第15章

It was this feature of the Zeppelin which induced Great Britain to build the May-fly and which likewise induced the French Government to stimulate dirigible design and construction among native manufacturers, at the same time, however, insisting that such craft should be equal at least in speed to the Zeppelins.

The response to this invitation was the Spiess, which with its speed of 45 miles per hour ranked, until 1914, as one of the fastest dirigibles in the French service.

In the meantime a Spanish engineer, Senor Torres, had been quietly working out a new idea. He realised the shortcomings of the prevailing types of airships some eleven years ago, and unostentatiously and painstakingly set out to eliminate them by the perfection of a new type of craft. He perfected his idea, which was certainly novel, and then sought the assistance of the Spanish Government. But his fatherland was not adapted to the prosecution of the project. He strove to induce the authorities to permit even a small vessel to be built, but in vain. He then approached the French Astra Company. His ambition was to build a vessel as large as the current Zeppelin, merely to emphasise the value of his improvement upon a sufficiently large scale, and to enable comparative data concerning the two designs to be obtained. But the bogey of expense at first proved insuperable.

However, the French company, decided to give the invention a trial, and to this end a small "vedette" of about 53,000 cubic feet displacement was built.

Although an unpretentious little vessel, it certainly served to emphasise the importance of the Torres idea. It was pitted against the "Colonel Renard," the finest ship at that time in the French aerial service, which had proved the fastest airship in commission, and which also was a product of the Astra Company.

But this fine craft was completely outclassed by the puny Astra-Torres.

The builders and the inventor were now additionally anxious to illustrate more emphatically the features of this design and to build a far larger vessel. The opportunity was offered by the British Government, which had been following the experiments with the small Astra-Torres in France. An order was given for a vessel of 282,500 cubic feet displacement; in this instance it was ranged against another formidable rival--the Parseval. But the latter also failed to hold its own against the Spanish invention, inasmuch as the Astra-Torres built for the British authorities exceeded a speed of 50 miles per hour in the official tests. This vessel is still doing valuable duty, being attached to the British air-service in France.