending into the housing of the aircraft.
“How much?” asked Rozal.
Larrieu leaned over the pressure-gauge. “Twenty meters a second.”
“Speed it up; we’ve got a long way to go.”
The ventilator seemed to go crazy. It was now projecting a terrible hurricane into the tunnel, in which the airplane was holding firm. In that furious tempest, the bird of wood and canvas, tautened by threads of steel, quivered, yielded and cried out, while the wind, colliding with the stays, produced a sinister whistle.
“Thirty-five meters a second!” announced the foreman.
The displacement of air was such that the spectators seemed to be caught up by the terrible force and had to take shelter in order not to be dragged into the tunnel like mere wisps of straw.
“Forty meters!”
“Faster!”
Larrieu looked at Rozal. He did not understand this exaggeration. Twenty meters was already, in reality, seriously bad weather, but forty-meter winds hardly existed. That was a 144 kilometers an hour—and no aircraft had ever traveled at such a speed. As he took his time carrying out the order, Rozal became impatient.
“Faster, I tell you! The apparatus is designed to travel at 200 kilometers an hour.”
The foreman looked at his employer with as much admiration as amazement. He wondered whether he might have gone mad. “But it’ll come apart,” he said, “like the last time.”
“Faster!” ordered Rozal.
The chassis on which the ventilator was supported seemed about to tear itself loose from the ground, to which it was fastened by enormous bolts sunk into stone blocks girdled with iron. The sound of the artificial tempest drowned out speech, and, in the depths of the corridor, the airplane valiantly supported the trial of resistance.
“Stop!”
The noise suddenly abated, gradually diminishing and fading away. Bounding forward as one, they all hastened into the tunnel and surrounded the bird; it was intact. Only the braces that had held it in place gave evidence of the effort to which they had been subjected. Still and fully stretched before the experiment, they were now soft and twisted, and the strands were frayed at intervals.
Rozal’s face lit up.
“Finally,” he said, “the apparatus is finished. It only remains to fit the engine.”
III. God? The gods? Whoever
“Oh, Boss!” cried Larrieu. “You’ll find it, the engine. Everyone here is sure that you’ll succeed.”
“May you be right, my friend.”
His ears still ringing with the formidable sound of the prodigious wind that had roared around and shook the motionless and resistant airplane a short while before, Rozal headed at top speed for the fitting workshop where the mechanics were working on the bizarre components that he had designed. There, however, he knew that things were not so far advanced. He had recommenced his plans and calculations a hundred times over, trying to decipher the enigma that was haunting him. For four year in succession, untiringly, he had been constructing, dismantling and reconstructing the rotating engine that he had conceived. Now he was proceeding on new bases, according to different concepts—but he had the absolute conviction that he was on the right track.
He asked the workshop overseer how the work was going, and could not hide his astonishment and joy when he heard how much work had been done since the morning. That was because all the workers employed there were intelligent fellows, with an education far superior to the average factory worker. They knew what they were doing and why their boss had abruptly told them to start a new assembly and throw away the one they had finished for scrap. They had understood their employer’s ambition and the improbable objective at which he was aiming; gripped by an extraordinary enthusiasm at the idea that he might succeed and that they would have collaborated in the work, they were working relentlessly, impatient for the decisive experiment and its result.
Henri Rozal spoke to each of them and shook their hands. He saw, with an evident satisfaction, the almost-completed components in the vices. He contemplated at length a kind of flared cylinder filled with metallic winglets, set on trestles in the middle of the studio; it was the core of his new engine, the extraordinary invention: the Turbine.
In a few days, perhaps a fortnight, the work would be finished. Would the engine work? Only the gods knew that.
God? The gods? Whoever.
He gazed again, thoughtfully, at the mysterious incomplete unit; then he went into the laboratory in which two chemists were studying. He only stayed there for a few moments, then went into his office.
Half an hour later, the factory came to a standstill, the daily labor concluded. Then, exhausted in spite of himself by the day’s surprises, Henri sat down in a lather armchair and, with his elbows on the work-desk where diagrams were spread out amid papers covered in calculations and formulae, he began to reflect.
IV. A Backward Step
Henri Rozal was 35 years old. The son of a hydrographic engineer, who had died on a long voyage round the world, and his very pretty wife, now dead, about whom tongues had wagged a great deal, Henri had undertaken serious studies.
Having emerged from the École Polytechnique among the first in his class, he had directed himself, doubtless by virtue of heredity, to naval specializations. At 27, he had drawn up plans for an admirably stable submarine hull. Already, he was planning to submit to the Ministry of Marine Affairs a model of an ultra-rapid and well-armed torpedo-boat when the world began to be astonished by the first exploits accomplished by airplanes.
