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

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William Collins

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Copyright © Paul Hoffman 2003

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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.