PAUL HOFFMAN
WINGS OF MADNESS
ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT
AND THE INVENTION
OF FLIGHT

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Paul Hoffman 2003

Paul Hoffman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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SOURCE ISBN: 9781841153681

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007441082

Version: 2016-10-11

DEDICATION

For Ann and Alexander and Matt

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue Dinner on the Ceiling Champs-Elysées, 1903

1 Arrival Minas Gerais, 1873

2 “A Most Dangerous Place for a Boy” Paris, 1891

3 First Flight Vaugirard, 1897

4 Dying for Science Paris, 1899

5 The Turkey Buzzard’s Secret

6 An Afternoon in the Rothschilds’ Chestnut Tree Paris, 1901

7 “It Is the Poor Who Will Suffer!” The Eiffel Tower, 1901

8 “Making Armies a Jest”

9 An Unwelcome Dip in the Mediterranean Bay of Monaco, 1902

10 “Airship Is Useless, Says Lord Kelvin” London and New York, 1902

11 The World’s First Aerial Car Paris, 1903

12 A Scurrilous Stabbing and a Russian Bribe St. Louis, 1904

13 “Aeroplane Raised by Small Motor, M. Santos-Dumont Performs a Feat Never Before Attained in Europe” Paris, 1906

14 “A War of Engineers and Chemists”

15 “Cavalry of the Clouds”

16 Departure Guarujá, 1932

Postmortem In Search of a Heart Campo dos Afonsos, 2000

What Santos-Dumont Wrote

What Santos-Dumont Read

What Santos-Dumont Made

Notes

Index

Origins and Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

[PROLOGUE] DINNER ON THE CEILING CHAMPS-ELYSÉES, 1903

IN DECEMBER 1903, an eleven-year resident of Paris, the Brazilian aeronautical pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, held a small holiday party in his high-ceilinged apartment on the Champs-Elysées. Louis Cartier, the jeweler, was there, as was Princess Isabel, the daughter of the last emperor of Brazil. The other attendees can only be surmised because there was no printed guest list, but his regular dining partners and confidants included George Goursat, the flamboyant writer and cartoonist who drew caricatures 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. They were not thrill-seekers. They did not rhapsodize about the joys of flying or preach a kind of aerial spirituality. They were not playful men and certainly did not host dinners at high tables. They were intent on building flying machines for financial gain, and when the U.S. government initially refused to fund them, they had no moral compunctions about approaching foreign militaries.

In the aftermath of the Great War, when it was evident that the plane could be used as a weapon of mass destruction, Santos-Dumont was the first aeronaut to press for the demilitarization of aircraft. His was a lonely voice, calling on heads of state to decommission their bombers. Orville Wright did not join his call (and Wilbur by then was dead).

Santos-Dumont was perhaps the most revered man in Paris in the first years of the twentieth century. His dapper countenance stared out from cigar boxes, matchbooks, and dinner plates. Fashion designers did a brisk business with replicas of his trademark panama hat and the stiff, high shirt collars that he favored. Toy makers could not turn out enough models of his balloons. Even French bakers honored him, offering cigar-shaped pastries decorated in the colors of the Brazilian flag.

He was famous on both sides of the English Channel—indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic. “When the names of those who have occupied outstanding positions in the world have been forgotten,” the London Times declared in 1901, “there will be a name which will remain in our memory, that of Santos-Dumont.”

The irony in the Times’s statement of course is that today he is barely remembered outside Brazil, where he is still a hero of mythic proportion. A town, a major airport, and dozens of streets are named for him. The mere mention of his name brings a smile to most Brazilians, as they picture the bygone era when their daring countryman proudly ruled the skies in a tiny balloon. As the rest of the world has largely forgotten Santos-Dumont, Brazilians themselves, in their romanticizing of the man in poems, songs, statues, busts, paintings, biographies, and memorial celebrations, have neglected his darker side. He was a tortured genius, a free spirit who strove to escape the confines of gravity, the peer pressure of his aeronautical confreres, the isolation of his rural upbringing, the small-mindedness of science’s ruling elders, the conformity of married life, the stereotypes of gender, and even the fate of his own cherished invention.

Many boys have dreamed of owning a personal flying machine, a kind of winged car that could take off and land anywhere, without the need of a runway. No one in the twenty-first century has realized that dream. A few elite corporate moguls have come close: They commute to work by helicopter, flying between backyard landing pads and office rooftops. But even a globe-trotting captain of industry cannot fly to his favorite restaurant, the theater, or the store. Only one man in history has enjoyed that freedom. His name was Alberto Santos-Dumont, and his aerial steed was an engine-driven balloon.

