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

Charlières were safer because they did not require an open flame, but montgolfières were more practical because hydrogen was expensive and scarce. “Balloonomania,” as historian Lee Kennett called it, was sweeping France: “The decade of the 1780s was in many ways a frivolous and jaded age, and it took the new ‘aerostatic machines’ to its heart. Ascensions became as fashionable as costume balls, and so numerous that the Paris city authorities had to issue an ordinance governing their use—the world’s first air traffic regulations. The distinctive form of the balloon lent itself to objects as diverse as chair backs and snuff boxes.”

      IN 1883, Alberto Santos-Dumont, age ten, had not yet seen a balloon, but he duplicated the Mongolfiers’ invention in miniature. Working from illustrations in books, he made handheld balloons out of tissue paper and filled them with hot air from the stove flame. At holiday celebrations he demonstrated the gasbags to the field hands. Even his parents, who did not approve of his incendiary experiments, could not conceal their amazement when the montgolfières soared higher than the house. He also made a toy wooden plane whose propeller, or “air screw” as it was called in those days, was powered by a wound-up rubber string.

      From reading Verne, Alberto was convinced that people had already gone beyond the hot-air balloon and flown airships, also known as dirigibles (steerable powered balloons). His family and childhood friends tried to disabuse him of the notion. He used to play a game with the other children called Pigeon flies! One boy was chosen as the leader, and he would shout, “Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!” and so on. “At each call we were supposed to raise our fingers,” Santos-Dumont wrote many years later. “Sometimes, however, he would call out: ‘Dog flies! Fox flies!’ or some other like impossibility to catch us. If anyone raised a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called ‘Man flies!’ for at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was, hoping that someday the laugh would be on my side.”

      It was not until Alberto was fifteen that he actually saw a manned balloon. At a fair in São Paulo, in 1888, he watched a performer ascend in a nearly spherical gasbag and descend by parachute. Alberto’s imagination took off:

      In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, when the hum of insects, punctuated by the far-off cry of some bird, lulled me, I would lie in the shade of the veranda and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to fall in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of the aerial ocean, I, too, devised airships and flying machines in my imagination.

      These imaginings I kept to myself. In those days, in Brazil, to talk of inventing a flying machine, or dirigible balloon, would have been to stamp one’s self as unbalanced and visionary. Spherical balloonists were looked on as daring professionals not differing greatly from acrobats; and for the son of a planter to dream of emulating them would have been almost a social sin.

      Santos-Dumont’s parents were politically conservative. They supported the emperor, whose railroad Henrique had eagerly constructed. But they could not keep their curious son from being exposed to all sorts of ideologies that they found distasteful. When Alberto was in the coffee-processing plant, even though he generally kept to himself, he would overhear conversations. Sometimes the workers talked about the democratic movement and spoke with passion of the patriot Tiradentes. The revolutionary dentist had become the hero of ordinary Brazilians, and his life was being turned into myth, as would Santos-Dumont’s years later. Tiradentes was depicted in numerous paintings as a bearded Christ-like figure, although in reality he was clean-shaven and short-haired. The day of his execution, April 21, became a national holiday, which is still celebrated today. Young Alberto had little interest in politics, and obviously no desire to be drawn and quartered, but he was attracted to the immortality that Tiradentes had achieved. He decided then that he wanted to do something with his life that would stir the hearts of men and women—an extraordinary aspiration for an adolescent to have. He had no idea what profession he would take up—it may not even have crossed his mind that one could become an aeronaut or an inventor. But he knew that whatever he did, it should have a profound impact on the people around him. Certainly no other aeronautical pioneer had such grand ambitions a decade before taking to the air.

       [CHAPTER 2] “A MOST DANGEROUS PLACE FOR A BOY” PARIS, 1891

      SANTOS-DUMONT’S INSULAR world expanded when he was eighteen. His sixty-year-old father, who still lorded over both his family and the plantation, was thrown from his horse and suffered a severe concussion and partial paralysis. When he did not fully recover, Henrique abruptly sold the coffee business for $6 million and headed to Europe in search of medical treatment with his wife and Alberto in tow. The threesome took a steamer to Lisbon. After a brief respite in Oporto, where two of Alberto’s sisters had taken up residence with their Portuguese husbands, two brothers by the name of Villares (and a third sister back in Brazil was married to yet another Villares brother), they boarded a train for Paris. Henrique had faith that the city’s doctors would cure him. After all, it was the place where Louis Pasteur was performing medical miracles, saving children from rabid canines by vaccinating them.

      From the moment in 1891 when Santos-Dumont disembarked at the Gare d’Orléans, he fell in love with the city. “All good Americans are said to go to Paris when they die,” he wrote. For a teenager who loved inventions, fin de siècle Paris represented “everything that is powerful and progressive.” He lost no time immersing himself in the city’s technological wonders. On his first day, he visited the two-year-old Eiffel Tower, which at 986 feet stood almost twice as tall as any other man-made structure in the world. Although the massive iron latticework was illuminated by conventional gas lighting, the elevators that carried sightseers and meteorologists to the observation deck were powered by that exciting new form of energy—electricity. Alberto rode the elevators for half a day, and then he sat on the bank of the Seine and admired the tower’s sky-high curves.

      Henrique shared his delight. When he was trained as an engineer four decades earlier, the profession did not enjoy the exalted reputation it now had in France and England. The construction of strong but graceful bridges to extend railway systems across the rivers and gorges of Europe had elevated the status of the engineer. “If we want any work done of an unusual character and send for an architect, he hesitates, debates, trifles,” Prince Albert of Great Britain observed. “Send for an engineer, and he does it.” Gustave Eiffel was one of the master bridge builders, and he won the commission to construct the monumental tower for the Paris Exposition of 1889, a world’s fair that celebrated the centennial of the French Revolution and the benefits of nineteenth-century industrialization. On both sides of the Atlantic, there had been talk of building a thousand-foot tower, but the will to do it was strongest in France. Paris wanted to prove to itself and the world that it had recovered fully from both the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, in which the Germans had annexed the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and the subsequent Paris Commune, in which twenty thousand Frenchmen had been slaughtered by their fellow Parisians and whole sections of the city leveled. Exposition planners blessed Eiffel’s blueprints as soon as they saw them, but a few vocal writers and painters protested the idea of a “dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney” with no escape from “the odious shadow of the odious column of bolted metal.” But once the tower was actually constructed, most of the indignant aesthetes came around to liking it, with the notable exception of the writer Guy de Maupassant, who, it was said, dined regularly “at the restaurant on the second platform because that was the only place in the city