The year 1898 witnessed the commencement of two famous systems of navigation by the lighter than air, one in France, the other in Germany, destined quickly to revolutionize the art, and to establish it on a practical basis. The leading exponents of these two systems were Señor Don Alberto Santos-Dumont, a rich young Brazilian living in Paris, and Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Germany’s stanch old admiral of the air. Both achieved success by applying the gasoline engine to the propulsion of elongated balloons, but by very different methods. Santos-Dumont, apparently ignoring, or fearing to adopt, the excellent hull and car designed and used by Renard, began where Tissandier left off, with a symmetrical hull and low-hung car, thus producing a safe aërial pendulum, if not a racing machine; then by degrees he gradually felt his way to something more efficient. Zeppelin began with a long cylindrical hull pointed at the ends, rigidly framed like that of Schwartz, and supporting its car and propellers well aloft near the line of resistance. His was a bold and effective design but difficult to execute. Santos-Dumont scored the first success, and startled the world by his spectacular flights; but ere long he was surpassed by other builders of non-rigid balloons. Zeppelin won his success slowly and by heroic perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles, finally emerging as the most successful and illustrious figure in the history of aëronautics. The achievements of these two pioneers and colleagues make the first decade of the twentieth century memorable in the annals of aërial navigation. Santos-Dumont, who spent his early years on his father’s large coffee plantation in Brazil, had, during boyhood, dreamed of navigating the air, and in 1897, at the age of twenty-four, made in France his first ascension in a spherical balloon. While living at Paris during that year he gave much time to motorcycling, automobiling and operating spherical balloons, of which he possessed two constructed after his own ideas; one, the smallest in the world, designed for solitary voyages, the other large enough for more than one person, intended for social excursions. Thus by way of amusement, and probably by impulse rather than deliberate purpose, he was equipping himself to become both the designer and the pilot of his future dirigibles.