[CHAPTER 1] ARRIVAL MINAS GERAIS, 1873

IN THE LATE eighteenth century, the professional class in Brazil was chafing after three hundred years of Portuguese rule. Deprived of books and newspapers, because the royal family back in Lisbon did not want them to acquire rebellious ideas, the Brazilian colonists nonetheless learned about the American Revolution and the egalitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment. In 1789, a dentist and second lieutenant in the army named Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, better known by his nickname Tiradentes (“tooth-puller”), helped organize Brazil’s first independence movement, Inconfidência Mineira, and conspired with other army officers, gold-mine owners, priests, and lawyers to oust the Visconde of Barbacena, the Portuguese representative who governed the state of Minas Gerais. An informer within the movement tipped off the authorities, and Tiradentes was arrested before he could unseat the governor. To discourage other potential fomenters, the authorities hung the dentist in public, hacked his body to pieces, and propped his head and other organs on prominent signposts, all the while proclaiming their loyalty to the queen of Portugal, Dona Maria, also known as the Crazy One because of her incapacitating melancholy.

After making an example of Tiradentes, the Portuguese crown was lulled into a false sense of security that insurrection was no longer possible in Brazil. The royal family had more pressing things on their minds. Napoleon Bonaparte was on the warpath in Western Europe. In 1807, his forces moved into Portugal, the one country that was still a leak in his European-wide trade blockade against his enemy Great Britain. Prince Dom João VI, who had ruled Portugal since 1792, when his mother was officially declared insane, decided to get out of harm’s way by shifting the entire royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. It was the first time a European monarchy set up court in the New World. A convoy of ships escorted by the British navy transported the royal family and some ten thousand top Portuguese minds—Supreme Court justices, bankers, clergymen, doctors, and a surgeon named Joaquim José dos Santos. The man was Santos-Dumont’s maternal grandfather.

When the Crazy One died in 1816, Dom João assumed the throne. He encouraged immigration to Brazil not just from Portugal but from Spain, France, and Britain. He made the country attractive to professionals by lifting the ban on reading material. He opened theaters and libraries and established scientific and literary academies. He promoted Brazil as offering the best of European culture with a more pleasant climate, exotic plants and animals, and enough land that a person need never see his neighbor. One of the tens of thousands of immigrants lured by this image was Francois Honoré Dumont, a Parisian jeweler, who moved with his wife to Brazil. He was Santos-Dumont’s paternal grandfather.

Brazil’s new residents and its Portuguese population benefited from the royal presence in Rio de Janeiro, but disciples of Tiradentes continued to incite rebellion among native Brazilians who felt themselves to be second-class citizens. There were sporadic acts of insurrection, but none really threatened Dom João’s rule. The king’s most serious challenge was in Portugal itself. Since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, there had been a power vacuum in Lisbon. In April 1821, Dom João, fearing that someone in Portugal might try to usurp his throne, sailed home with five thousand loyal supporters. He left behind his son Pedro as prince regent, a decision he would regret. Pedro was alarmed by the growing independence movement in Brazil itself, and he made the pragmatic decision to sever ties with both his father and Portugal and declare Brazil an independent entity. On December 1, 1821, the disloyal son, only twenty-four years of age, was crowned the first emperor of Brazil, making the country the only constitutional monarchy in Latin America, among republics cast off from the Spanish Empire. It would remain that way until 1899.

Dom Pedro I’s reign lasted a decade. He was more imperial than his father and showed little interest in working with the legislature empowered by Brazil’s new constitution. In 1831, faced with congressmen conspiring against him, he abdicated his throne, fled the country, and left behind as the sovereign his five-year-old son, also named Pedro. The constitution provided that “little Pedro” could not be crowned until he was eighteen, but the legislature swore him in four years earlier because the absence of an official emperor was fueling political instability.

Alberto Santos-Dumont was born during Pedro II’s reign, on July 20, 1873, in a remote outpost of Minas Gerais, the home state of Tiradentes. Alberto’s parents, Henrique Dumont and Francisca de Paula Santos, were first-generation Brazilians who lived in a district of the state named Joâo Aires. The town they resided in was Cabangu, but to call it a town exaggerated its size. At first Cabangu consisted of only their house. Henrique was an engineer, and he had won a contract to build a stretch of the Dom Pedro II railroad through this remote part of Minas Gerais. The railroad was one of the vast public-works projects that the emperor had planned, and so it was an honor for Henrique to receive the commission. The drawback was the necessity of living in isolation.

