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PARIS COPIRILMT
SANTOS IN THE BIRD OF PREY
The Eight-Cylinder Antoinette Motor is Below Him to the Left.

Deutsch is paying for two spare-no-expense copies of the Bird of Prey; while the Blériot-Voisin combination has abandoned its original form to copy the same winner of the two first heavier-than-the-air prizes-the Arcdeacon Cup and the Aereo Club prize.
 Probably a full list of aeroplanes building in Paris would include half the great auto manufacturers. Girardot of the C. G. V., for 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 anticipation, intensified by Santos-Dumont's two flights.
 Sensational rumors circulate. "Since Santos made his combination with the Antoinette mator 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 up all the big prizes."

True, the prizes - apart from the Daily Mail's London-Manchester $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 Aero clubs would have already offered one sufficient to tempt the Wright Brothers to Paris had not the French Government asked them to patriotically desist - not to spoil its dickering for the secret.

Desirous to get at facts instead of rumors, I traced Santos 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 Elysées, and finally caught him in a garage, superintending alterations in his 120-horsepower racer.

"I'm going to Rome for the holidays," he said. "Got to make the vehicle more comfortable." 

Certainly he goes via Marseilles and the Riviera; but cutting the icy winds of northern France at sixty miles an hour to get there is typical of the sporting crankiness of these up-to-date Parisians, who are as much at home in workshops as in salons, who pass form pink-lit luxury to the cold grind of factories, from babble and frou-frou of beauty to the friendship of artisans.

"Experiment in private?" laughed Santos. "Not on your life. I wouldn't put that afterfront on the friends who have encouraged me. The story comes from my endeavor to find a better place than 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 thousands 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 aluminium. A 100-horsepower motor with sixteen 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 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 od aluminium."

buying motors of them. On the other hand, M. Bleriot is backing the aeroplace experiments of a school friend, Voisin. When it came a cropper at Bagatelle the other day I have them permission to store it in my 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 moto. By its suppression of the fly wheel it becomes easily the lightest motor in the world. Santos now explained to me this novelty.

"A one-cyclinder steam engine needs a fly wheel to carry its piston past the dead point; but the moment it has two cylinders a steam engine does not require a fly wheel - donkey engines on board ship do not have them. All right. Now, to correspond with a two-cyclinder steam enginer in this respect, how many cylinders must a petroleum motor possess? Evidently four times as 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 has, etc. Therefore, when you have an eight-cyclinder petroleum motor it is as if you had a two-cyclinder steam engine - you can do away with the fly wheel."

This, you understand, it one - but only one - of the reasons his Bird of Prey was furnished with an eight-cylinder motor, and why his new motor will have sixteen cylinders. Try to imagine what a sixteen-cylinder motor looks like. In a way it suggests a shining metallic centipede alive with explosions and sparks. For lightness it has the free escape of gas, with all its thunderspitting.

"I am still in admiration of its lightness!" exclaimed Santos. "It will develop more than 100-horsepower and it weighs only 200 pounds! There's progress! The Buchet motor with which I won the Deutsch prize of Navigable Ballooning gave me 12-horsepower for 198 pounds weight."

"I hope the Wright brothers will fly over Paris," said Ernest Archdeacon, as he stopped a moment to glance at the Mercedes and talk routes to Rome with Santos. "It will be far simpler to buy one of their machines than to risk our necks in experimental constructions. But, whether they come or don't come, we shall fly.

"Their good work is really done," he added. "Their story came to us at the psychological moment. It has given us the necessary encouragement to do the rest."

"Surely we shall fly," said Caption Ferber. He is the Parisian who has been nearest to the Wrights. "We are now where automobiles were in 1894. What is going to happen? It is very simple. As in 1984 the Paris papers will found heavy prizes. We will have aeroplane races. Who will compete in them? Why, the same Parisians who made the bicycle races, the motorcyclette races, the automobile races. Gentlemen of means and leisure will associate themselves with workmen, as in 1894, when the automobile was being born. * * *

"Some will kill themselves," he mused. "Some innocent pedestrians will be crushed by falling aeroplanes. The Parliament will aerial races. Under pressure of industrial and sporting intersts Parliament will permit them anew - as with the automobile races. The press will guide public opinion in the interest of Paris. A great new industry will be created. Foreigners will come to buy aeroplanes - as they now flock to the Automobile Salon. * * * Voila!"

"Voila!" repeated Santos.
"Voila!" repeated Arch-deck, as the Parisians pronounce Archdeacon.

STERLING HEILIG

Transcription Notes:
the journal is partially cut off on the left so it's impossible to transcribe correctly.