The steam engine was dependable, but once you had installed firebox, boiler and cord wood aboard, there was little if any lift remaining for crew or cargo. Giffard in 1852 built an ingenious small engine using steam but it still weighed 100 pounds per horsepower, drove the ship at a speed of only three miles an hour. Automobile engines today weigh as little as six pounds per horsepower, modern airplane engines one pound per horsepower. Man experimented with feather-bladed oars, with a screw propeller, turned by hand, using a crew of eight men. Haenlein, German, built a motor that would use the lifting gas from the ship—coal gas or hydrogen. Rennard in 1884 built an electric motor, taking power from a storage battery. But real progress would have to wait for the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania and the invention of the internal combustion engine. When the gasoline engine came in, in the 90’s, the dirigible builders saw the long sought key to their problem. While Count Zeppelin was experimenting with his big ships in Germany, Lebaudy, Juliot, Clement Bayard in France and most conspicuously the young Brazilian, Santos Dumont, were working with the smaller dirigibles. Santos Dumont built 14 airships in the first decade of the century, brought the attention of the world to this project. He won a 100,000 franc prize in 1901 for flying across Paris to circle Eiffel Tower and return to his starting point—and gave the money to the Paris poor. The Wright Brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, in 1903, opening a different field of experiment. France pushed both lines of research. After Santos Dumont’s dirigible flight, Bleriot started from the little town of Toury in an airplane, flew to the next town and back, a distance of 17 miles, making only two en route stops,—and the town erected a monument to him. In 1909, Bleriot flew a plane across the English Channel and in the following year the airship Clement Bayard II duplicated the feat, carrying a crew of seven, made the 242 miles to London in six hours. The year 1910 was a momentous one for all aircraft, with France as the world center. Bleriot and Farman, Frenchmen, Latham, British, the Wrights and Curtiss, Americans, broke records almost daily at a big meet in August that year, while at longer range the French and English dirigibles and the Parsevals of Germany, and still more important the great Zeppelins at Lake Constance droned the news of a new epoch. A young American engineer, P. W. Litchfield, attended the Paris meet, saw these wonders, made notes. He stopped in Scotland on his way back, bought a machine for spreading rubber on fabric, hired the two men tending it (those men, Ferguson and Aikman, were still at their posts in Akron thirty odd years later), hired two young technical graduates on his return, tied in the fortunes of his struggling company with what he believed was a coming industry.