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

Such chimerical schemes for ballooning were abandoned once the Montgolfiers showed how little there really was to it. On June 5, 1783, the two brothers demonstrated a thirty-foot-diameter unmanned balloon in the public square in Annonay. It required eight men to hold down the twenty-thousand-cubic-foot balloon, whose envelope consisted of pieces of silk lined with paper fastened together by buttons and buttonholes. When the Montgolfiers gave the signal, the men released the giant gasbag and it climbed six thousand feet. After ten minutes, it came down in a field a mile and a half away.

News of the accomplishment reached the Paris Academy of Sciences, whose members had been actively experimenting with the construction of a lighter-than-air balloon but had so far failed to get anything off the ground. The Parisian scientists, not wanting to be upstaged by unschooled papermakers, accelerated their efforts. The physicist-engineer Jacques Alexandre César Charles, assisted by two craftsmen, the brothers Ainé and Cadet Robert, substituted hydrogen gas for the burning-straw fumes, and on August 23, 1783, in the place des Victoires began inflating a twelve-foot-diameter silk balloon. The hydrogen was obtained by pouring five hundred pounds of sulfuric acid over one thousand pounds of iron filings. Charles had not counted on the chemical reaction to produce as much heat as it did, and the balloon fabric had to be repeatedly doused with cold water to keep it from singeing. The water vapor trapped in the balloon condensed and weighed it down.

The inflation took three days, and, as word spread of the spectacle, a crowd gathered, choking the neighboring streets. To ease the congestion, Charles ordered the balloon moved in the stealth of night, escorted by armed guards, to the more expansive Champ de Mars, at the foot of what is now the Eiffel Tower. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond witnessed the move:

No more wonderful scene (#litres_trial_promo) could be imagined than the Balloon being thus conveyed, preceded by lighted torches, surrounded by a “cortege” and escorted by a detachment of foot and horse guards; the nocturnal march, the form and capacity of the body, carried with so much precaution; the silence that reigned, the unseasonable hour, all tended to give a singularity and mystery truly imposing to all those who were acquainted with the cause. The cab-drivers on the road were so astonished that they were impelled to stop their carriages, and to kneel humbly, hat in hand, whilst the procession was passing.

At 5:00 P.M. on August 27, Charles’s assistants triumphantly released the balloon and it rose rapidly to a height of three thousand feet. After forty-five minutes, it descended in a field in the village of Gonesse, fifteen miles from Paris.

Unlike the hot-air balloon, which could have been made at any time in recorded history, the hydrogen balloon could not have been invented much earlier than it was because the gas, initially called phlogiston, or “inflammable air,” was discovered only in 1766, by the English scientist Henry Cavendish. On learning that “inflammable air” was nine times lighter than ordinary air, Joseph Black in Edinburgh filled a small, thin bag with the new gas and watched it rise to the ceiling of his laboratory. He had difficulty, though, in scaling up the experiment. The problem was that the materials he tried for bags were either too heavy or too porous. At a large public lecture, he used the allantois of a calf as the gasbag, but was humiliated by its failure to ascend and gave up ballooning entirely. In 1782, Tiberius Cavallo, a fellow of London’s Royal Society, “found that bladders (#litres_trial_promo), even when carefully scraped, are too heavy, and that China paper is permeable to the gas.” Charles succeeded because he had the idea of making the silk impermeable but still lightweight by varnishing it with a solution of elastic gum.

The Montgolfiers made the next move in the race to advance aerostation. On September 19, 1783, they repeated the Annonay experiment at Versailles for the benefit of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their court. According to one observer, the papermakers “had caused all the old shoes (#litres_trial_promo) that could be collected to be brought here, and threw them into the damp straw that was burning, together with pieces of decomposed meat; for these are the substances which supply their gas. The King and the Queen came up to examine the machine, but the noxious smell thus produced obliged them to retreat at once.” French scientists found the demonstration particularly insulting because the two brothers had beaten them to the balloon’s invention while harboring incorrect notions about the cause of the ascension. The Montgolfiers attributed the “lifting power” to the lighter-than-air smoke generated from their patented combination of fetid meat and dirty shoes. In fact, the smoke particles were heavier than air and actually worked to counteract the balloon’s rise. The lift came not from the imprisoned smoke but the captured hot air, which was lighter than the cooler ambient air. Most of the observers did not care why the spectacular blue-and-gold balloon was aloft—they just marveled at the fact that it was. And the world’s first aerial travelers, a sheep, a rooster, and a duck, were suspended in a cage below the balloon. The animals emerged unscathed from their two-mile trip to the forest of Vaucresson, except for the rooster, whose right wing had suffered a nasty kick from the sheep.

