Aeronaut

As it must to all men, Death came last week to Walter Wellman, 75, oldtime Polar explorer, who tried to fly the Atlantic when Charles Lindbergh was eight years old.

At the Century's turn Walter Wellman was an adventuring journalist. Having discovered the exact landing place of Columbus, and led two unsuccessful searches for the North Pole, he persuaded Publisher Frank B. Noyes in 1906 to put up $75,000 for an airship flight to the Pole. The money paid for the dirigible America I, in which Explorer Wellman & party collided with a glacier. Two years later America II also got into trouble. Before America II could make another try, Peary reached the Pole afoot and Explorer Wellman lost interest. However, his Arctic experience enabled him to sense, prove, and write a famed report of Dr. Frederick Cook's monumental hoax.

Against such a background Walter Wellman became the talk of two continents when in 1910 he attempted to fly from Atlantic City to Europe in the rebuilt America, with a crew of five and a mascot kitten. The America had a bag 228 ft. long filled with hydrogen generated from sulphuric acid and iron filings. She carried a long control car, the keel of which was a cylindrical fuel tank. From it were suspended a lifeboat and a long cable trailing a cluster of 30 hollow steel cylinders. This last device, called an "equilibrator," was supposed to touch the water, keeping the dirigible at an altitude of 200 ft. If the warm sun should cause the ship to rise, the equilibrator would act as ballast. There were two 80-h. p. engines.

The America took off on a Saturday morning, amid intense public excitement. She chugged out to sea, sent four wireless messages (the first from aircraft) including one reporting that the kitten had jumped overboard and was rescued by a rope. A shifting wind drove the ship off her northeast course. The equilibrator bounced from wave to wave, threatened to wreck the ship. Early Tuesday morning, after traveling 1,008 mi., the America sighted a steamer which came alongside, took Capt. Wellman, crew & kitten aboard. The America vanished into the skies.

Walter Wellman never went aloft again. He wrote prolifically for a few years, then lapsed into complete obscurity in his Manhattan home. Few months ago cancer of the liver laid him low.

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