116 years ago today, at 11.15am, November 20th 1903, the airship, Le Jaune, built by France’s Lebaudy brothers, glided past the Eiffel Tower in Paris .... Read much more below
The first experimental Lebaudy airship was built in 1902 in their specially constructed airship hangar at Moisson, near the River Seine downstream from Paris. The name Le Jaune (“The Yellow”) came from a coat of yellow lead chromate that was used to seal the airship envelope.
The Lebaudy airships were what is known as semi-rigids, having a spar which ran practically the full length of the gas bag to which it was attached in such a way as to distribute the load evenly. The car was suspended from the spar, at the rear end of which both horizontal and vertical rudders were fixed, while stabilising fins were provided at the stern of the gas envelope itself.
Le Jaune was built by the engineer Henri Juillot, it made thirty flights in 1902, in all but two of which it succeeded in returning to its starting point. The length was 183 feet and its maximum diameter 30 feet, while the cubic capacity was 80,000 feet. This machine carried a 40-horse-power Daimler motor driving two propellers. A speed of 3G feet per second, or about 25 miles per hour, was obtained. Six months after this crowd gathering flight, during tests in the summer of 1904, the balloon was dashed against a tree and almost entirely destroyed.
Later vessels of the Lebaudy type were the 'Patrie' and 'Republique,' in which both size and method of construction surpassed those of the two first attempts. The next year a new and larger balloon, equipped with a more powerful motor was used. Many flights were made in tests for the French War Department. In some of these, the Lebaudy Brothers were accompanied by the minister of war.
Various methods of anchoring a dirgible in the open and keeping its head into the wind had been tried, but at best it will always be a decidedly hazardous undertaking. In November, 1907, the French dirigible 'La Patrie' was anchored at Verdun, caught away from its house, and encountered a gale which broke her hold on her mooring-ropes. She broke loose in the storm, and in spite of the two hundred soldiers holding on, she drifted derelict westward across France, the Channel, and the British Isles, Ireland and Scotland, floated over the North Sea and disappeared in the Atlantic!
Paul and Pierre Lebaudy were the owners of a sugar refinery who, with the assistance of their engineer Henri Julliot as designer were instrumental in the development of airships in the first decade of the twentieth century. Their semi-rigid airships were considered useful for military purposes and several were ordered by the French War Ministry.
These are my colourised versions of: Le Jaune, gliding past the Eiffel Tower, 11:15 a.m. 20th November, 1903, Pierre Lebaudy, and engineer Henri Julliot in the hangar at Moisson on the day of the flight, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, taken in November 1889, but I have posted the original photographs at the top of the comments.
Read on for just a little of the history created by "la tour Eiffel"........
Completed on March 31, 1889, the tower was the world’s tallest man-made structure for 41 years until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930.
It is 324 metres tall (including antennas) and weighs 10,100 tonnes.
It is possible to climb to the top, but there are 1,665 steps.
The lifts travel a combined distance of 103,000 km a year – two and a half times the circumference of the Earth.
Victor Lustig, a con artist, "sold" the tower for scrap metal on two separate occasions.
During cold weather the tower shrinks by about six inches.
Eiffel also designed interior elements of the Statue of Liberty.
Since its opening more than 250 million people have visited the tower.
Its construction took two years, two months and five days - 180 years fewer than Paris's other great attraction, Notre Dame.
Repainting the tower, which happens every seven years, requires 60 tonnes of paint.
The tower comprises 18,000 metallic parts, joined together by 2.5 million rivets.
The tower sways around six to seven centimetres (2-3 inches) in the wind.
Gustave Eiffel kept a small apartment of the third floor for entertaining friends. It is now open to the public.
In 1960 Charles de Gaulle proposed temporarily dismantling the tower and sending it to Montreal for Expo 67. The plan was rejected.
There are 20,000 lightbulbs used on the Eiffel Tower to make it sparkle every night.
Pierre Labric cycled down the stairs of the tower in 1923. He won a bet, but was arrested by local police
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