By the time Alberto was six, the railway work was over, and his father, tapping into his wife’s inheritance, had moved the family south to fertile lands outside São Paulo and entered the coffee business. It was not an easy move. The land had to be cleared, five million coffee trees planted, elaborate facilities built to store, dry, and process the beans, and living quarters erected for the workers and foremen. The plantation was so large that Henrique built sixty miles of railway to span it and purchased seven locomotives. The work paid off. Henrique, nicknamed the coffee king by the press, soon had one of the country’s largest farms. With his newfound wealth, he could afford to import European tutors for his children and to send Alberto, when he was older, to private schools in São Paulo and Ouro Prêto.

“Inhabitants of Europe comically picture these plantations to themselves as primitive stations of the boundless pampas, as innocent of the cart and wheelbarrow as of the electric light and telephone,” Santos-Dumont wrote when he was an adult. “There are such stations far in the interior. I have been through them … but they are not the coffee plantations of São Paulo. I can hardly imagine a more stimulating environment for a boy dreaming over mechanical inventions.” At the age of seven he drove the broad-wheeled “locomobiles,” the steam traction engines that carried the red coffee berries from the fields to his father’s railway. Five years later he sweet-talked a foreman into letting him fire up a huge Baldwin locomotive and haul a trainload of berries to the processing plant.

Of Henrique’s eight children, it was Alberto, the sixth child and youngest of three sons, who took the most interest in the mechanics of coffee production. He knew every step in the long process. “I think it is not generally understood how scientifically a Brazilian coffee plantation may be operated,” he recalled, with the berries untouched by human hands from the moment they entered the train cars to the time their by-product was loaded onto transatlantic ships. In a memoir written in 1904, called My Air-Ships, Santos-Dumont lovingly described how his family processed the coffee. The first step was to transfer the berries to giant tanks

where the water is continually renewed and agitated. Mud that has clung to the berries from the rains, and little stones, which have been mixed with them in the loading of the cars, go to the bottom, while the berries and the little sticks and bits of leaves float on the surface and are carried from the tank by means of a trough, whose bottom is pierced with innumerable little holes. Through these holes falls some of the water with the berries, while the little sticks and pieces of leaves float on.

The fallen coffee berries are now clean. They are still the color and size of cherries. The red exterior is a hard pod, or polpa. Inside of each pod are two beans, each of which is covered with a skin of its own. The water which has fallen with the berries carries them on to the machine called the despolpador, which breaks the outside pod and frees the beans. Long tubes, called “driers,” now receive the beans, still wet and with their skins on them. In these driers the beans are continually agitated in hot air.

Coffee is very delicate. It must be handled carefully. Therefore the dried beans are lifted by the cups of an endless-chain elevator to a height whence they slide down an inclined trough to … the coffee machine house.

The beans were then carried by a second elevator to the processing plant. The first machine they encountered was a ventilator, a series of vibrating sieves that let the coffee beans slip through but trapped any remaining sticks, leaves, and pebbles, impurities that would break the next machine.

Another endless-chain elevator carries the beans to a height whence they fall through an inclined trough into the descascador, or “skinner.” It is a highly delicate machine; if the spaces between are a trifle too big, the coffee passes without being skinned, while if they are too small, they break the beans.

Another elevator carries the skinned beans with their skins to another ventilator, in which the skins are blown away.

Still another elevator takes the now clean beans up and throws them into the “separator,” a great copper tube two yards in diameter and about seven yards long, resting at a slight incline. Through the separator tube the coffee slides. As it is pierced at first with little holes, the smaller beans fall through them. Further along it is pierced with larger holes, and through these the medium-sized beans fall; and further still along are yet larger holes for the large, round beans called “mocha.” Each grade falls into the hopper, beneath which are stationed weighing scales and men with coffee sacks. As the sacks fill up to the required weight, they are replaced by empty ones; and the tied and labeled sacks are shipped to Europe.

As a boy, Santos-Dumont spent whole days watching the machines and teaching himself to fix them. They were always breaking down.

In particular, the moving sieves were continually getting out of order. While they were not heavy, they moved back and forth horizontally at great speed and took an enormous amount of motive power. The belts were always being changed, and I remember the fruitless efforts of all of us to remedy the mechanical defects of the device.

Now, is it not curious that these troublesome shifting sieves were the only machines at the coffee works that were not rotary? They were not rotary, and they were bad. I think this put me as a boy, against all agitating devices in mechanics, and in favor of the more easily handled and more serviceable rotary movement….

This was a prejudice that would serve him well when he built flying machines as an adult.

