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

with my air-ship.

      It occurred to Santos-Dumont that his new propeller might give him control of his elevation if he could figure out how to tilt the airship, raising or lowering its nose, so that the motor would drive the balloon’s ascent or descent. Once again his solution was simple: a system of movable weights by which the center of gravity of the airship could easily be shifted. The weights were merely two bags of ballast, one fore and one aft, suspended from the balloon envelope by long, heavy cords. Extending from each weight to the basket was a lighter cord, by which the weight could be pulled into the basket, shifting the center of gravity of the whole system. If the front weight was drawn in, the nose of the airship would point up, and if the aft weight was pulled in, the nose would point down. Other than the two-hundred-foot guide rope, which would be useful during takeoff and landing, No. 1 would not require additional ballast. Santos-Dumont hoped that he had minimized the ballast enough to have weight to spare for an ample lunch basket. He was ready to fly No. 1 as soon as Lachambre applied the varnish.

      On September 18, 1898, three and a half months after his first ascent in Brazil, Santos-Dumont put No. 1 to the test. By then, he had floated over Paris more than a hundred times in spherical balloons, and his reputation as a courageous and ingenious balloonist was known throughout the city. No other Parisian aeronaut was flying for his own pleasure; the others were paid professionals, and they ascended mostly in rural areas. He had already earned the nickname Petite Santos. It was meant affectionately but it bothered him. He had gone to great lengths—dark, vertically striped suits, lifts in his shoes, a panama hat—to boost his short stature. He had even designed custom-made high collars for his dress shirts to make his neck appear longer. He drew the knot in the tie excessively tight so as not to accentuate his small size, preserving the tightness by piercing the knot with a pearl or jeweled pin. His suit jacket and turned-up trousers were always crisply pressed. He was the most impeccably dressed aeronaut the world would ever know.

      People turned out at his ascensions as much to see him as to watch him fly. The accessories to his wardrobe were decidedly feminine and piqued the interest of spectators and journalists alike, who could not reconcile them with his manly risk-taking in novel airships. One foreign correspondent described him this way:

      Santos, as he prefers to be called, is a little, thin, swarthy chap of 5 feet and maybe 4 or 5 inches. His face would be effeminate were it not for the thick, though closely cropped, mustache, which shades his upper lip, and lends strength to his whole face. His chin shows, however, whence he gets the dogged sticktoitiveness and the wonderful grit which has enabled him to keep on working until at last he has reached his present eminence. The lower jawbone is long and angular, and when he closes it the protrusion of the muscles denoting determination is very pronounced. The roof of his mouth is inclined to protrude also, and his lips are a trifle thicker than the average. He is not a handsome man. His teeth are, however, beautifully white and regular, and his smile is charming. It spreads all over his face, beginning with his eyes, and as it steals over his features it softens and lightens them delightfully…. It is his voice, too, which is low and strangely gentle, which somehow conveys the idea of effeminacy which one cannot help but feel no matter how often one is reminded of his daring feats of courage. This effect is added to by a gold bracelet which Santos wears on his wrist, although his sleeve hides it, except occasionally, when some gesture of the arm shows it for a moment. This is rare, however, for Santos thinks much more than he talks, and talks much more than he gestures.

      Fellow aeronauts and members of the Automobile Club turned out early at the Jardin d’Acclimatation on September 18 to watch him prepare No. 1. The zoological gardens were home now to one of Lachambre’s large tethered balloons. Lachambre sold hydrogen to him at the favorable rate of one franc per cubic meter, the gas for No. 1 costing $1,270. As Santos-Dumont inflated the airship, the assembled aeronauts spoke nervously among themselves. Finally one of them shared their concern about the potentially lethal combination of a fire-spitting motor and a highly flammable gas: “If you want to commit suicide, why not sit on a cask of gunpowder with a lighted cigar in your mouth?”

      Santos-Dumont laughed and assured the onlookers that he most decidedly wanted to live, if only to witness the future of flying machines. He pointed to the exhaust pipe on the engine. He proudly showed them how he had bent the pipe with his own hands so that any sparks were directed away from the balloon. Besides, he said, he was so familiar with the tricycle engine that he could tell by subtle changes in its sound if it was starting to burn uncontrollably, in which case he would just shut it off.

      The issue of the motor was abandoned, however, when the bystanders saw him doing something that looked far more perilous: He was preparing to start his ascension at the downwind end of the open turf, next to the woods. Although the airship was facing upwind, many assumed that the motor would not be a match for the wind and that he would be swept backward a few feet into the nearby trees. Santos-Dumont was convinced that his motor was more powerful than the wind. He planned to adjust it until the force of the propeller exactly canceled out the wind, so that the balloon would rise straight up. The other aeronauts pleaded with him not to make such a risky takeoff on the first flight. Why not adopt the time-honored approach in spherical ballooning of starting the ascent at the upwind end of the open space? That way the balloon, pushed by the wind as it climbed, would have the entire expanse to cross before reaching the woods. Santos-Dumont gave in to the crowd and moved No. 1 to the other end of the field. It was the wrong approach.

      He aimed the airship downwind across the open field and, with the engine idling, climbed into the basket. Then he shouted, “Let go all!” Machurin and Albert Chapin, Santos-Dumont’s chief mechanic, released the mooring ropes and the Brazilian throttled up the engine. No. 1 raced forward, propelled by the wind and motor working together, and in a matter of seconds traversed the field and smashed into the trees on the other side. “I had not time to rise above them,” Santos-Dumont recalled, “so powerful was the impulse given by my motor.” The airship fell to the ground—fortunately the descent was cushioned by the scraping of the basket along the branches—and he emerged with no injuries except to his pride. He berated his fellow aeronauts for talking him out of his plan. Never again, he said, would he have the “weakness to yield.” But the episode had its dividends. “This accident,” he said, “at least served to show the effectiveness of the petroleum motor in the air to those who doubted it before.”

      In two days he repaired the airship and returned to the Jardin d’Acclimatation for a second attempt. The crowd was larger this time, drawing strangers who were torn between fear and excitement that they might witness another crash. There was a stiff breeze, and this time Santos-Dumont stuck to his instinct of positioning the airship at the downwind end of the lawn and aiming it into the wind. No. 1 rose slowly and was never in danger of crashing into the trees. He reeled the front ballast weight into the basket, and, with the center of gravity shifted toward the back, the balloon’s giant nose swung upward. The crowd cheered. He tipped his hat and began to demonstrate that he could indeed steer the balloon. He grasped the rudder and guided No. 1 in a tight loop around Lachambre’s captive balloon. The applause was even louder, and Lachambre saluted his protégé.

      Santos-Dumont’s first surprise was that he could actually sense the airship moving, unlike the experience in a spherical balloon. He was astonished to feel the wind in his face and his coat fluttering as No. 1 plowed ahead. He likened it to standing on the deck of a fast-moving steamship. He had wondered whether the sensation of mounting and descending obliquely with his shifting weights would be unpleasant. But it turned out not to bother him at all even though No. 1 pitched considerably. He attributed his composure to sea legs earned on voyages between France and Brazil. “Once, on the way to Brazil,” he recalled,

      the storm was so violent that the grand piano went loose and broke a lady’s leg; yet I was not seasick…. I know that what one feels most distressingly at sea is not so much the movement as that momentary hesitation just before the boat pitches, followed by the malicious dipping or mounting, which never comes quite the same, and the shock at top and bottom. All this