three, twenty-nine minutes and thirty-one seconds after starting,
Santos-Dumont crossed the line, the winner of the Deutsch Prize. And so
the young Brazilian accomplished that which had been declared
impossible.

[Illustration: THE MOTOR AND BASKET OF "SANTOS-DUMONT NO. 9"
The gasoline holder, from which a tube leads to the motor, can be seen
on the side of the basket.]

The following winter the aerial navigator, in the same No. 5, sailed
many times over the waters of the Mediterranean from Monte Carlo. These
flights over the water, against, athwart, and with the wind, some of
them faster than the attending steamboats could travel, continued until
through careless inflation of the balloon the air-ship and navigator
sank into the sea. Santos-Dumont was rescued without being harmed in the
least, and the air-ship was preserved intact, to be exhibited later to
American sightseers.

"Santos-Dumont No. 6," the most successful of the series built by the
determined Brazilian, looks as if it were altogether too frail to
intrust with the carrying of a human being. The 105-foot-long balloon, a
light yellow in colour, sways and undulates with every passing breeze.
The steel piano wires by which the keel and apparatus are hung to the
balloon skin are like spider-webs in lightness and delicacy, and the
motor that has the strength of eighteen horses is hardly bigger than a
barrel. A little forward of the motor is suspended to the keel the
cigar-shaped gasoline reservoir, and strung along the top rod are the
batteries which furnish the current to make the sparks for the purpose
of exploding the gas in the motor.