Immediately, he had felt irresistibly drawn to the new science. Within a month, he devoured all the books that had appeared on the subject since Mouillard, Chanute and Lilienthal. He went to see, in the factories where the machines of the Voisin brothers, Blériot and Gastambide15 were being constructed. He spent entire nights trying to understand the mystery of flight, by way of the observations and studies that others before him had published. And while Farman and Santos-Dumont16 were trying, without succeeding every day, to travel a few hundred meters, at first at Bagatelle and then on the Issy-les-Moulineaux drill-field, he formed an opinion. He hesitated for another month; then, divining the marvelous future that the conquest of the air promised the audacious, he handed in his re
signation, thus abandoning his material certainties for an ideal—elevated, undoubtedly, but problematic.
He was then 28. He was a tall and handsome fellow, well-built, who moved smoothly and had a proud and supple stride. His face, clean-shaven in the American style, with a slender, well-shaped mouth, dark eyes and arched eyebrows, made him resemble a chic sportsman rather than a scientist. In his behavior and manner of dress he was reminiscent of a boxer who was, at the same time, a man of the world—but on looking into his pupils, where the fire of his soul burned intensely, no one could doubt that he was a seeker of enigmas.
And that was true; Henri Rozal only lived through his dream, his science, the conquest of the distant, elevated goal—the one toward which so many other sublime pioneers were aiming.
When his parents died he had inherited 50,000 francs—the savings accumulated by the hydrographic engineer. In two years, he had spent it all on his chimera, but his dream had taken form, and he was able to formulate his convictions regarding the future of aeronautics, of still-hesitant flight. Knowing his subject admirably well, he spoke about it easily. In the salons of that epoch, no one was talking about anything except aviation, the science in fashion.
It was during an evening in the home of mutual friends that he met Nasenberg, that prodigious launcher of men and businesses. The banker, interested by the young engineer rich in seemingly-logical original ideas, had chatted to him for a long time. Henri Rozal pleased him, by virtue of his frankness and the decisiveness reflected in his bright eyes—but what flattered the idea of the business-broker most agreeably was observing that deep down, the young man, in spite of everything, though certainly impassioned by his idea, had a genuine and rational desire to make a fortune.
Some scientists only aspire to the chimerical vanity of vain rosettes. Some think about material profits but want them so avidly that their over-ambitious realization discourages investors. A few remain at square one with their pride—and, often, an idea that practical men would have exploited with good results.
Henri Rozal knew, or at least affirmed that he knew, where aviation was going and what might be extracted from it. He had explained to Nasenberg, very clearly, how the problem presented itself. According to him, there were two possible paths. The first and simpler, the more immediately realizable, consisted in building, right away, an apparatus capable of flying for an hour or an hour and a half at most. That was all. Half the work pertaining to aviation was in the public domain. The rest had been deduced after Farman’s experiments.
From the moment that, thanks to the discovery of the internal combustion engine, the weight per horse-power got down below five kilos, it was child’s play, profiting from the lessons of predecessors, to construct an aircraft capable of getting off the ground and flying for a certain time. He could, therefore fabricate one, test it, perfect it within a few months and mount an assault on the prizes instituted by the generous Maecenases who, for the most part, had not anticipated that they would have to untie their purse-strings so quickly.
The prizes were attractive, to be sure, and worth the trouble of going after—yes, it was tempting; but there were restrictions. Several constructors were hastening to execute that program, and two or three of them had a considerable lead. With a little bad luck, one could spend a great deal of money on aircraft and aviators, and arrive too late.
Henri Rozal liked the second path better. In spite of the initial successes, in the present state of the means that aviation had at its disposal, one could not get very far without being stopped by a key problem: the engine. Necessarily, people were using automobile engines. They were making them lighter, of course, but they would always be too heavy for their motive force, and they would never be able to permit aircraft to fly at high speed—and speed signified security. While the bird-men were not strong enough to vanquish atmospheric pressures, while tempests caused them to stall in mid-air, carrying them away and tumbling them like dead leaves detached from a branch, the problem would not be solved.
Now, with the automobile engine, one was caught in a vicious circle. It permitted one to stay in the air, in good weather, on condition that the pilot was experienced and talented—but one would only ever have dangerous instruments guided by acrobats or madmen. Thus, before long, progress would stop dead, treading water, as had happened after the discovery of the steam-engine, before the advent of the internal combustion engine that was to revolutionize mechanical industry.
