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balloonists were competing. Surely that, a winged female figure with bare breasts and flowing hair, holding the torch of progress in one hand and supporting a elongated gas balloon on her back, was all the incentive required. The Swiss pi lot Emil Messner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “It is a beastly work of art,” he spluttered. “It looks like a German sausage!”
    A ruckus then erupted when Lambert was asked to clarify what would constitute a technical landing during the race: when the balloon’s drag rope touched the ground or when the balloon basket did? The correspondent from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looked on in bemusement as “at once a babel of German, French, Swiss and English arose.” Lambert quieted the confusion by calling for a meeting of the aeronauts the following morning at the Jefferson Hotel, but the beleaguered president’s problems weren’t quite over. “In the midst of the tumult,” reported the Post-Dispatch , “the German entrants could be heard calling for hay.”
    Lambert looked nonplussed. Why on earth did they need hay? To keep their feet warm, they replied in unison, explaining that it could get very cold during a balloon race. Lambert guaranteed them that they would have all the hay they needed. Once calm had been restored to the dinner, a second round of speeches began. Von Abercron proposed a toast to his compatriot Oscar Erbslöh, winner of the 1907 International Balloon Cup race and recently killed in an airship accident. Then one of the American balloonists, Alan Hawley, rose to his feet and on behalf of the United States wished everyone a safe race. “The best advice I can offer you,” he said, “is to keep close to the ground.” The final speaker was the Swiss balloonist Colonel Theodore Schaeck, at fifty-four the oldest competitor in the race. He and Emil Messner had won the cup in 1908 with a 750-mile flight from Berlin to Norway. The voyage had lasted seventy-two hours, forty of which had been spent drifting across the North Sea. So sure had they been that they would ditch and die in the water, Messner and Schaeck had written farewell letters to their families. Grahame-White might have balked at the vulnerability inherent in a free balloon, but putting one’s fate in the lap of the gods was the beauty of the sport in Schaeck’s view. “The airplane is doing great things,” he told his audience of balloonists and aviators, “but I notice that the spherical still exists. Besides, your airplane has still to remain in the air seventy hours or more!”
    Some of the balloonists banged their glasses on the table and cried, “Hear, hear!” casting playful grins at Hoxsey and Johnstone, who smiled and applauded Schaeck back to his seat. Slowly the party began to break up, the aviators mindful of a need for an early start tomorrow so they could organize the transportation of their machines to New York. The balloonists, too, couldn’t afford to wake with a sore head if they had to be at the Jefferson Hotel at ten A.M. to resolve the question of a technical landing. But a few men lingered over their drinks, and among the topics of conversation was Walter Wellman. Had they heard the latest? According to that evening’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he was making capital progress at fifteen knots an hour. What was more, a wireless message from the airship had confirmed that the engines were working well and the sea was calm.

    * Jacon claimed he had been hired by Wellman during the summer for $50 a week, plus expenses, but that no money was forthcoming after the first week. Then, on October 14, Jacon received his back pay, but it was only $30 a week.
    * Penny dreadfuls were cheap and sensationalist novels popular with the British working classes and schoolboys.
    * On July 25, 1909, Blériot became the first man to fly across the English Channel. Leaving France early in the morning in a monoplane of his own design, he touched down in England thirty-seven