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

As I got the pleasure and the experience, and paid all my expenses and damages, it was a mutually advantageous arrangement,” said Santos-Dumont. All and all, he made more than two dozen flights before Brazil was completed.

      On a stormy afternoon in March 1898, he filled in for Lachambre at a fair in Péronne, in the north of France. Thunder was rumbling in the distance, and some of the onlookers who knew that he was inexperienced urged him not to ascend at all or certainly not without a copilot. The expressions of concern made him more determined to go up in the balloon by himself.

      “I would listen to nothing,” he recalled. He went up late in the afternoon, as he had originally planned. “Soon I had cause to regret my rashness,” he said. “I was alone, lost in the clouds, amid flashes of lightning and claps of thunder, in the rapidly approaching darkness of the night. On, on I went tearing in the blackness. I knew I must be going with great speed, yet felt no motion. I heard and felt the storm…. I felt myself in great danger, yet the danger was not tangible.” He stayed up all night, waiting for the storm to break. The longer he waited, with no discernible damage to the balloon, the less fearful he was. “There was a fierce kind of joy,” he said. “Up there in the black solitude, amid the lightning flashes and the thunderclaps, I was a part of the storm.”

      Once the bad weather passed, the joyous thrill of night ballooning turned to bliss. “In the black void,” he said,

      one seems to float without weight, without a surrounding world, a soul freed from the weight of matter! Yet, now and again there are the lights of earth to cheer one. You see a point of light far on ahead. Slowly it expands. Then where there was one blaze, there are countless bright spots. They run in lines, with here and there a brighter cluster. You know that it is a city…. And when the dawn comes, red and gold and purple in its glory, one is almost loath to seek the earth again, although the novelty of landing in who knows what part of Europe affords still another unique pleasure…. There is the true explorer’s zest of coming on unknown peoples like a god from a machine. “What country is this?” Will the answer come in German, Russian, or Norwegian?

      On this occasion the answer came in Flemish, because Santos-Dumont had landed far inside Belgium.

      As soon as he returned to Paris, he urged his young male friends whose lust for adventure had been snuffed by the demands of family and business to take up ballooning. “At noon you lunch peacefully amid your family,” he said. “At 2:00 P.M. you mount. Ten minutes later you are no longer a commonplace citizen—you are an explorer, an adventurer of the unknown as truly as those who freeze on Greenland’s icy mountains or melt on India’s coral strands.” And the adventure did not always end with the landing. Other aeronauts, he told his friends, had been shot at when they descended in foreign countries. Some had been taken prisoner “to languish as spies while the telegraph clicked to the far-off capital, and then to end the evening over champagne at an officer’s enthusiastic mess. Still others have had to strive with the dangerous ignorance, and superstition even, of some remote little peasant population. These are the chances of the winds!”

      Santos-Dumont chose to make his first ascent in Brazil on July 4, 1898, at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the zoological gardens in the Bois de Boulogne. The Bois was a huge wooded park, with two and a half times the acreage of New York City’s Central Park. Earlier in the century it had been the stalking ground of thieves and ruffians. Napoleon III asked Baron Haussmann to redesign the Bois along the lines of London’s Hyde Park. He turned some of the woods into open fields and added policemen, bungalows, pavilions, landscaping, and roads wide enough for horse-drawn carriages to make a U-turn. By Santos-Dumont’s day, the Bois was the playground of the rich, with its neat polo grounds and the Longchamp horse-racing track.

      The Jardin d’Acclimatation at the north end of the Bois opened in 1856. It was originally conceived as a scientific research center where animals of interest to French breeders would be acclimatized. Among the first inhabitants were yaks from Tibet, porcupines from Java, water pigs from South America, zebus from India, and zebras, kangaroos, cheetahs, llamas, ostriches, and armadillos. There were also Spanish mastiffs, Siberian greyhounds, and other dog breeds. Santos-Dumont’s new friend Alphonse de Rothschild was a director of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, but the operation proved too expensive to run as a scientific venture and so by 1865 it was turned into a tourist destination with the introduction of crowd-pleasing zoo animals such as bears, elephants, hippopotamuses, and dromedaries. Children could ride a train towed by a zebra or watch a car pulled by llamas that had a monkey as a coachman. But the zoo’s directors were not content with showing animals. In the interest of drawing even more spectators, they decided to present living people too, “from the four corners of the world.” American Indians, Eskimos, Nubians, Hindus, and Kurds were exhibited, complete with labels and maps of their range, as if they were exotic apes. On Sunday fashionably dressed women and their escorts strolled through the zoological gardens and gawked at the natives on display.

      Santos-Dumont could have ascended from a more secluded spot, but he had confidence in Brazil and wanted to show it off to the many curiosity seekers in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Because Lachambre had built a hydrogen plant there, it was also a convenient place. The little balloon with disproportionately long rigging proved equal to the challenge. Santos-Dumont showed unusual restraint in leaving behind his substantial lunch basket so that Brazil could hold the maximum amount of ballast, sixty-six pounds of sand. Although Brazil contained only one-seventh the hydrogen gas of a typical balloon, it easily carried him and the ballast aloft. As Machuron and Lachambre anxiously watched from the ground, he demonstrated Brazil’s stability by making a big show of moving around in the basket. Relieved, the two men helped themselves to a bottle of champagne that he had left behind. After the smooth descent, Santos-Dumont pulled the rip cord, waited a short while for the balloon to deflate, and packed the whole thing into his valise.

      The flawless flight gave him confidence. If the veteran aeronauts had misjudged the stability of Brazil and underestimated the strength of Japanese silk, could they not also be wrong about the difficulties of building a steerable balloon? How could they be so sure that a propeller-driven airship would collapse in a strong wind? What if he changed the shape of the balloon from a near sphere to an elongated cylinder? Instead of being bandied about by the wind, would it not “cut the air”?

      What eluded him at first was the power source. The petroleum engine was an unlikely candidate because it was unreliable as well as deafening and foul-smelling—characteristics that would detract from the tranquillity of ballooning. Petroleum engines in automobiles seemed to have minds of their own, slowing down and speeding up and conking out at will, which was bad enough if you had a road under you but unacceptable in the air.

      Santos-Dumont had acquired half a dozen automobiles since his Peugeot roadster. Although he was not satisfied with their performance, he enjoyed taking the sputtering vehicles for a spin. His notion of an autumn holiday was driving a six-horsepower Panhard six hundred miles from Paris to Nice; he made it in fifty-four hours, stopping often to make minor repairs and tweak the engine but not to sleep. He never made a long road trip again, however, because he could not stand to be away from his balloons.

      Eventually he had even stopped using his cars for everyday driving. “I was once enamored of petroleum automobiles because of their freedom,” he told a journalist some years later. “You can buy the essence everywhere: and so, at a moment’s notice, one is at liberty to start off for Rome or St. Petersburg. But when I discovered that I did not want to go to Rome or St. Petersburg, but only to take short trips about Paris, I went in for the electric buggy,” of a kind seldom seen in France.

      In 1898, he imported a light electric vehicle from Chicago and “never had cause to regret the purchase.” Every day he went for a morning spin through the gardens of the Bois and on afternoon errands to the balloon makers’ workshop in Vaugirard and the Automobile Club in the place de la Concorde. The electric motor, aside from its reliability, had other advantages over the petroleum engine: It was quiet and odorless. But it was not suitable for air travel because, with its