Alberto was also the handyman around the house. His mother’s sewing machine often jammed, and she expected him to stop whatever he was doing and repair it. When arms or legs fell off his sisters’ dolls, he was the one who reattached them. When the wheels on his brothers’ bicycles started to wobble, he was the one who realigned them.

Alberto was a loner and a dreamer, preferring the company of plantation machinery to a meal with his family. The atmosphere in Alberto’s house was often tense. His mother was deeply religious and superstitious, and his father, a man of reason and science, openly mocked her beliefs at family dinners. Although Henrique was pleased by his youngest son’s fascination with technology, he did not understand why Alberto had no interest in hunting, roughhousing, and the other manly activities that his brothers liked. Alberto never joined the men on all-day horseback expeditions and picnics to the far reaches of the land.

At night he stayed up late reading. His father, who had received his engineering training in Paris at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Métiers, had stacks of books lying around the house, in French, English, and Portuguese. Alberto paged through most of them, even the technical manuals. His favorites were science fiction. He loved Jules Verne’s vision of a sky populated with flying machines and had read all his novels by the age of ten. He learned from his father’s engineering texts that the hot-air balloon had been invented in 1783, by Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, papermakers in Annonay, France, a town in the Rhône valley forty miles from Lyons. The brothers had constructed a large pear-shaped envelope, from paper or silk, with an aperture at the base so that it could be inflated with smoke from burning straw. One account said that the inspiration had come from Joseph’s aimlessly tossing the conical paper wrapping of a sugarloaf into the fireplace and then being surprised to see it rise up the chimney without igniting. Another story attributed it to his watching his wife’s camisole levitate after she hung it in front of the hearth to dry.

The fact that “millions of people” over the ages must have observed similar phenomena, one commentator noted, “and had not derived anything practical therefrom only enhances the glory of those who in such well-worn tracks did make a discovery.” The earliest suggestion of aerostation, as ballooning was called, predated the Montgolfiers by two thousand years but was probably not authentic. In Noctes Atticae (“Attic Nights”), the Roman writer Aulus Gellius described a flying dove constructed by Archytas of Tarentum, a Pythagorean mathematician in the fourth century B.C. It was a “model of a dove or pigeon formed in wood and so contrived as by a certain mechanical art and power to fly: so nicely was it balanced and put in motion by hidden and enclosed air.” Although the “hidden and enclosed air” suggested an anticipation of the hot-air balloon, it was doubtful that a hollow wooden bird would have been light enough to ascend. It was more likely that the dove’s apparent flying was a mechanical trick accomplished by invisible wires.

The physical basis of aerostation was as simple as the Montgolfiers’ solution of imprisoning hot air in a bag: The balloon floated because it weighed less than the equivalent volume of air, just as a seafaring ship floated because it weighed less than the equivalent volume of water. But the analogy between ship and balloon worked only if one accepted the idea that the atmosphere weighed something, and that was not known until Galileo’s time, when Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, demonstrated that the atmosphere had a measurable weight that decreased with elevation. Another seventeenth-century investigator, Otto von Guericke in Magdeburg, Germany, invented a vacuum pump for creating the “rarefied air” found at very high elevations. In 1670, Francesco de Lana-Terzi, an Italian Jesuit priest, conceived of a man-carrying vessel supported by four huge hollow-copper spheres devoid of air. Because the evacuated spheres would be lighter than the air they displaced, he expected the vessel to rise through the atmosphere like an air bubble ascending through water. The mathematically sophisticated priest calculated that the spheres had to be twenty-five feet in diameter and ¹/₂₂₅ of an inch in thickness. When his physicist friends warned him that spheres this thin would collapse when the air was withdrawn from them, he responded—according to engineering historian L. T. C. Rolt—“that his was only a theoretical exercise, arguing that since God had not intended man to fly, any serious practical attempt to flout His designs must be impious and fraught with peril for the human race. One suspects that the Jesuit fathers may have had a serious talk with their scientifically minded son and that he made this disclaimer because he could smell faggots burning.”

But other clerics continued the armchair exercise. In 1755, Joseph Galien, a Dominican friar and theologian at the papal university in Avignon, proposed collecting rarefied air from the upper reaches of the atmosphere and enclosing it in a mile-long vessel that would be capable of lifting fifty-four times the weight carried by Noah’s ark. Galien never explained how he planned to reach the upper atmosphere in the first place, and his supervisor at the divinity school implored him to take a long respite from clerical duties and, on his return, to restrict his speculation to theology not technology.

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 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, 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 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 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.

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