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

time had few reservations about experimenting on themselves. In Who Goes First?, Lawrence Altman told the story of the French doctors who developed the rabies vaccine (and whose reputation drew Santos-Dumont’s ailing father to Paris). Transmitted by the bite or lick of an infected animal, rabies was a relatively rare disease but notorious because of its horrifying symptoms—the slow but fatal destruction of the brain and central nervous system that leaves the victim gasping for air and shaking spasmodically—and its painful treatment—“cauterization of the bite with a red-hot iron.” In 1880, Louis Pasteur, who was already revered for his “pasteurization” of milk and beer, turned his attention to the disease. Within a year he had found a method of transmitting the virus, by injecting brain material extracted from a rabid dog into a healthy canine. Soon he developed a technique for treating the brain extract so that he could adjust the virulence of the inoculation. Rabies acquired through a bite had a long incubation period. By giving a bitten dog a series of progressively stronger inoculations, the animal would develop immunity to the disease before the incubation period was over. In 1884, Pasteur reported that twenty-three immunized dogs had warded off the disease, but he was still afraid of using the live vaccine on human beings. He rebuffed the emperor of Brazil, who had pleaded with him to apply the vaccine in a country where the incidence of rabies was much greater than in Europe.

      “Experimentation permitted on animals,” Pasteur said, “is criminal when it comes to man.” Rabies was a fatal disease, so the failure of the vaccine promised almost certain death. In 1885, he told three of his colleagues that he wanted to test the vaccine on himself. He took off his shirt and begged them to inject him with the live virus. They refused. They did not want to be accomplices to the possible suicide of one of France’s most beloved scientists. Instead, the three men assumed the risk themselves. When weeks passed and none of them contracted the disease, Pasteur had the confidence to inoculate victims of rabid-dog bites. By 1886, he had treated 350 people and all but one was saved from the disease.

      Medical self-experimentation was not confined to France. In 1892, seventy-four-year-old Max von Pettenkofer, the German public-health advocate who had purified Munich’s drinking water, purposely swallowed a solution of cholera bacteria. He believed that the bacteria could not by itself cause the often-fatal disease, that other cofactors he identified needed to be present as well. Because he personally did not possess the cofactors, his dramatic experiment was intended to prove that cholera bacteria was not the sole causative agent. He had diarrhea for a week but never became seriously ill, confirming for himself the validity of his theory (although science would ultimately prove him wrong and attribute his mild symptoms to immunity from an earlier, accidental exposure to cholera). Pettenkofer had prepared himself for the worst. “Even if I had deceived myself,” he wrote, “and the experiment endangered my life, I would have looked Death quietly in the eye for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honor. Health and life are, as I have so often said, very great earthly goods but not the highest for man. Man, if he will rise above the animals, must sacrifice both life and health for the higher ideals.”

      On November 8, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X rays in his laboratory in Würzburg. The discovery was serendipitous: Roentgen had been experimenting with a cathode-ray tube in his darkened laboratory when he noticed that metals and other materials far from the tube were emitting an eerie green fluorescence. He suspected that radiation from the tube was causing the materials to glow but it could not be the familiar, short-distance cathode rays because they would not have reached the materials. When he inadvertently passed his hand between the tube and a glowing screen, he saw the outline of his bones. He hurriedly “photographed” his wife’s hand and announced his discovery to the world. The “penetrating” radiation captured the public’s imagination. X rays were featured in advertisements, popular songs, cartoons, novels, and breathless newspaper reports.

      “The x-ray mania began early and grew quickly,” social historian Nancy Knight noted:

      “Hidden Solids Revealed!” trumpeted the New York Times in January 1896. The press was enchanted with the possibilities of the new rays. With the information that they rendered “Wood and Flesh More Easily Penetrated … Than Plain Glass,” many observers immediately speculated on various applications and uses. Even the most mundane experiments with the new technique were labeled miraculous. “Startling results” announced by professors at Yale turned out to be x-ray photographs of uncracked walnuts showing “a splendid view of the kernels.” Some popular magazines and journals showed x-ray photographs of feet in boots, coins in wooden boxes, and shapely women in tight lacing. One popular cartoon hinted at the possible leveling effects of the rays by revealing that beneath the superficial layer the well-to-do of the Gilded Age were the same as the common people.

      Well-fed or hungry, fat or thin, everyone’s skeleton looked roughly the same. Another cartoon, called “The March of Science,” showed an eavesdropper behind a door. The caption said, “Interesting result attained, with the aid of Röntgen rays, by a first-floor lodger when photographing his sitting-room door.”

      Even as the X-ray craze abated, physicians continued to be smitten with the invisible new light. Within two months of Roentgen’s discovery, the medical community knew that X rays were a powerful tool for revealing the interior of the human body. Physicians welcomed X rays because the Industrial Revolution had largely passed them by. The nineteenth century had seen great advances in the prevention of disease (through vaccines, antiseptic practices, and public-health initiatives) but before the X-ray machine there had been no exciting new technology for the diagnosis or treatment of disease.

      The enthusiasm of roentgenologists did not dampen when it was established by the turn of the century that repeated exposure to X rays was injurious to their own health. To the contrary, as Rebecca Herzig observed in the article “In the Name of Science: Suffering, Sacrifice, and the Formation of American Roentgenology,” the X-ray pioneers took pride in their painful boils, cancerous lesions, and amputated limbs that were the by-products of their diagnostic work. Frederick H. Baetjer, a roentgenologist at Johns Hopkins, lost eight fingers and an eye to years of working with X rays. “Despite the suffering he has undergone in the interest of science,” the New York Times reported after the seventy-second operation to save his body, he planned to “continue his work as long as he lives, fingers or no fingers.” Elizabeth Fleischmann, famous for her X-ray images of American servicemen wounded in the Spanish-American War, was eulogized as America’s Joan of Arc after she died in 1905 of radiation-induced cancer following a series of amputations.

      “The emerging field of roentgenology,” Herzig wrote, “gained definition through the spectacular deaths and mutilations of its adherents.” They wore their hideous injuries as badges of honor. “Scarred and limb-less roentgenologists came to embody the abstract cause of ‘science,’ much as stigmata render palpable the ineffable presence of divinity. At one 1920 professional gathering, historian Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles reports, so many attendees were missing at least one hand that when the chicken dinner was served, no one could cut the meat.”

      WHEN SANTOS-DUMONT risked his life for aeronautical progress, he was following the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of his time, but his motives were not entirely selfless. He enjoyed being an inventor and an aeronaut but also liked being a showman, and airship trials that courted disaster made for a better performance. He believed that if his legacy was going to rival Tiradentes’, he needed to do more than perfect the powered balloon. Men and women had wept at the news of the Brazilian patriot’s gruesome death. As significant an invention as the flying machine undoubtedly was, Santos-Dumont did not expect people to cry after a successful flight unless they saw the sacrifices—his brushes with death—that he chose to endure.

      In the spring of 1899, Santos-Dumont dismantled No. 1, salvaging the basket,