Читать книгу Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight - Paul Hoffman - Страница 10

AT THE CLOSE of the nineteenth century, Santos-Dumont was the only person flying powered airships. (Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in Germany was building a mammoth, 420-foot-long semirigid airship—a fabric-covered, aluminum-strutted hull that housed fifteen separate gasbags—but it had not yet gone aloft.) Santos-Dumont’s fellow aeronauts were still ascending in spherical balloons, and not always successfully. In 1898, the London Evening News challenged balloonists to make it across the Channel from London to Paris. A man named A. Williams, after months of waiting for a favorable wind, planned to take off on November 22. When he was nearly ready, “a slight accident took place,” the paper said, “which delayed matters, and the start was postponed for an hour.” It seems that while the balloon was being inflated, it was somehow driven against iron railings and ripped. Once the tear was repaired and the inflation completed, Williams discovered that the balloon was not capable of lifting two companions, as he intended, so only one, a Mr. Darby, accompanied him. After an hour they descended into a tree and then briefly rose again.

Finally, after having traversed a distance of not one quarter of that from London to Paris (and, by the way, not in the right direction), it was found that the balloon had not sufficient power to proceed, and a descent was attempted near Lancing. Then it was found that this balloon, supposed to be replete with everything that practical aeronauts could suggest, had not a single anchor on board. The aeronaut, not wishing to be carried over the sea, then adopted the extraordinary course of swarming down the guide rope, leaving his unfortunate companion to follow. Relieved of Mr. Williams’ weight, the balloon started to rise again, and the passenger found himself in the awkward predicament of either having to jump some 50 ft. down, or be wafted out to sea. He chose the former, and though badly injured, was lucky enough to escape with his life. The balloon disappeared over the Channel, but was found some days afterward in France.

Mr. Darby was lucky. In 1899, the publication Revue Scientifique counted nearly two hundred people who had lost their lives in balloons. Usually the deaths were nasty and quick. Each monthly issue of Aeronautical Journal, a British periodical that tracked developments in flight around the world, published an accident report. In October 1899, the journal described two fatal falls:

An Italian military captive balloon broke loose in July, carrying with it not only an officer and a corporal who were in the car, but also a soldier who had held on to the rope in hopes of keeping the balloon down. Those in the car tried to draw up the unfortunate man, but after a time he let go, and was dashed to pieces on the banks of the Tiber….

At Beuzeville, in France, an aeronaut, named Bernard, made an ascent, but finding his balloon had too little lift, he dispensed with the car, and sat upon the hoop. It is supposed that the gas from the balloon issuing through the neck must have asphyxiated him, for he was seen to let go his hold and fall to the ground from a great height, being killed on the spot.

Early in his planning to power an airship with an internal combustion engine, Santos-Dumont learned that Karl Wolfert, a Protestant minister, had had the same idea. Wolfert sought out the technical advice of automotive pioneer Gottlieb Daimler. On June 12, 1897, before an audience of the kaiser’s military advisers, Wolfert was set to ascend with Michael, his mechanic, and an officer of the Prussian army. Just before liftoff, the officer was overcome by a bout of claustrophobia in the balloon basket and bowed out of the trip. In Wolfert’s eagerness to take off and impress his distinguished observers, he neglected to add ballast to compensate for the missing officer’s weight. He and his mechanic ascended to exuberant cheers and waves from the crowd, and the poorly ballasted airship climbed rapidly to three thousand feet. Without warning, the gasbag exploded, and the airship was engulfed in flames. A horrible scream was heard, and then complete silence. The stunned audience scrambled out of their seats to avoid the falling, charred wreckage. Two bodies, burnt beyond recognition, smashed the seats. They had died in just the kind of accident that Santos-Dumont’s friends had feared.

