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Santos' New Machine to Be Ready This Week and it Will Not Be a Toy. 

By STERLING HEILIG
[Special Letter to The Dispatch] 

Paris, Ec 29.- "This year man flies!" says Santos-Dumont, and the Paris automobile world is so convinced of it that we are witnessing a phenomenal aeroplane scramble. The Marquis de Dion has put the DeDion-Bouton factory to work on two aeroplanes and six experimental motors. Ernest Archdeacon is building a single-box machine with a 70-horse-power motor of his own devising. The Italian Vina has his single-plane refitting with one of the remarkable 12-cylinder motors of which I shall speak presently. Serge de Bolontoff, son of the Princess Wiasensky, is removing his plant from Vevey to Paris. 
The Count de la Vauix, who has hitherto despised everything but spherical ballooning, has ordered an aeroplane with propeller force to drive it 37 miles an hour. A. V. Rol, the Londoner who admittedly follows the Wrights, has come to Paris to profit by mechanical facilities and be ready fo the coming mixup. Henri Deutsch is paying for two spare-no-expense copies of the Bird of Prey, while the Bleriot-Voisin combination has abandoned its original form to copy the same winner of the two first heavier-than-the-air prizes-the Archdeacon Cup and the Aero Club Prize. 
Probably a full list of aeroplanes building in Paris would include half the great auto manufacturers. Girardot of the C. G. V., fo example, is admittedly a candidate; the younger Clement is backing a school friend inventor; many are working in secret; some of the productions will never be heard of; but I cannot exaggerate the movement of the anticipation, intensified by Santos-Dumont's two flights. 

Prizes That Are Tempting 
Sensational rumors circulate. "Since Sanots made his combination with the Antoinette motor people, he will do the rest of his experiments in private," runs one story. "Then, one day, their perfected aeroplane will dart over Paris. They will scoop all the big prizes." True, the prizes- apart from the Daily Mail's London-Machester $50,000-are still nebulous; but that several heavy ones will be founded in Paris early in 1907 is an open secret. For example, one of the rumors of the Automobile Salon has it that the combined Automobile and Aeroclubs would have already offered one sufficient to tempt the Wight brothers to Paris had not the Fench Government asked them to patriotically desist-not to spoil its dickering for the secret. Desirous to get at facts instead of rumours, I traced Sanots from the Automobile Salon to Colombin's tea-place, lost him at the Ritz, picked up the trail at his sumptuous apartment in the Champs Elysees, and finally caught him in a garage, superintending alterations in his 120-horse-power Mercedes racer. 
    "I'm going to Rom for the holidays," he said. "Got to make the vehicle more comfortable."
    Certainly he goes via Marseille and the Riviera, but cutting the icy winds of Northern France at 60 miles per hour to get there is typical of the sporting crankiness of these up-to-date Parisians who are as much at home in the workshops as in salons, who pass from pink-lit luxury to the cold grind of the factories, from the babble and frou-frou of beauty to the friendship of artisans.
The Aluminum Aeroplane.
   "Experiment in private?" laughed Santos. "Not on your life, I wouldn't put that affront on the friends who have encouraged me. The story comes from my endeavor to find a better place that Bagatelle, which is public ground. Look you! After winning the Aero Club prize I had petroleum enough to continue flying half an hour; yet I stopped the motor for fear of finally crashing down on some of those ten thousand women and children.
   "I had no right to order them to make a clear space.  If I can get a big private ground near Paris, certainly I'll take it.  I need space.  My new aeroplane will not be a toy for youth and beauty.  It will be a devil!  All aluminum!  A 100-horsepower motor with 16 cylinders all churning at the same time!"
   "When will it be ready?" I asked.
   "The first week in January. That is why I can run down to Rome for the holidays."
  "Santos," I said, "are you going to fly-like those chaps in the Jules Verne stories?" 
   He looked at me squarely in the eye.
   "It is as good as done-since my two flights in that old Bird of Prey, which was a tentative construction, whose one simple object was to quit the earth by motive force-to fix the requirements by actual doing.  Where I used silk and bamboo in it, the new flyer will be all of aluminum!" 
   "The great plane surfaces?" I asked astonished.
   "It will shine like magic," he laughed. "It will look like one of Wells' Martian aeroplanes-and dart through the air like one." 
   "But the enormous metallic surfaces!" I objected.
   "They will answer better than silk from every point of view; then, as I double my motive power, I can reduce my surface.  The Bird of Prey required a speed of 25 miles per hour to quit the earth.  The new flyer will take nearly 50-and will have nearer 80!"
   "The Antoinette motor?" I suggested. "Since you have gone in with Bleriot you will profit by skilled aid."

Santos Not Combined.
   "I have gone in with no one," answered Santos quickly.  "M. Bleriot is the backer of a big industrial enterprise that makes a wonderful motor for my purposes. It also makes automobiles, phares, and searchlights. That is one thing.  I am buying motors from them.  On the other hand, M. Bleriot is backing the aeroplance experiments of a school friend, Voisin.  When it came a cropper at Bagatelle the other day I gave them permission to store it in many hangar at Neuilly St. James. There, too, they will repair it, adapting the lines of my Bird of Prey. Why not? The more the merrier! We want to fly!"
   The day previous I had pushed my way through the crowd around the Antoinette stand at the automobile salon to take a look at the extraordinary motor.  By its suppression of the flywheel it becomes easily the lightest motor in the world.  Santos now explained to me this novelty.
   "A one-cylinder steam engine needs a flywheel to carry its piston past the dead point, but the moment it has two cylinders a steam engine does not require a flywheel-donkey engines on board ship do not have them.  All right.  Now, to correspond with a two-cylinder steam engine in this respect how many cylinders must a petroleum motor possess?  Evidently four times [[?]] many, because where in a steam engine you have two pushes for each turn, the petroleum motor gives but one push every two turns--you know the cycle, drawing in gasoline, mixing it with air, igniting it, explosion, pushing out consumed gas, etc.  Therefore, when you have an eight-cylinder petroleum motor it is as if you had a two-cylinder steam engine-you can do away with the flywheel."