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The first trial was set for May 11, 1899, on the Feast of the Ascension. In the morning, the skies were clear, and Santos-Dumont supervised No. 2’s inflation at the captive balloon station in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. “In those days,” he recalled, “I had no balloon house of my own…. As there was no shed there for me, the work had to be done in the open, and it was done vexatiously, with a hundred delays, surprises, and excuses.” By the afternoon, storm clouds blotted the sun and it had started to rain. Because he had no place to store the inflated balloon, he faced an unpalatable choice. He could empty the balloon, wasting the hydrogen and losing the money he had paid for it. Or he could attempt an ascension with an engine that was sputtering from the dampness and a rain-soaked balloon that was heavier, perhaps dangerously so, than it ought to be. He went ahead but as a measure of security tethered the airship to the ground. The drizzle turned into a downpour, and he was unable to rise above the trees before encountering a high-pressure system that compressed the hydrogen so that the balloon visibly shrank. Before the air pump and fan could inflate the balloonet, a strong gust of wind folded up No. 2 worse than No. 1 and tossed it into the trees. The balloon ripped, cords snapped, and No. 2 fell to the ground.
Santos-Dumont’s friends rushed over and, finding him in one piece, strongly admonished him. “This time you have learned your lesson,” they said. “You must understand that it is impossible to keep the shape of your cylindrical balloon rigid. You must not again risk your life by taking a petroleum motor up beneath it.”
“What has the rigidity of the balloon’s form to do with danger from a petroleum motor?” replied Santos-Dumont. “Errors do not count,” he continued. “I have learned my lesson, but it is not that lesson.” Drenched and a bit scraped up, his panama hat squashed, he was in no hurry to climb out of the dented basket. He surveyed the damage and satisfied himself that the problem was the balloon’s long, slender shape, “so seductive from certain points of view, but so dangerous from others.” No. 2, after just a brief life, would have to be retired, the motor and basket salvaged. In the morning he drew up plans for a plumper airship that would be less sensitive to changes in air pressure.
He made No. 3 in the shape of a football. “The rounder form of this balloon also made it possible to dispense with the interior air-balloon and its feeding air-pump that had twice refused to work adequately at the critical moment,” he wrote. “Should this shorter and thicker balloon need aid to keep its form rigid, I relied on the stiffening effect of a 33-foot bamboo pole fixed lengthwise to the suspension-cords above my head and directly beneath the balloon.” Sixty-six feet long by twenty-five-feet wide, No. 3 had a gas capacity of 17,650 cubic feet, nearly three times that of No. 2. When filled with hydrogen, his third airship also had three times the lifting power of his second airship and twice that of the first. The lifting power was more than required, and so he was able to substitute ordinary lamp gas, which was cheap and obtainable everywhere, for the scarce and expensive hydrogen. Although illuminating gas had only half the lifting power of hydrogen, No. 3 could still carry aloft 50 percent more weight than the hydrogen-filled No. 2. In fact No. 3 could transport a motor, the basket, and the rigging, as well as the aeronaut, with 231 pounds to spare for emergency ballast and a full lunch.
Santos-Dumont scheduled No. 3’s first flight for the thirteenth of November, over the protest of skittish members of the newly formed Paris Aéro Club who urged him not to fly on an unlucky day. (France was notorious in its dread of the number thirteen; a quatorzième, or professional fourteenth guest, could be hired on the spur of the moment to round out an otherwise ill-fated dinner party.) And November 13, 1899, was not just any unlucky day—it was the day on which centennial alarmists had predicted the world would end. Santos-Dumont enjoyed mocking the superstitions of others. He once rounded off the pay of a triskaidekaphobic housekeeper to a multiple of thirteen and gave her a necklace with thirteen beads. But he had his own peculiar beliefs. “He only entered a place with his right foot first,” recalled Antoinette Gastambide, whose father manufactured one of his engines. “He told me that whenever he flew he would wrap a female stocking around his neck,” hidden under his shirt so that no one knew. “It was the stocking of Madame Letellier, one of the most famous women in Europe, who had had a lot of luck in her life.” Before he ascended, he would also never say good-bye for fear that it would be his last farewell. He could not sleep unless his hat was next to him. As for numbers, he went out of his way to avoid the number fifty, refusing to carry fifty-franc notes or fifty thousand reis bills in his wallet, and later in life—after a scary crash on the eighth of the month—he shunned the number eight. His friends surmised that his preference for flying on “unlucky” days was his way of thumbing his nose at the obvious dangers of aerostation. In general, he preferred to ascend on days of historic importance such as the Fourth of July, Brazil’s Independence Day (September 7), or the Feast of the Ascension.
On November 13, 1899, the weather was unremarkable—a cool, crisp day with no signs of precipitation—and the world showed no sign of coming to an end. Santos-Dumont spent the morning inspecting the airship, testing the motor, and checking the all-important exhaust valve. By early afternoon, his workmen had filled the balloon with lamp gas and he was ready to take off from the Parc d’Aérostation in Vaugirard. His friend Antônio Prado asked him whether he was afraid to go up after the two close calls in his previous airships. Santos-Dumont confessed that he was nervous. Prado wanted to know how he faced the fear. “I grow pale,” he said, “and try to gain control over myself by thinking of other things. If I do not succeed, I feign courage before those watching me, and face the danger. But even so I am still afraid.”
At 3:30 P.M. Santos-Dumont set off on his most successful flight to date. As soon as he was in the air, he headed for the Eiffel Tower. “Around that wonderful landmark for twenty minutes, I had the immense satisfaction of describing circles, figure eights, and whatever other maneuvers it pleased me to undertake, and in all directions, diagonally up and down as well as laterally,” he recalled. “I had at last realized my fullest expectations. Very faithfully the airship obeyed the impulse of propeller and steering-rudder.” From the Eiffel Tower he made a straight course to the Bois. He did not want to return to Vaugirard because the balloon shed there was surrounded by houses, which meant that there would be little room for error when landing, and the wind that had picked up would make the descent even riskier. “Landing in Paris, in general, is dangerous for any kind of balloon,” he said, “amid chimney pots that threaten to pierce its belly and tiles that are always ready to be knocked down on the heads of passersby.” So he chose to touch down in the Bois, this time in the most controlled way “at the exact spot where the kite-flying boys had pulled on my guide rope and saved me from a bad shaking up.”
Santos-Dumont inspected No. 3 and was pleased that it had not lost any gas whatsoever. “I could well have housed it overnight,” he recalled, if he had had a place to shelter it, “and gone out again in it the next day! I had no longer the slightest doubt of the success of my invention.”
That night at Maxim’s he boasted about his achievement. Having made one controlled descent, the rooftops no longer seemed so threatening, and he wagered good