Charles and the Montgolfiers independently told the king that on the next ascension they themselves would be the passengers, but his majesty forbade such valuable subjects from risking their lives. Instead he offered prisoners as the first pilots, proposing to set them free if they survived. But Charles ultimately convinced him that the first person aloft should be a man of science who could describe the voyage if he were fortunate enough to make it back. The honor went to Francis Pilâtre de Rozier, a distinguished member of the Academy of Sciences who was the superintendent of the king’s natural-history collection. On October 15, 1783, he ascended in a captive balloon (one tethered to the ground), the hot air replenished by the burning of straw and wood in an iron basket hung below the balloon. Having found it easy to stoke the fire when he was in the air, Pilâtre de Rozier and a companion, the Marquis d’Arlandes, went up in a free balloon for the first time on November 21. Ascending from the Bois de Boulogne at 1:54 P.M., they reached an elevation of five hundred to one thousand feet and, after twenty-five minutes, descended beyond the Paris city limits, some nine thousand yards from where they had started. Ten days later, Charles and Ainé Robert had the honor of being the first people to ascend in a hydrogen balloon, in a two-hour journey that began in the Tuileries and ended twenty-seven miles away in the town of Nesle.

Within a few months of Charles’s trip, the skies of Paris were populated with both hydrogen balloons, known as charlières, and montgolfières (hot-air balloons). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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! (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#ulink_14f19a3f-93d5-5340-8a8b-136d49476c1e)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) because that was the only place in the city where he could be certain not to see the tower.” In 1891, Parisians were still in the midst of their honeymoon with the ten-thousand-ton, 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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?” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 sign a contract to hold yourself responsible for all damage we may do to your own life and limbs, and to mine, to the property of third parties, and to the balloon itself and its accessories. Furthermore, you must agree to pay our railway fares and transportation for the balloon and its basket back to Paris from the point at which we come to the ground.”

Santos-Dumont asked for time to think it over. “To a youth eighteen years of age,” he wrote in his memoir, “twelve hundred francs was a large sum. How could I justify it to my parents? Then I reflected: ‘If I risk twelve hundred francs for an afternoon’s pleasure, I shall find it either good or bad. If it is bad, the money will be lost. If it is good, I shall want to repeat it and I shall not have the means.’ This decided me. Regretfully, I gave up ballooning and took refuge in automobiling”—an interest that was piqued when he accompanied his father to the Palais des Machines, a building that, like the Eiffel Tower, was constructed as part of the Paris Exposition of 1889. During the exposition, the cavernous building, an iron-and-glass cathedral to technology, housed thousands of exhibits from all over the world, from mining equipment and steam-powered looms to the first gas-powered automobile, patented by Karl Benz, and Thomas Edison’s display of phonographs and electric lights, operated by the inventor himself. Even though the exposition had officially ended months before Henrique and Alberto’s visit, the Palais des Machines continued to house new technologies. At one point, Henrique realized that he had lost his son. He meandered slowly back through the hall in his wheelchair and found Alberto mesmerized by a working internal combustion engine, entranced that a machine much smaller than a steam engine could be so powerful. “I stood there (#litres_trial_promo) as if I had been nailed down by Fate,” Santos-Dumont recalled. “I was completely fascinated. I told my father how surprised I was at seeing that motor work, and he replied: ‘That is enough for today.’”

Alberto subsequently visited the Peugeot workshop in Valentigny. Although he had reservations about spending his father’s hard-earned money on a balloon flight, he had none about spending it on a 3.5-horsepower four-wheeler. Peugeot manufactured only two cars in 1891—the steering and brakes barely worked—and the eighteen-year-old Brazilian was now the proud owner of one of them. In a few months, when his father came to the realization that Parisian medicine could not restore his health, Alberto sailed with him back to Brazil. Alberto brought along the Peugeot roadster, and when he powered it up in São Paulo, he reportedly had the distinction of being the first person ever to drive a car in South America.

Henrique knew that he was dying, so he had a long talk with Alberto about his future. He had seen how happy his youngest son had been in the City of Light, and, to his wife’s chagrin, urged him to return to Paris by himself, despite cryptically warning him that the city was “a most dangerous place for a boy.” (#litres_trial_promo) He told Alberto that he did not have to worry about earning a living and advanced him his inheritance of a half million dollars. He sent him off with the challenge “let’s see if you make a man of yourself”—strong words that reflected his concern that his son had never shown the slightest interest in the opposite sex. Alberto returned to Paris in the summer of 1892, and his father died in August.

Santos-Dumont’s first order of business in Paris was to look up other balloonists in the city directory. But “like the first,” (#litres_trial_promo) he wrote, “all wanted extravagant sums to take me up with them on the most trivial kind of ascent. All took the same attitude. They made a danger and a difficulty of ballooning, enlarging on its risks to life and property. Even in presence of the great prices they proposed to charge me, they did not encourage me to close with them. Obviously they were determined to keep ballooning to themselves as a professional mystery. Therefore, I bought a new automobile.”

