e year that witnessed the first triumphs of Santos-Dumont saw also
the beginning of the success of his great German rival, the Count
von Zeppelin. These two daring spirits, struggling to attain the
same end, were alike in their enthusiasm, their pertinacity, and
their devotion to the same cause. Both were animated by the highest
patriotism. Santos-Dumont offered his fleet to France to be used
against any nation except those of the two Americas. He said: "It is
in France that I have met with all my encouragement; in France and
with French material I have made all my experiments. I excepted the
two Americas because I am an American."

Count Zeppelin for his part, when bowed down in apparent defeat and
crushed beneath the burden of virtual bankruptcy, steadily refused
to deal with agents of other nations than Germany--which at that
time was turning upon him the cold shoulder. He declared that his
genius had been exerted for his own country alone, and that his
invention should be kept a secret from all but German authorities. A
secret it would be to-day, except that accident and the fortunes of
war revealed the intricacies of the Zeppelin construction to both
France and England.

Santos-Dumont had the fire, enthusiasm, and resiliency of youth;
Zeppelin, upon whom age had begun to press when first he took up
aeronautics, had the dogged pertinacity of the Teuton. Both were
rich at the outset, but Zeppelin's capital melted away under the
demands of his experimental workshops, while the ancestral coffee
lands of the Brazilian never failed him.

Of the two Zeppelin had the more obstinacy, for he held to his plan
of a rigid dirigible balloon even in face of its virtual failure in
the supreme test of war. Santos-Dumont was the more alert
intellectually for he was still in the flood tide of successful
demonstration with his balloons when he saw and grasped the promise
of the airplane and shifted his activities to that new field in
which he won new laurels.

Zeppelin won perhaps the wider measure of immediate fame, but
whether enduring or not is yet to be determined. His airships
impressive, even majestic as they are, have failed to prove their
worth in war, and are yet to be fully tested in peace. That they
remain a unique type, one which no other individual nor any other
nation has sought to copy, cannot be attributed wholly to the
jealousy of possible rivals. If the monster ship, of rigid frame,
were indeed the ideal form o