100 YEARS AGO

Paris was greatly excited on Saturday last when M. Santos Dumont, with his seventh balloon, successfully rounded the Eiffel Tower and returned to the shed at St. Cloud, thirty seconds within the thirty minutes allotted by the Committee of the Deutsch Prize. At the time of the voyage the wind, according to the Times correspondent, was blowing at the rate of twelve of thirteen miles an hour. At one period the balloon, travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, appeared as though it would collide with the Tower; the aeronaut, however, was able to control its movements without any apparent difficulty, and, as has been said, the journey was accomplished within the time limit agreed upon. M. Santos Dumont is to be congratulated upon the success which has at last attended the untiring efforts put forward by him towards the solution of the problem of aerial navigation.

From Nature 24 October 1901.

50 YEARS AGO

The second International Congress on Astronautics was held in London during September 3–8. It was attended by nearly fifty delegates representing societies and groups interested in astronautics from Argentina, Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States... The latter part of the London Congress was devoted to a symposium of papers on the general theme of orbital vehicles, their construction and uses. There was general agreement among the speakers that such vehicles are possible from an engineering point of view; the first instrument-carrying vehicles could be built within ten to fifteen years; but man-carrying artificial satellites appear to be much further in the future... The greatest problem of interplanetary flight is that of propulsion, and in his paper “Interplanetary Travel between Satellite Orbits”, Prof. Lyman Spitzer discussed a method of applying nuclear energy. It was suggested that an electrically accelerated ion beam could be used for achieving a gas ejection velocity of 100 km./sec. without the use of very high temperatures in the propellant gases. Such a unit could not be built with a large enough thrust/weight ratio to allow it to take off from the surface of a planet. It would be capable of travelling from a close-orbital station about the earth to a similar orbit about any other planet.

From Nature 27 October 1951.