He also attended to his education. He and his father had investigated the colleges in Paris, but in the end his father, knowing that Alberto might rebel against a structured curriculum, suggested that he hire a private tutor instead. That was fine with Alberto, who had recurrent nightmares about being called upon to answer a question in a crowded classroom. In 1892, he employed a former college professor named Garcia and the two of them designed an intense program of study weighted toward the “practical sciences”—physics, chemistry, and mechanical and electrical engineering. The home-study plan appealed to the recluse and bookworm in Santos-Dumont, and for the next five years he buried himself in his textbooks. Occasionally he visited cousins in England, where he would slip into the back of lecture halls at the University of Bristol and listen to the professors; because he was not an official student, there was little danger of his being called on.

For relaxation in those studious years, Santos-Dumont drove his cars. (According to Brazilian biographies, he owned more cars in 1892 than anyone else in Paris—but the truth of this assertion, and just how many cars he owned, cannot be confirmed.) He would pass the time motoring up and down the wide boulevards, but the first internal combustion engines were so unreliable that they often broke down, stalling the predominant horse traffic. His Peugeot was such a novelty that even when it was running properly, it snarled traffic as pedestrians rushed into the street to get a better view. The police warned him to keep the car moving, and once he was fined—in what might have been the city’s first traffic violation—for causing a disturbance near the opera house. The “disturbance” was actually a convivial affair, an impromptu street party of passersby tickled by the sight of his vehicle.

Fin de siècle Parisians were great revelers. According to Eugen Weber, they turned even unpleasant experiences, such as being vaccinated against smallpox, into festive occasions. Inoculations were “done at parties, as if one were (#litres_trial_promo) going to the theater,” the society columns reported. “One organizes an intimate luncheon; the doctor arrives at dessert, the vaccine in his pocket.” In his student days, Santos-Dumont was not much for revelry or heavy drinking, but he occasionally indulged in Parisian nightlife, that inebriated swirl of intelligent discourse and decadence. The cafés were places for learned conversation not just about art and literature but scientific and technological developments like the discovery of X rays and the construction of the Paris metro. People who fashioned themselves intellectuals stayed up all night talking, pausing to inject themselves with morphine in gold-plated syringes, sip Vin Coca Mariani (a wine permeated with cocaine), or snack on strawberries soaked in ether. End-of-the-century Paris was forgiving to someone like Santos-Dumont who was not sure about his sexuality. The avant-garde café crowd promoted erotic experimentation, and homosexuality became so fashionable that every hipster had to try it. “All remarkable women do it,” (#litres_trial_promo) the wife of a banker wrote, “but it’s very difficult. One has to take lessons.”

In 1897, Santos-Dumont returned home to Brazil and reflected on his five years in Paris. With Garcia’s guidance, he had mastered the sciences. He was thankful for that, and yet there were things he wished he had done. “I regretted bitterly (#litres_trial_promo) that I had not persevered in my attempt to make a balloon ascent,” he wrote. “At that distance, far from ballooning possibilities, even the high prices demanded by the aeronauts seemed to me of secondary importance.”

Before heading back to Paris, he visited a bookstore in Rio and purchased a copy of Andrée’s Balloon Expedition, In Search of the North Pole. The book, written by the Paris balloon makers Henri Lachambre and Alexis Machuron, proved to be a great diversion on the long steamship passage. Lachambre and Machuron had built a huge balloon called the Eagle for the young Swedish scientist Salomon August Andrée, who had been planning for more than a decade to make the first balloon expedition to the North Pole. Andrée finally got the opportunity on July 11, 1897, when he ascended from Dane’s Island, off the north coast of Norway near Spitsbergen, for a 2,300-mile journey that he hoped to complete in six days. Accompanying him were two companions, three dozen carrier pigeons, a boat, a stove, sleds, tents, sundry scientific instruments, cameras, and enough food and birdseed to last four months. Although the Eagle was not powered, Andrée had cleverly equipped it with large sails so that he could steer it on a course that could deviate by as much as thirty degrees from the wind.

Lachambre and Machuron had published their book within days of Andrée’s ascent, before it was evident what had happened to him. They reported that one carrier pigeon had delivered an encouraging message: “13th July, 12:30 P.M., (#litres_trial_promo) 82.2° N. Lat., 15.5° E. Long. Good progress toward the north. All goes well on board. This message is the third by pigeon. Andrée.” After Santos-Dumont disembarked in France, he learned that only one other pigeon had made it back. The Andrée expedition was the talk of Paris cafés. The prevailing sentiment was that he would not return, and indeed that turned out to be the case. Three decades would pass before a hunting party discovered Andrée’s body and diary on White Island, a deserted expanse of pack ice only 150 miles from the Eagle’s starting point. The sails had apparently failed, and Andrée could not steer the balloon out of a fierce snowstorm that finally forced it down. He described in the diary how he and his companions had survived on lichen and seal blubber for three months. Then the journal entries ended. The brutal winter had set in, and the men froze to death in a blizzard.

