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

wrought-iron giant. Henrique and Alberto watched fashionable young ladies climb the 1,671 stairs in fanciful dresses from rue Auber known as the Eiffel ascensionniste, which boasted a series of nested collars to protect “the adventurous wearer against cooler temperatures at high altitude.”

      Alberto Santos-Dumont also marveled at the novel vehicles he saw. The first mass-produced bicycles rolled quietly along the streets, with rubber tires in place of the clacking wooden wheels with which he was familiar. The bicycle gave middle-class Parisians a form of mobility that few Brazilians could afford, and contributed to a sexual revolution when women, demanding the same freedom of movement as men, insisted on their own bikes and, to ride them, donned pants—culottes—for the first time. (A popular advertisement of the time depicted a grinning bride speeding away on a bicycle after abandoning her beau at the altar.) The first few motorcars, totally unknown in Rio, clamored down the boulevards at speeds of less than ten miles an hour—and provoked the same artists who had objected to the Eiffel Tower to sniff that “the harsh smell of gasoline obliterates the noble smell of horse manure.” On the street corners were théâtrophones, special pay phones by which Parisians could listen to live opera, chamber music, plays, even political meetings.

      Despite the conspicuous new technologies, the typical apartment house, except in the so-called American quarter on the right bank, lacked certain conveniences that were already common in New York and Chicago (but not yet in Rio or São Paulo). “Elevators are the exception rather than the rule, candles are more in evidence than incandescent lamps … and such a thing as a well-equipped bathroom is practically nonexistent,” observed New Yorker Burton Holmes, a contemporary of Santos-Dumont and one of the world’s first photojournalists. Holmes was particularly vexed by the difficulty of taking a hot bath:

      “Un bain, Monsieur? Mais parfaitement! I will make the bath to come at five o’clock this afternoon,” said the obliging concierge when I expressed a desire for total immersion. “But I want the bath now, this morning, before breakfast,” I insisted. “Impossible, Monsieur, it requires time to prepare and to bring, but it will be superb—your bath—the last gentleman who took one a month ago enjoyed his very much. You will see, Monsieur, that when one orders a bath in Paris, one gets a beautiful bath—it will be here at four o’clock.” At four, a man, or rather a pair of legs, came staggering up my stairs—five flights, by the way—with a full-sized zinc bath tub, inverted and concealing the head and shoulders and half the body of the miserable owner of those legs. The tub was planted in the middle of my room: a white linen lining was adjusted; sundry towels and a big bathing sheet, to wrap myself in after the ordeal, were ostentatiously produced. Then came the all-important operation of filling the tub. Two pails, three servants, and countless trips down to the hydrant, several floors below, at last did the trick: the tub was full of ice-cold water. “But I ordered a hot bath.” “Patience, Monsieur, behold here is the hot water!” Whereupon the bath man opens a tall zinc cylinder that looks like a fire extinguisher and pours about two gallons of hot water into that white-lined tub—result a tepid bath—expense sixty cents—time expended two hours, for the tub had to be emptied by dipping out the water and carrying it away, pail after pail. Then the proud owner of the outfit slung his pails on his arms, put his tub on his head like a hat, and began the perilous descent of my five flights of stairs.

      In private homes the telephone was as scarce as hot water. “Polite society proved relatively slow to accept the phone,” historian Eugen Weber noted, and even “President Grévy took a lot of persuading before he allowed one to be installed in the Elysée Palace.” The upper class regarded the phone as interfering with the sacred privacy of their living space. Rare was a Parisian like the Comtesse Greffulhe who appreciated “the magic, supernatural life” that the phone provided: “It’s odd for a woman to lie in bed,” she explained, “and talk to a gentleman who may be in his. And you know, if the husband should walk in, one just throws the thingummy under the bed, and he does not know a thing.” As late as 1900, “there were only 30,000 telephones in France,” Weber observed, when New York City’s hotels had more than 20,000 among them.

      And yet, with the exception of a few grumbling aesthetes, Parisians, even more so than New Yorkers, had an abiding faith in the inherent goodness of technology. When New York State introduced the electric chair in 1899, Weber said, the power companies objected, fearing that if people knew that electricity could kill, they would not want it in their homes or offices. The French, on the other hand, laughed off the possibility of a deadly electric chair; they could not imagine that such a wondrous new source of power could be destructive.

      Santos-Dumont felt at home among Paris’s technophiles. The city had everything going for it, he thought, except that the sky was astonishingly deficient in airships. He expected it to be peppered with real-life versions of Verne’s flying machines. This after all was the country where the Montgolfier brothers had sent up the first hot-air balloon a century before. Moreover, as Santos-Dumont knew, in 1852 a Frenchman named Henri Giffard had chugged along at half a mile an hour in the world’s first powered balloon by hanging a five-horsepower steam engine and propeller from a 144-foot-long cigar-shaped gasbag. In 1883 two brothers, Gaston and Albert Tissander, had substituted an electric motor and boosted the speed to three miles an hour. As part of the French military’s balloon program, Colonel Charles Renard and Lieutenant Arthur Krebs had more success with an electric engine in 1884, setting a speed record of 14.5 miles an hour. Santos-Dumont could not understand why in the ensuing seven years the airship had not evolved into an everyday conveyance. Indeed, it had devolved: There were no airships at all in 1891.

      The powerless gasbags that did inhabit the sky were generally tethered, anchored by long cords that kept them from drifting away. Most of these balloons were not operated by inventors or men of science but by street performers. One woman of particular renown sat at a piano suspended from a balloon and played Wagner five hundred feet above the ground. Another showman regularly sent up roosters, turtles, and mice and prided himself that they were none the worse for it. In Paris there were also a few shameless hucksters who charged exorbitant fees for rides in untethered balloons. They could control the elevation more or less by throwing out ballast or letting out gas, but they had little influence on where the wind might sweep them.

      In earlier times, clerics had railed against men who tried to fly, warning them that they were flirting with disaster by encroaching on the realm of the angels. In 1709, the Brazilian aeronaut Laurenco de Gusmao, known as the flying priest, was put to death as a sorcerer by the Inquisition. Even in enlightened fin de siècle France, this view of flying as black magic persisted among the lower classes. Santos-Dumont had heard the story of an errant balloon that was carried by an unpredictable wind from Paris to a nearby town, where it precipitously crashed. As the unlucky paying customer climbed nervously out of the basket, peasants attacked the limp gasbag, beating it ferociously with sticks and denouncing it as devil’s work. To prevent future incidents that might end even more violently, the government distributed a pamphlet in the countryside explaining that balloons were not vessels of the dark forces. Santos-Dumont thought there must be a better way. He decided it was his mission to design a steerable balloon that could fight the wind so that no one would be swept inadvertently onto a stranger’s land.

      The first step, he decided, was to go up in one of the existing balloons. On a day when his parents were occupied getting medical advice about his father’s condition, Santos-Dumont looked up balloonist in the city directory and visited the first one listed.

      “You want to make an ascent?” the man asked gravely. “Hum, Hum! Are you sure you have the courage? A balloon ascent is no small thing, and you seem too young.”

      Santos-Dumont assured him of his purpose and his resolve, and the aeronaut consented to take him up for at most two hours provided that the day was sunny and the skies calm. “My honorarium will be twelve hundred francs [two hundred and forty dollars],” he added, “and you must