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

and the stench of the smoke and the hold. In the air-ship there is no smell. All is pure and clean. And the pitching itself has none of the shocks and hesitations of the boat at sea. The movement is suave and flowing, which is doubtless owing to the lesser resistance of the airwaves. The pitches are less frequent and rapid than those at sea; the dip is not brusquely arrested, so that the mind can anticipate the curve to its end; and there is no shock to give that queer “empty” sensation to the solar plexus.

      And the navigator of the air, he observed, has one great advantage over the sea captain—he can easily move laterally to trade an undesirable current for an advantageous one.

      At first the flight of No. 1 could not have gone better. “For a while we could hear the motor spitting and the propeller churning the air,” reported an eyewitness. “Then, when he had reached equilibrium, we could still observe Santos manipulating the machinery and the ropes. Around and around he maneuvered in great circles and figure 8’s, showing that he had perfect control of his direction.”

      Santos-Dumont was encouraged by the ease with which he controlled No. 1. “Being inexperienced,” he said, and overconfident, “I made the great mistake of mounting high in the air—some 1300 feet—an altitude that is considered nothing for a spherical balloon, but which is absurd and uselessly dangerous for an air-ship under trial.” At that height he commanded a view of the entire city and was enthralled by the beautiful grounds of Longchamp. He headed toward the racetrack.

      “As the air-ship grew smaller in the distance, those who had opera-glasses began crying that it was ‘doubling up,’” the eyewitness continued. “We saw it coming down rapidly, growing larger and larger. Women screamed. Men called hoarsely to one another. Those who had bicycles or automobiles hastened to the spot where he must be dashed to the ground. Yet within an hour M. Santos-Dumont was among his friends again, unhurt, laughing nervously, and explaining all about the unlucky air-pump.”

      He told his friends that he had encountered no problems when he ascended. As the atmospheric pressure decreased, the hydrogen simply expanded, keeping the balloon taut. And when the expansion became too great, a valve automatically released some of the gas. The valve was another one of Santos-Dumont’s innovations. Spherical balloons generally had a free vent, a small open hole, in the bottom through which gas could escape as it expanded. The free vent meant that there was never any danger of the balloon bursting, “but the price paid for this immunity,” he noted, “is a great loss of gas and, consequently, a fatal shortening of the spherical balloon’s stay in the air.” And it was not just an issue of prolonging the flight that was on his mind when he substituted a valve for the open hole. He was also concerned about maintaining the airship’s cylindrical shape. When a spherical balloon lost a bit too much gas, it had a limp shape but was still flightworthy. If his cylindrical balloon leaked gas, it started to fold and was difficult, if not impossible, to fly. The introduction of the valve eliminated the accidental leaking of gas, but its proper functioning was critical to his safe return. He repeatedly checked the valve just before the trip, because, although his friends saw fire as the chief danger, his principal concern was the valve failing and the balloon exploding.

      But on the actual flight the problems occurred on the descent. The increase in atmospheric pressure compressed the balloon, as he had expected. He had equipped No. 1 with an air pump that was supposed to direct air into the balloon to compensate for any contraction. That was the idea anyway, but in practice the pump proved to be too weak.

      As Santos-Dumont descended, No. 1 began to lose its shape, folding in the middle like a portfolio. The cords were subjected to unequal tension, and the balloon envelope was in danger of being torn apart. “At that moment I thought that all was over,” recalled Santos-Dumont, “the more so as the descent which had already become rapid could no longer be checked by any of the usual means on board, where nothing worked.” The cords suspending the ballast bags became tangled, so he could no longer control where the nose of the airship pointed. He thought of throwing out ballast. That would certainly cause the airship to rise, and the decreased atmospheric pressure would enable the expanding hydrogen gas to restore the balloon to its taut, cylindrical shape. But when he eventually returned to earth, the problem would undoubtedly repeat itself, only worse; the balloon would be flaccid because of the gas lost in the interim. Santos-Dumont could think of nothing to do as No. 1 plummeted. He feared that the cords connecting the basket to the balloon would snap one by one. He looked down, and the sight of the housetops, “with their chimney pots for spikes,” made him queasy.

      “For the moment,” he wrote, “I was sure that I was in the presence of death…. ‘What is coming next?’ I thought. ‘What am I going to see and know in a few minutes? Whom shall I see after I am dead?’ The thought that I would be meeting my father in a few minutes thrilled me. Indeed, I think that in such moments there is no room for either regret or terror. The mind is too full of looking forward. One is frightened only so long as one still has a chance.”

      But then he realized that he did have a chance. A charitable wind was sweeping him away from the rocky streets and jagged roofs toward the soft grassy pelouse of Longchamp, where a few boys were flying kites. He shouted to them to grab the two-hundred-foot guide rope and run with it as fast as they could against the wind. “They were bright young fellows,” he recalled, “and they grasped the idea and the guide-rope at the same lucky instant. The effect of this help in extremis was immediate, and such as I had expected. By this maneuver we lessened the velocity of the fall, and so avoided what would otherwise have been a bad shaking-up, to say the least. I was saved for the first time!” The boys helped him pack everything into the airship’s basket. He secured a cab and returned to the center of Paris.

      He immediately put the troublesome aspects of the flight behind him, like a mother forgetting the pains of labor once she has seen her newborn’s face. “The sentiment of success filled me,” he recalled. “I had navigated the air…. I had mounted without sacrificing ballast. I had descended without sacrificing gas. My shifting weights had proved successful, and it would have been impossible not to recognize the capital triumph of these oblique flights through the air. No one had ever made them before.”

      That night he celebrated at Maxim’s, the famous restaurant at No. 3, rue Royale that is still in business today. He was one of Maxime Gaillard’s first customers, when the dark-wooded bistro opened in the early 1890s. The restaurant initially catered to carriage drivers who passed the time while their bosses dined elsewhere, but soon they too discovered its fine, hearty cuisine—French onion soup, oysters on the half shell, poached lobster, sole in brandy sauce, roast chicken, scallops of veal, grilled pigs’ feet and tails—and displaced the coachmen. As a night spot for the well-to-do, Maxim’s was ideally located in the center of the city, on the same block as the Automobile Club, the aristocratic Hotel Crillon, and the elite Jockey Club. Maxim’s attracted what working-class Parisians derisively called des fils à papa, rich young men who spent their fathers’ money on women and wine. When it came to the wine, Santos-Dumont fit right in. Maxim’s did not serve lunch in those days. The restaurant opened at 5:00 P.M. for the evening aperitif, dinner was served from 8:00 until 10:00, and supper from midnight until dawn.

      Santos-Dumont always came for supper and sat at the same table in the corner of the candlelit main room. With his back to the wall, he could watch everything that transpired, and the goings-on in the wee hours of the night were legendary. A beautiful blonde who became a silent movie star used to shed all her clothes, climb onto one of the tables, and sing torch songs. A Russian named Aristoff arrived every morning precisely at four and consumed the identical meal: grilled kipper, scrambled eggs, minute steak, and a bottle of champagne. For his bachelor party, a French count ordered the waiters to dress up as undertakers and arrange the tables to looks like funeral biers. Maxim’s was the spark for many romantic assignations. In the 1890s strangers rarely approached each other directly but flirted with their eyes across the dining room. Many couples got together