On May 12, 1902, Santos-Dumont witnessed a similar accident in Paris that claimed the life of a fellow Brazilian, Augusto Severo. Inspired by Santos-Dumont’s own efforts, Severo had built an airship called Pax. On Severo’s first free ascent, accompanied by Saché, his machinist, sparks from the engine ignited the balloon and the hydrogen exploded. The frame of the airship plunged fifteen hundred feet and struck the one-story house at No. 89, avenue du Maine, collapsing its roof into the bedroom of a man named Clichy. The bed was on the opposite side of the room from the falling debris, and Clichy and his wife were awakened to the sight of a smashed airship and two disfigured bodies crashing through the ceiling. The Herald reported, “The machinist lay near the motor, stretched out upon the willow framework, which served as the flooring. His face had been terribly burned and his hands stripped of skin. His back was broken by the shock. M. Severo, who seems to have been standing at the moment of the shock, had nearly all his bones broken. He was scarcely recognizable. The shin bones protruded through the skin, and the lower jaw was torn from the socket.” Santos-Dumont was grief-stricken, but the grisly accident only reinforced his resolve to build a safe and reliable airship.

AERONAUTS WERE not the only martyrs for science at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The pace of industrial and scientific progress was so exhilarating that men and women were willing to sacrifice their own well-being to ensure that the progress continued. Scientists had always known that there was a general risk in exploring the uncharted—it was an occupational hazard. But in fin de siècle Europe and America, the stakes were raised. As the prestigious new American journal Science announced in 1883: “Higher than all, [science] must be devoted to the truth. It must cheerfully undertake the severest labor to secure it, and must deem no sacrifice too great in order to preserve it.” Science had become the new secular religion, and its practitioners, like the aeronauts, were expected to proceed with an important experiment even if it might kill them.

Physicians at that time had few reservations about experimenting on themselves. In Who Goes First?, Lawrence Altman told the story of the French doctors who developed the rabies vaccine (and whose reputation drew Santos-Dumont’s ailing father to Paris). Transmitted by the bite or lick of an infected animal, rabies was a relatively rare disease but notorious because of its horrifying symptoms—the slow but fatal destruction of the brain and central nervous system that leaves the victim gasping for air and shaking spasmodically—and its painful treatment—“cauterization of the bite with a red-hot iron.” In 1880, Louis Pasteur, who was already revered for his “pasteurization” of milk and beer, turned his attention to the disease. Within a year he had found a method of transmitting the virus, by injecting brain material extracted from a rabid dog into a healthy canine. Soon he developed a technique for treating the brain extract so that he could adjust the virulence of the inoculation. Rabies acquired through a bite had a long incubation period. By giving a bitten dog a series of progressively stronger inoculations, the animal would develop immunity to the disease before the incubation period was over. In 1884, Pasteur reported that twenty-three immunized dogs had warded off the disease, but he was still afraid of using the live vaccine on human beings. He rebuffed the emperor of Brazil, who had pleaded with him to apply the vaccine in a country where the incidence of rabies was much greater than in Europe.

“Experimentation permitted on animals,” Pasteur said, “is criminal when it comes to man.” Rabies was a fatal disease, so the failure of the vaccine promised almost certain death. In 1885, he told three of his colleagues that he wanted to test the vaccine on himself. He took off his shirt and begged them to inject him with the live virus. They refused. They did not want to be accomplices to the possible suicide of one of France’s most beloved scientists. Instead, the three men assumed the risk themselves. When weeks passed and none of them contracted the disease, Pasteur had the confidence to inoculate victims of rabid-dog bites. By 1886, he had treated 350 people and all but one was saved from the disease.

Medical self-experimentation was not confined to France. In 1892, seventy-four-year-old Max von Pettenkofer, the German public-health advocate who had purified Munich’s drinking water, purposely swallowed a solution of cholera bacteria. He believed that the bacteria could not by itself cause the often-fatal disease, that other cofactors he identified needed to be present as well. Because he personally did not possess the cofactors, his dramatic experiment was intended to prove that cholera bacteria was not the sole causative agent. He had diarrhea for a week but never became seriously ill, confirming for himself the validity of his theory (although science would ultimately prove him wrong and attribute his mild symptoms to immunity from an earlier, accidental exposure to cholera). Pettenkofer had prepared himself for the worst. “Even if I had deceived myself,” he wrote, “and the experiment endangered my life, I would have looked Death quietly in the eye for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honor. Health and life are, as I have so often said, very great earthly goods but not the highest for man. Man, if he will rise above the animals, must sacrifice both life and health for the higher ideals.”

