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

of the rich and famous on the walls of the city’s fanciest restaurants; Gustave Eiffel, the architect of the eponymous tower; Antônio Prado Jr., the son of the Brazilian ambassador; two or three Rothschilds, who first met their thirty-year-old host when his experimental airship crashed in their gardens; Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s reclusive widow; and assorted kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses too numerous to name.

      When Santos-Dumont’s butler ushered the guests into the dining room, they were amused to find that they had to climb a stepladder so that they could sit on tall chairs positioned around a table higher than they were. But they were not surprised. Since the late 1890s Santos-Dumont had been giving “aerial dinner parties.” The first ones were held at an ordinary table and chairs suspended by wire from the ceiling. This worked when the hundred-pound Santos-Dumont dined alone, but when a group assembled, the ceiling eventually gave way under the collective weight. Santos-Dumont was a skilled craftsman, who had learned woodworking from the men on his father’s coffee plantation, so he built the long-legged tables and chairs that had become a fixture of his apartment ever since. At the first elevated soirees, his guests, between sips of milky green absinthe, invariably asked what the point of the high table was. And their shy host, who preferred to let others do the talking, would run his bejeweled fingers through his jet-black hair, which was parted in the middle, in a style seen almost exclusively on women, and impishly explain that they were dining aloft so that they could imagine what life was like in a flying machine. The guests laughed. Flying machines did not exist in the 1890s, and received scientific wisdom said that they never would. Santos-Dumont ignored the snickering and insisted that they would soon be commonplace.

      Hot-air balloons, to be sure, were a familiar sight in the skies of fin de siècle Paris, but they were not flying machines. With no source of power, these large floating orbs—they were described as spherical although they actually had the shape of an inverted pear—were entirely at the mercy of the wind. By the turn of the century, Santos-Dumont changed that. He strapped an automobile engine and propeller to the balloon and, to make it aerodynamically efficient, switched its shape to that of a sleek cigar. On October 19, 1901, thousands of people turned out to watch him circle the Eiffel Tower in his innovative airship. The crowds on the bridges over the Seine were so thick that people were shoved into the river when they scaled the parapets to get a better view. The scientists who observed the flight from Gustave Eiffel’s apartment at the top of the tower were sure he would not make it. They feared that an unpredictable wind would impale him on the spire. Others were convinced that the balloon would explode. When Santos-Dumont proved them wrong, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells sent congratulatory telegrams.

      By the end of 1903, at the time of Santos-Dumont’s dinner with Cartier and Princess Isabel, he was a fixture in the Paris skies. He had designed a small airship, which his fans called Baladeuse (“Wanderer”), his personal runabout in which he went barhopping, tying the balloon to the gas-lamp posts in front of the city’s glamorous night spots. Baladeuse was as easy to operate as that new invention, the automobile, that sputtered down Paris boulevards but it had the advantage of not startling horses or pedestrians when it was in midflight. Santos-Dumont’s larger racing airships demanded more attention than Baladeuse, and he complained to Cartier that he could not time his own flights because it was dangerous for him to take his hands off the controls and fish out his pocket watch. Cartier promised he would come up with a solution, and he soon invented one of the first wristwatches for Santos-Dumont—a commercial version of which became a must-have accessory for status-conscious Parisians.

      Santos-Dumont had a romantic vision of every person on earth possessing their own Baladeuse, so that they would literally be free as birds to travel anywhere they wanted anytime they pleased. The future of flying machines, he thought, lay in the lighter-than-air balloon not in the heavier-than-air plane, which as far as he knew had not progressed beyond the unpowered glider. He envisaged gigantic airships—not rigid zeppelins but big, soft balloons with their payloads slung below—whisking travelers between Paris and New York, Berlin and Calcutta, Moscow and Rio de Janeiro.

      Santos-Dumont did not believe in patents. He made the blueprints of his airships freely available to anyone who wanted them. He saw the flying machine as a chariot of peace, bringing estranged cultures in contact with one another so that they could get to know one another as people, thereby reducing the potential for hostilities. In retrospect it seems a naive vision, with the Great War only a decade away, but his optimism was not uncommon among men of science at the turn of the century, when novelties such as the electric light, the automobile, and the telephone were transforming society in fundamental ways.

      That December night in 1903, Santos-Dumont and his elevated companions reflected on what a great year it had been for him. He had had none of the usual accidents, which had made him famous as the man who defied death time and again. None of his customary crashes on the jagged rooftops of Parisian hotels, no unexpected nosedives into the Mediterranean, no sudden descents onto a stranger’s land. It had been a tranquil year. In Baladeuse he owned the skies of France. He was the only one who was consistently puttering around in a flying machine. As Santos-Dumont’s butler decanted wine for the guests, Cartier and Princess Isabel offered a toast to their host’s ingenuity. No one else was close to mastering the air—or so it seemed.

      Eager for a new challenge, Santos-Dumont joined the competition to build and fly the world’s first airplane. For a few months he appeared to have succeeded, but after an acrimonious priority fight, Wilbur and Orville Wright, who had initially flown in near secrecy, garnered that glory. Santos-Dumont retained the distinction of flying the first airplane in Europe, and his élan and perseverance were credited with inspiring aeronauts across the continent.

      Early aeronautics in Europe had the quality of a gentlemen’s club. Balloon meets on Sunday mornings replaced polo and fox hunts. Flying machines were a diversion for the rich men who owned the first automobiles—oil barons, well-heeled lawyers, and newspaper tycoons. They accepted Santos-Dumont as one of their own because he was the fine-mannered son of a coffee magnate. They supported the inventors of dirigibles and airplanes both by funding them directly and by offering lucrative prizes for aeronautical “firsts”: the first to circumvent the Eiffel Tower in a powered balloon, the first to fly an airplane fifty yards, the first to cross the English Channel.

      The recreational aspect of these aeronautical contests tended to belie how dangerous they were. More than two hundred men, many of them with wives and children, some of them the top engineers and inventors of their day, died in accidents before Santos-Dumont succeeded. The aeronautical pioneers had none of the modern techniques for assessing the airworthiness of a flying machine. The only way to demonstrate that it could fly was to go up in it, and, as it turned out, most of these fanciful machines either could not get off the ground, stay upright in the air, or descend safely. Santos-Dumont clearly knew the risks involved. And although he told friends that flying gave him the greatest pleasure in life, he would not have courted danger if it were not for a higher purpose—the invention of a technology that would revolutionize transportation and advance world peace.

      The first half of his goal was realized in his lifetime. The flying machine of course is now the principal means of conveying people long distances. In the United States alone, there are 90,700 plane flights a day. And in Brazil 157 planes depart for Europe every week. The flight from São Paulo to Paris is eleven hours, a journey that took Santos-Dumont more than a week by steamship and train. Progress toward the second half of his goal has been decidedly mixed. On the one hand, passenger planes, along with the telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet, have turned the world into a global village. When an earthquake strikes El Salvador, food from London can be airlifted there within hours. When an Ebola outbreak is detected in the Congo, doctors from the Centers for Disease Control can be there in a day. On the other hand, military aircraft have caused millions of casualties not just at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in the ordinary course of war. And then on the morning of September 11, 2001, the unthinkable happened: Two passenger planes were diabolically converted into skyscraper-obliterating missiles. The first great invention of the twentieth century had become the nightmare of the twenty-first.

      The Wright brothers had a different motivation from Santos-Dumont in developing the plane. They were not idealists. They did not dream about bringing distant peoples together.