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

into air-ship construction as a sort of life-work.”

      He contacted the Paris Aéro Club, which had purchased land in Saint-Cloud, just west of the Bois, and persuaded the club to let him build a giant aerodrome, a balloon hangar, at his own expense, complete with a hydrogen-generating plant and a state-of-the-art workshop. He wanted the hundred-foot-long aerodrome to have thirty-six-foot-high doors so that an inflated airship could easily be moved in and out. But again he encountered resistance to his plans. “Even here,” said Santos-Dumont, “I had to contend with the conceit and prejudice of the Parisian artisans, who had already given me such trouble at the Jardin d’Acclimatation.” They declared that the sliding doors would be too big to open properly. “Follow my directions,” he replied, “and do not concern yourself with their practicability. I will answer for the sliding.” They were still reluctant. “Although the men had named their own pay,” he said, “it was a long time before I could get the better of this vainglorious stubbornness of theirs. When finished, the doors worked—naturally.” (Three years later the Prince of Monaco would build him an even bigger aerodrome, and the fifty-foot-high doors that Santos-Dumont requested would have the distinction of being the tallest working doors in the world.)

      While the Saint-Cloud aerodrome was under construction, Santos-Dumont continued to fly No. 3, which did not require the elaborate preparations that its predecessors did. “To fill five hundred cubic mètres with hydrogen takes all day, whereas with the ordinary burning gas it takes only an hour,” he told the New York Herald. “Think how much time is saved! I have only to look out my window and see what are the weather indications, and if they prove favorable I am in my balloon an hour afterward.” Because he no longer ascended in bad weather, and the airship was demonstrably more stable than its predecessors, the flights were by and large uneventful, until the final one, when the rudder fell off and he had to make an unplanned descent. Luckily there was an open space, the plain at Ivry, below him. He made dozens of trips in No. 3, and set a record for the longest time aloft, twenty-three hours.

      He would have designed a new rudder for No. 3 if it were not for a challenge laid down at a meeting of the Paris Aéro Club in April 1900. To stimulate aerostation in the new century, Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe, a petroleum magnate and founding member of the club, announced that he was offering a hundred thousand francs (twenty thousand dollars) to the first airship that “between May 1 and October 1, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, or 1904 should rise from the Parc d’Aérostation of the Aéro Club at St. Cloud and, without touching ground, and by its own self-contained means on board alone, describe a closed curve in such a way that the axis of the Eiffel Tower should be within the interior of the circuit, and return to the point of departure in the maximum time of half an hour. Should more than one accomplish the task in the same year, the one hundred thousand francs were to be divided in proportion to their respective times.” Deutsch added that if the prize was not claimed in any given year, he would, as a gesture of encouragement, award the interest on the hundred thousand francs to the aeronaut who had accomplished the most in the previous twelve months. Santos-Dumont, who had attended the Aéro Club meeting, told his friends that Deutsch would not have to part with the interest. He planned to come away with the prize, and the attendant glory, before the year was out.

      The Eiffel Tower was three and a half miles from Saint-Cloud, and so an airship would have to travel fourteen miles an hour to make the round-trip in thirty minutes (actually the necessary speed was probably closer to fifteen and a half miles per hour if one considers the time lost in turning around the tower). No. 3