The development of the airship continued for many years to pay toll in wreckage and loss of life. In 1902 three notable airships were built and flown in France; two of these were destroyed in the air above Paris, within a few minutes of their first ascent. Senhor Augusto Severo, a Brazilian, made a spindle-shaped airship, ninety-eight feet long, driven by two airscrews, placed one at each end of a framework which formed the longitudinal axis of the airship. It ascended on the 12th of May, and when it had reached a height of thirteen hundred feet, exploded in flames. Senhor Severo and his assistant perished in it. The other ship was designed by Baron Bradsky, secretary to the German Embassy in Paris; its total weight was made exactly equivalent to the weight of the air that it displaced, and it was to be raised by the operation of an airscrew rotating horizontally under the car. By the action of this screw the car itself began to rotate, and to drag the ship round with it; the resistance of the air on the body of the ship put too great a strain on the steel wires by which the car was suspended; they broke, and from a height of many hundred feet Baron Bradsky and his engineer, M. Morin, fell to earth with the car, and were killed. This second disaster happened on the 13th of October 1902, at Stains, near Paris. Twelve days later, on the 25th of October, a much more fortunate airship, the dirigible built for the brothers Lebaudy, made its first ascent at Moisson. This vessel was more successful than any of its predecessors, and became the model for airships of the semi-rigid type. It was fish-shaped, with a capacity of more than eighty thousand cubic feet, and was driven by a forty horse-power Daimler petrol motor, which worked two airscrews, eight feet in diameter, at a rate exceeding a thousand revolutions a minute. The lower part of the envelope was flat, and secured to a rigid metal framework; six steel tubes, attached to this framework, supported the car below, and, besides distributing the load, conveyed the thrust of the airscrew to the ship above. In the course of a year the ship made twenty-eight return journeys, covering distances up to twenty-two miles. In November 1903 it broke all records, first by making the longest voyage that had ever been made by a navigable balloon, that is, from Moisson to Paris, a distance of about forty miles, and next, a week later, by successfully combating a wind of more than twenty miles an hour. 'Aerial navigation', said Colonel Renard, who witnessed this trial, 'is no longer a Utopia.' After a time the ship was taken over by the French army, and its immediate Lebaudy successors, _La Patrie_ of 1906 and _La Republique_ of 1908, also became military airships. Both were wrecked after a short career, but the military airship had made good its promise, and three new airship-building firms were established in France. In 1902 the Astra Company, in 1909 and 1910 the Zodiac Company and the Clement-Bayard