While on the subject of air safety I could not pass up those wiley balloonist who gave powered, semi controlled flight a shot. This was only a few decades before airplanes with wings took off and somehow people were looking up a lot more. I mean they hadn't got the car worked out and trains were just getting going. You'd think they would maybe take the time to get one of them right at least before moving on. Since locomotives and horseless carriages still exploded with alarming frequency, you figure they would have got some of the basics taken care off. Oh well, same thinking that gave us the 30 inch bore cannon I guess.
A fellow Frenchman of Clement Ader was Henri Giffard. Just a few years before Ader's bat winged flyer, Henri actually flew around in a powered balloon. The year was 1852 and he flew an enormous 43 metre long hydrogen filled balloon that was powered by a 3 horsepower steam engine spinning a 12 foot propeller. This engineering marvel flew over 15 miles and was totally controlled by Giffard. Balloonists up till then were at the mercy of the winds. This made air travel, and transport, potentially viable.
The insane flammability of hydrogen was not lost on balloonists of the era. Giffard's wheezing and sparking steam engine was suspended well below the gas bag (mainly to give the huge propeller room) but he got the fire safety thing. The smoke stack pointed downwards and had water vapour from the boiler injected into it to snuff the bigger flaming chunks.
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