things must be learned before he could handle successfully the much more
delicate and sensitive elongated gas-bag.

In general, Santos-Dumont worked on the theory of the dirigible
balloon--that is, one that might be controlled and made to go in any
direction desired, by means of a motor and propeller carried by a
buoyant gas-bag. His plan was to build a balloon, cigar-shaped, of
sufficient capacity to a little more than lift his machinery and
himself, this extra lifting power to be balanced by ballast, so that the
balloon and the weight it carried would practically equal the weight of
air it displaced. The push of the revolving propeller would be depended
upon to move the whole air-ship up or down or forward, just as the
motion of a fish's fins and tail move it up, down, forward, or back, its
weight being nearly the same as the water it displaces.

The theory seems so simple that it strikes one as strange that the
problem of aerial navigation was not solved long ago. The story of
Santos-Dumont's experiments, however, his adventures and his successes,
will show that the problem was not so simple as it seemed.

Santos-Dumont was built to jockey a Pegasus or guide an air-ship, for he
weighed but a hundred pounds when he made his first ascensions, and
added very little live ballast as he grew older.

Weight, of course, was the great bugbear of every air-ship inventor,
and the chief problem was to provide a motor light enough to furnish
sufficient power for driving a balloon that had sufficient lifting
capacity to support it and the aeronaut in the air. Steam-engines had
been tried, but found too heavy for the power generated; electric motors
had been tested, and proved entirely out of the question for the same