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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 When his physicist friends warned him that spheres this thin would collapse when the air was withdrawn from them, he responded—according to engineering historian L. T. C. Rolt—“that his was only a theoretical exercise, arguing that since God had not intended man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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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