Rozal put it to Nasenberg in these terms:
“The man who contrives to get rich in the field of aviation will be the one who finds the ideal engine, permitting artificial birds to fly through the sky like bolides. The day when a machine made of steel, powerful, supple and streamlined, flies through the air at the speed of a projectile, there will be no natural elements that can make it deviate from its route, no atmospheric perturbations that can break its equilibrium. Everything that can be done before then will be of no great use, and will only know an ephemeral glory before becoming obsolete within five years.
Nasenberg had looked deep into Rozal’s eyes. “Why don’t you attack that problem yourself?”
“It requires too much money, and I’ve spent what I had.”
“How much would it require?”
“Two hundred thousand francs.”
“Come to my office tomorrow; we’ll arrange the matter.”
Thus, in the course of an evening, the two men had become acquainted, understood one another and made an agreement. Two months after that conversation, the factory at Nanterre was constructed, and Rozal set to work.
Disappointments had followed immediately. Almost at the same time as Henri Farman was completing the first kilometer in a closed circuit at Issy-les-Moulineaux, on January 13, 1908, Rozal discovered, to his anguish, that he had taken a wrong turn. He had thought that, with an internal combustion engine without pistons and a rotational distribution, he might attain previously-unknown speeds. The engine did, indeed, rotate well, but it heated up so much that he was obliged to abandon cooling with winglets and replace them by an intense circulation of water with radiators. That resulted in a surplus of weight unforeseen in his calculations.
Even so, he had constructed an apparatus that he equipped with a piston-free engine, and tested it at the end of April 1908 in a deserted area of Picardy. The airplane flew very rapidly, and for a moment, Rozal knew the emotion of initial success. It did not last long; after five minutes, overheated by a terrible regime, the engine became red hot, expanded, abruptly stalled, and the airplane fell from a height of twelve meters on to a ploughed field, where it remained stuck like a gigantic arrow. Miraculously, Rozal was unharmed. He extricated himself from the wreckage of the apparatus, took a cigarette case out of his pocket, phlegmatically, and lit up. While his assistants came running, he was already thinking about the modifications that he needed to make to his invention.
A month later, having made suitable provision for the cooling of the engine, giving greater importance to the circulation of the water, he had resumed his trials. This time, the apparatus, being too heavy, refused to fly. Henri Rozal realized that he was in an impasse; he almost despaired.
In the same era, however, other aviators achieved dazzling successes. At the camp at Auvours, near Le Mans, the American Wilbur Wright amazed spectators with his flights. Throughout the summer, the champion of the biplane never ceased to fly over the vast hippodrome of Hunaudières. Henri Rozal was a member of his faithful audience, bearing witness to the prowess of the bird-man with admiring and dolorous eyes. But he came back from Mans with the conviction that Wilbur Wright had only accomplished, in sum, fortunate experiments. More than ever, he sensed that the real problem did not lie in that direction.
He set to work again rapidly, tore up his calculations and plans, everything that he had attempted, and began again on new principles. But the money flowed away! Nasenberg, who still had faith, and stimulated by the success of competitors, not to mention the fact that active intere
st he took in the new sport gave him his qualifications as a Parisian and provided good publicity for his other business affairs, feeding his coffers.
Rozal had, therefore, set off in an absolutely contrary direction when the news reached him that the champions of the other path had affirmed their triumph. One blow following another, on the thirtieth and thirty-first of October, two aviators in different machines, representing two different schools, carried out aerial voyages not over an experimental field but over the open countryside, flying higher than obstacles: hedges, telegraph poles and wires, farmhouses, trees, hills and valleys. Henri Farman flew from Bouy to Reims and Louis Blériot departed from Toury in Eure-et-Loir to land at Artenay in the Loiret. Blériot even gave himself the luxury of a few ports of call, like a mere tourist, and returned to his hangar that same evening.
Thus, events cruelly proved Henri Rozal wrong. While he floundered, achieving nothing, risking killing himself a hundred times over in further experiments with new apparatus, of which he modified the wings, the propellers, the stabilizers, and while the enigma of the engine confounded him, others more practical than him hastened to fly toward success and money. Every day, the public learned the name of a new aviator, who quickly became popular. Delagrange, Latham and Paulhan17 became heroes in a matter of months while he struggled against the arduous problem that was necessary to his goal.
Soon, in spite of everything, he was proved right. Delagrange killed himself; others killed themselves. As more records were set, the number of victims of aviation grew rapidly, and a veritable dolor took possession of the public. After the brilliant enthusiasm of the debut, there was almost despair.
The Human Arrow Page 5