It wasn't until 1884 that a really practical airship took to
the skies. La France, built by a pair of French Army Captains, Charles Renaud
and Arthur Krebs, is generally considered the first truly dirigible aircraft.
It was 165 feet long, with an overall weight of about 2 tons. Most of that
weight was taken up by banks of wet-cell batteries providing power for an
electric motor driving the ship's tractor propellor. As one might expect, La
France's range was quite limited, but it could move at a very respectable 12
miles per hour.

Reynaud and Krebs deserve some bonus Steampunkery Points for
the electric drive system, which is much the same as what Captain Nemo used to
propel the Nautilus in Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Electrical power
also meant they didn't have to worry about a hot exhaust stack or stray spark
setting the balloon envelope on fire, which was a serious concern aboard an
airship filled with hydrogen.

Retrospectives about "how the future used to be"
often reprint some of the amusing illustrations by the French caricaturist
Albert Robida. His scenes of top-hatted and mustachioed men flying off to the
Opera in their airships are the epitome of steampunk zaniness.

 . . . Except that he
wasn't making anything up. If you lived in Paris in 1901, the airship runabout
wasn't some cartoonist's fantasy, it was something you could see by looking out
of the window. The mustachioed gentleman at the controls was Alberto
Santos-Dumont, piloting his Airship #6 to lunch at Maxim's.

Santos-Dumont #6 was about the minimum possible airship that
could still fly: it was 109 feet long, with a lifting power of just under a
ton. That was enough for a slender Franco-Brazilian aeronaut, possibly a lunch
guest, and a gasoline engine pushing it along at about 18 miles per hour over
the rooftops of Paris.

Santos-Dumont was almost a pulp science fiction character
himself. He was the heir to a vast Brazilian coffee fortune, a self-taught
balloon pilot and airship designer, and a style-setting man-about-town. When
flying his airship around Paris he couldn't let go of the controls to go
fumbling in his waistcoat pocket for his watch (and probably didn't want to
risk dropping his timepiece from several hundred feet in the air) — so his
buddy Louis Cartier created a wristwatch, which Santos-Dumont wore for the rest
of his life. All the other fashionable gentlemen followed suit.

(Digression: The alert reader may have noticed a pattern in
these blog entries. With the sole exception of New Jerseyite Dr. Solomon
Andrews, all the pioneers in airships were French. From the Montgolfiers right
up to the 1930s, France was the world center of aviation. Even though the
Wright Brothers were Americans, most of the early advances in airplane design also
came out of France. You can see it in the very names of an airplane's
components: the fuselage, the ailerons, the empennage. The Paris Air Show has
always been the aviation world's Oscar night. For some reason Americans suffer
from a mysterious sort of amnesia regarding French aeronautical pioneers. I
don't know why.)

With Santos-Dumont, steampunkery, alternate history, and the
real world get into a monumental tangle. At the dawn of the 20th Century, the
world really was a steampunk alternate universe, and it was only dragged back
to reality by the carnage of World War I.

Next time: The Count!