Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight. Paul Hoffman

as the balloon passed through a cloud. They could still make out the basket, the instruments, and the parts of the rigging that were nearest to them, but the balloon itself was invisible. “So we had for a moment the strange and delightful sensation of hanging in the void without support,” wrote Santos-Dumont, “of having lost our last ounce of weight in a limbo of nothingness.” They furiously threw out ballast. After a few minutes they emerged from the dark fog to find themselves only one thousand feet above a village—the balloon had plunged nine thousand feet. The two men took their bearings with a compass and compared the landmarks they saw with those on a map. “Soon we could identify roads, railways, villages, and forests,” Santos-Dumont said, “all hastening toward us from the horizon with the swiftness of the wind itself!” The wind was also gusting unpredictably, tossing the balloon from side to side and bouncing it up and down, making a soup of what remained of the roast beef and ice cream.

      If this maiden voyage had taught Santos-Dumont the value of ballast in maintaining a balloon’s equilibrium, it also taught him the value of the guide rope for a smooth landing and takeoff. The thick guide rope, extending three hundred feet and dangling from the basket, served as an automatic brake whenever the balloon returned to earth with disquieting speed for whatever reason. And the reasons could be many: a downward stroke of wind, the accidental loss of gas, the accumulation of snow on the balloon envelope, or a cloud passing in front of the sun. When the balloon descended below three hundred feet, more and more of the guide rope came to rest on the ground, thereby lightening the weight of the craft and arresting its fall. Under the opposite condition, when the balloon was ascending too rapidly, the lifting of the guide rope off the ground increased the weight of the balloon, thereby slowing its rise.

      The guide rope, though ingeniously simple and effective, also had its “inconveniences,” as Santos-Dumont charitably put it. “Its rubbing along the uneven surfaces of the ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, roads and houses, hedges and telegraph wires—gives violent shocks to the balloon,” he wrote later. “Or it may happen that the guide rope, rapidly unraveling the snarl in which it has twisted itself, catches hold of some asperity of the surface, or winds itself around the trunk or branches of a tree.” He was writing from experience. As Machuron prepared to land, the guide rope coiled itself around a large oak, bringing the balloon to an abrupt halt, throwing the two aeronauts backward in the basket. For a quarter of an hour, the captured balloon, battered by the wind, kept them “shaking like a salad basket.”

      Machuron used the occasion to dissuade Santos-Dumont from constructing a powered balloon. “Observe the treachery and vindictiveness of the wind!” he shouted. “We are tied to the tree, yet see what force it tries to jerk us loose!” At that moment Santos-Dumont was thrown again into the bottom of the basket. “What screw propeller could hold a course against it?” Machuron continued. “What elongated balloon would not double up and take you flying to destruction?”

      They eventually managed to free themselves from the oak by throwing out most of the remaining ballast. But the adventure was not over. “The lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward,” recalled Santos-Dumont, “and pierced the clouds like a cannonball. Indeed, it threatened to reach dangerous heights, considering the little ballast we had remaining in store for use in descending.” The experienced Machuron had one last trick: He opened the balloon’s valve to let gas escape and the balloon began to descend again toward an open field, the guide rope behaving itself this time as it came in contact with the ground. The field would normally have been an ideal landing spot, but a strong crosswind promised a harsh touchdown in so open an area. Fortune smiled on Santos-Dumont, though, and as the balloon fell, after nearly two hours aloft, it drifted toward the edge of the field.

      “The Forest of Fontainebleau was hurrying toward us,” Santos-Dumont recalled. “In a few moments we had turned the extremity of the wood, sacrificing our last handful of ballast. The trees now protected us from the violence of the wind; and we cast anchor, at the same time opening wide the emergency valve for the wholesale escape of gas.” They landed smoothly, without any damage, climbed out of the basket, and watched the balloon expire. “Stretched out in the field, it was losing the remains of its gas in convulsive agitations,” Santos-Dumont said, “like a great bird that dies beating its wings.” And they could not have found a better deathbed, the well-manicured grounds of the Château de la Ferrière, owned by Alphonse de Rothschild, the seventy-year-old head of the Bank of France, the man responsible for the wealth of his famous family. Servants and laborers helped the two aeronauts fold up the collapsed balloon; stuff it, the rigging, and the lunch-table settings into the basket; and transport all 440 pounds to the nearest railway station two and a half miles away. On the sixty-mile train trip back to Paris, Santos-Dumont told Machuron that aeronautics was his calling. The balloon maker promised to build him his own pear-shaped balloon. Santos-Dumont’s only disappointment was that he would have to put on hold his dream of a steerable airship. The two men and their balloon were back in Paris by 6:00 P.M. Santos-Dumont pronounced the day a success and started thinking about what he was going to have for dinner.

      Machuron and Lachambre never had such an eager client nor a more contrary one. He was back in their workshop the next day placing an order for his first balloon, called Brazil. The misunderstandings began at once. Machuron assumed that he wanted an ordinary-size balloon that could hold between 17,000 and 70,000 cubic feet of gas. But Santos-Dumont had in mind a gasbag four times smaller than had ever been flown before, a balloon so compact, twenty feet in diameter, that when its 4,000 cubic feet of gas was released he could carry it around town in his handbag. Machuron refused to accept the order. He spent the afternoon trying to convince Santos-Dumont that Brazil would never fly.

      “How often have things been proved to me impossible!” Santos-Dumont wrote later. “Now I am used to it, I expect it. But in those days it troubled me. Still I persevered.”

      Machuron and Lachambre insisted that for stability a balloon had to have a certain minimum weight. The aeronaut needed the freedom to move around in the basket without fear that his actions would cause the balloon to rock or swing uncontrollably. With a small balloon, they said, that freedom would be impossible. Not so, Santos-Dumont argued. If the suspension tackle that connected the basket to the balloon were made proportionately longer, the center of gravity of even a lightweight system would not shift appreciably when the aeronaut moved about. He drew two diagrams to illustrate. The veteran balloon makers conceded that he had a point and made plans to construct Brazil from the usual materials.

      Santos-Dumont had a problem with this too. The customary materials were too heavy, he said. He wanted to make the balloon out of light Japanese silk, and he brought Machuron a sample. “It will be too weak,” Machuron said. “It will not be able to withstand the enormous pressure of the gas.” Santos-Dumont wanted proof, so Machuron measured the strength of the silk with a dynamometer. The result surprised both of them. The silk was thirty times stronger than it needed to be. Although a square meter of silk weighed only a little more than an ounce, it could withstand a strain of more than 2,200 pounds.

      By the time Santos-Dumont left the workshop, Machuron and Lachambre were shaking their heads. He had managed to persuade them to change every material that they ordinarily used. The silk envelope of the balloon would weigh less than four pounds. Three coats of varnish, to keep gas from seeping through, would bring the weight to thirty-one pounds. The netting that covered the balloon would be four pounds instead of hundreds of pounds, and the basket would weigh only thirteen pounds, five times lighter than usual.

      Because Machuron and Lachambre had several orders to fulfill before they could start on Brazil, Santos-Dumont would have to wait a few months before he could see whether his lightweight balloon was flight-worthy. The two balloon builders were also booked for public ascents at fairs, festivals, and weddings throughout France and Belgium. Santos-Dumont preferred that Machuron and Lachambre remain in the workshop building Brazil, and so