In his own journal, Santos-Dumont noted how much Andrée’s story had affected him: “The reading of the book (#litres_trial_promo) during the long voyage proved a revelation to me, and I finished by studying it like a textbook. Its description of materials and prices opened my eyes. At last I saw clearly. Andrée’s immense balloon—a reproduction of whose photograph on the book cover showed how those that gave it the final varnishing climbed up its sides and over its summit like a mountain—cost only 40,000 francs to construct and equip fully! I determined that, on arriving in Paris, I would cease consulting professional aeronauts and would make the acquaintance of constructors.”

Santos-Dumont saw a little of himself in Salomon Andrée. He liked Andrée’s adventurous spirit and shared his belief in the unbounded power of technology to end human misery. Andrée had described, in a series of sanguine articles, the likely benefits that the electric light and other new inventions would have on human evolution, liberty, hygiene, athletics, language, architecture, military planning, home life, marriage, and education. Despite his loquaciousness in print, Andrée was a man of few words at public functions, and Santos-Dumont too was tongue-tied at formal affairs.

Both men shunned intimate relationships with women and never married. “In married life, one has to deal (#litres_trial_promo) with factors which cannot be arranged according to a plan,” Andrée wrote. “It is altogether too great a risk to bind oneself into a condition of things where another individual would be fully entitled—and what right would I have to repress this individuality?—to demand the same place in my life that I myself occupied! As soon as I feel any heart-leaves sprouting, I hasten to uproot them, for I know that any feeling which I allowed to live would become so strong that I should not dare to submit to it.”

[CHAPTER 3] FIRST FLIGHT VAUGIRARD, 1897 (#ulink_737b6e3b-0508-580f-8ff7-a69e6ed81413)

IN THE FALL of 1897, Santos-Dumont sought out the builders of Andrée’s balloon, in the hope that the architects of such a risky and fanciful project as the first flight to the North Pole would be receptive to his aeronautical interests. Santos-Dumont visited Lachambre and Machuron in their Parc d’Aérostation in Vaugirard, a town that had been incorporated into Paris. The two men warmed to him at once. They did not dismiss him as a feckless dreamer; nor did they demand a large fee or exaggerate the obvious dangers of aerostation. “When I asked M. Lachambre how much (#litres_trial_promo) it would cost me to make a short trip in one of his balloons,” Santos-Dumont recalled, “his reply so astonished me that I asked him to repeat it.”

“For a long trip of three or four hours,” Lachambre said, “it will cost you 250 francs, all expenses and return of balloon by rail included.”

“And the damages?” Santos-Dumont asked.

“We shall not do any damage!” he replied, laughing. Santos-Dumont accepted the deal before Lachambre had a chance to change his mind. Machuron offered to take him up the next day.

Santos-Dumont did not trust any of his beloved motorized vehicles to get him to the ascension on time, so he traveled by horse-cab, arriving early in Vaugirard so that he could watch the preparations. The deflated balloon lay flat and formless on the grass. On Lachambre’s order, the workmen turned on the gas and the balloon slowly swelled into a forty-foot-diameter sphere, holding 26,500 cubic feet of gas. By 11:00 A.M. the preparations were complete. A mild breeze was gently rocking the narrow wicker basket; Machuron stood in one corner, and opposite him was the diminutive Brazilian, impatient and fidgety, clutching a large bag of sand ballast so that the basket would not tip too much in the direction of Machuron, who weighed twice as much as he. “Let go, all!” (#litres_trial_promo) Machuron yelled. The workmen released the balloon, and Santos-Dumont’s first sensation in the air was that the wind had ceased altogether.

“The air seemed motionless around us,” recalled Santos-Dumont. “We were off, going at the speed of the air current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed, for us, there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt movement forward and upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves, but the earth that sinks down and away.” The other surprise was that the horizon appeared elevated: “At the bottom of the abyss which already opened 1500 yards below us, the earth, instead of appearing round like a ball, shows concave like a bowl by a peculiar phenomenon of refraction whose effect is to lift up constantly to the aëronaut’s eyes the circle of the horizon.” He could still make out people on the ground—they looked like ants, he said (a description that is now a cliché but may have been original to him). He could not hear their voices. The only sounds were the faint barking of dogs and the occasional locomotive whistle.