To lessen the effects of a possible fall, the experiments were carried out over water, and the great airship was housed in a shed built on Lake Constance. The cost of this shed alone was enormous, for it was elaborately constructed on pontoons, and anchored in such a way that it could be turned round to allow the airship to be liberated from it in the best direction to suit the wind. The trial trip was made one evening in June 1900, when a very light wind was blowing. The great machine rose into the air, carrying Zeppelin and four companions to a height of 800 feet. The steering apparatus then being put into action, it circled round and faced the wind, remained stationary for a short while, and then sank gracefully and gently upon the water. A few days later another and more successful trial was made. The wind at the time was blowing at sixteen miles an hour, but in spite of this the airship slowly steered its course against the wind for three and a half miles, when, one of the rudders breaking, it was obliged to come down. On one or two other occasions also it made successful voyages, proving itself to be perfectly manageable and capable of being steered on an absolutely calm day. The expense of the experiments was, however, tremendous; money fell short, and the great machine, the result of many years’ labour and thought, has since been abandoned and broken up. [Illustration: SANTOS DUMONT’S AIRSHIP.] A far happier fate has so far attended the efforts of the brave young Brazilian, Albert Santos Dumont. The wealthy son of a successful coffee-planter, he had always from his boyhood been keenly interested in aeronautics, and, coming to Paris, he constructed in 1898 an airship of a somewhat novel kind. His balloon was cigar-shaped, 83 feet long, and holding 6500 feet of pure hydrogen. Attached to the balloon, and working a propeller, was a small motor like those used for motor cycles, and astride of this Santos Dumont rode, bicycle fashion, steering his course with a rudder. In this ingenious machine he ascended from the Botanical Gardens in Paris and circled several times round the large captive balloon then moored there, after which he made a number of bold sweeps in the air, until an accident occurred to his engine and he came precipitately to the ground. Though shaken he was by no means discouraged, and declared his intention of continuing his experiments until he should have invented an airship which, in his own words, should be “not a mere plaything, but a practical invention, capable of being applied in a thoroughly useful fashion.”