Indeed, ever since man has learned to fly he has become such an exalted creature that he has ceased to regard any mechanical feat as impossible. This is, in a measure at least, pardonable when we stop to consider that ever since man got up off his hands and learned to walk upright he has longed to be able to fly as a bird through the heavens in any direction he chose, without let or hindrance, boundary or border. Though he expended every effort to accomplish this feat, and often lost his life in the attempt, for countless ages the privilege to soar aloft was denied him. In point of time it was, as we have seen, September, 1783, before the Montgolfier brothers succeeded in sending up even a paper bag inflated with hot air, and it was November of the same year before two Frenchmen, the Marquis d’Arlandes and Pilâtre de Roziers, made the world’s first trip in any kind of aerial vehicle—namely, a free balloon. But these and most of the attempts to navigate the air in the next century were unsuccessful, primarily due to the lack of power adaptable to propelling a gas-bag through the air. In 1852. Henri Gifford, another Frenchman, made the first successful directed flight in a dirigible 143 feet long and 39 feet in diameter. It was inflated with hydrogen and driven by a three-horse-power steam-engine, an eleven-foot screw propeller, and it made six miles an hour relative to the wind. Owing to the fuel, fire, and weight problems the steam-engine was then impractical as a means of propulsion for lighter-than-air machines. In 1884 Captain Charles Renard went a step farther in the right direction by installing a 200-pound electric motor, generating nine horse-power. The battery, composed of chlorochromic salts, delivered one shaft horse-power for each eighty-eight pounds of weight, but in spite of such a handicap he flew over Paris at fourteen and a half miles an hour. Nevertheless, the electric motor was also impractical, even for a rigid dirigible. As a matter of fact, every gas-bag was at the mercy of the winds, and could not steer a direct course, until the gasoline motor was invented and developed to generate more than a dozen horse-power. The first man to build a rigid dirigible with an aluminum framework and drive it with a gasoline motor was an Austrian named Schwartz, but the first man to build, equip, and perform the necessary evolutions with a rigid dirigible was Santos-Dumont, the famous Brazilian. He accomplished this feat in September, 1898, when he set out from the Zoological Gardens at Paris and in the face of a gentle wind steered his airship in nearly every point of the compass. In 1901 he circumnavigated the Eiffel Tower, thus demonstrating the feasibility of the lighter-than-air ship as a practical means of locomotion through the air.