On November 8, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X rays in his laboratory in Würzburg. The discovery was serendipitous: Roentgen had been experimenting with a cathode-ray tube in his darkened laboratory when he noticed that metals and other materials far from the tube were emitting an eerie green fluorescence. He suspected that radiation from the tube was causing the materials to glow but it could not be the familiar, short-distance cathode rays because they would not have reached the materials. When he inadvertently passed his hand between the tube and a glowing screen, he saw the outline of his bones. He hurriedly “photographed” his wife’s hand and announced his discovery to the world. The “penetrating” radiation captured the public’s imagination. X rays were featured in advertisements, popular songs, cartoons, novels, and breathless newspaper reports.

“The x-ray mania began early and grew quickly,” social historian Nancy Knight noted:

“Hidden Solids Revealed!” trumpeted the New York Times in January 1896. The press was enchanted with the possibilities of the new rays. With the information that they rendered “Wood and Flesh More Easily Penetrated … Than Plain Glass,” many observers immediately speculated on various applications and uses. Even the most mundane experiments with the new technique were labeled miraculous. “Startling results” announced by professors at Yale turned out to be x-ray photographs of uncracked walnuts showing “a splendid view of the kernels.” Some popular magazines and journals showed x-ray photographs of feet in boots, coins in wooden boxes, and shapely women in tight lacing. One popular cartoon hinted at the possible leveling effects of the rays by revealing that beneath the superficial layer the well-to-do of the Gilded Age were the same as the common people.

Well-fed or hungry, fat or thin, everyone’s skeleton looked roughly the same. Another cartoon, called “The March of Science,” showed an eavesdropper behind a door. The caption said, “Interesting result attained, with the aid of Röntgen rays, by a first-floor lodger when photographing his sitting-room door.”

Even as the X-ray craze abated, physicians continued to be smitten with the invisible new light. Within two months of Roentgen’s discovery, the medical community knew that X rays were a powerful tool for revealing the interior of the human body. Physicians welcomed X rays because the Industrial Revolution had largely passed them by. The nineteenth century had seen great advances in the prevention of disease (through vaccines, antiseptic practices, and public-health initiatives) but before the X-ray machine there had been no exciting new technology for the diagnosis or treatment of disease.

The enthusiasm of roentgenologists did not dampen when it was established by the turn of the century that repeated exposure to X rays was injurious to their own health. To the contrary, as Rebecca Herzig observed in the article “In the Name of Science: Suffering, Sacrifice, and the Formation of American Roentgenology,” the X-ray pioneers took pride in their painful boils, cancerous lesions, and amputated limbs that were the by-products of their diagnostic work. Frederick H. Baetjer, a roentgenologist at Johns Hopkins, lost eight fingers and an eye to years of working with X rays. “Despite the suffering he has undergone in the interest of science,” the New York Times reported after the seventy-second operation to save his body, he planned to “continue his work as long as he lives, fingers or no fingers.” Elizabeth Fleischmann, famous for her X-ray images of American servicemen wounded in the Spanish-American War, was eulogized as America’s Joan of Arc after she died in 1905 of radiation-induced cancer following a series of amputations.

“The emerging field of roentgenology,” Herzig wrote, “gained definition through the spectacular deaths and mutilations of its adherents.” They wore their hideous injuries as badges of honor. “Scarred and limb-less roentgenologists came to embody the abstract cause of ‘science,’ much as stigmata render palpable the ineffable presence of divinity. At one 1920 professional gathering, historian Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles reports, so many attendees were missing at least one hand that when the chicken dinner was served, no one could cut the meat.”

WHEN SANTOS-DUMONT risked his life for aeronautical progress, he was following the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of his time, but his motives were not entirely selfless. He enjoyed being an inventor and an aeronaut but also liked being a showman, and airship trials that courted disaster made for a better performance. He believed that if his legacy was going to rival Tiradentes’, he needed to do more than perfect the powered balloon. Men and women had wept at the news of the Brazilian patriot’s gruesome death. As significant an invention as the flying machine undoubtedly was, Santos-Dumont did not expect people to cry after a successful flight unless they saw the sacrifices—his brushes with death—that he chose to endure.

In the spring of 1899, Santos-Dumont dismantled No. 1, salvaging the basket, the motor, and the propeller for an airship that he hoped would better hold its shape. No. 2 had the same length as No. 1 and the same general cylindrical form but was slightly wider, and, as a result, held 10 percent more gas, increasing its lifting power by forty-four pounds. He took advantage of the additional carrying capacity by adding a small rotary fan to supplement the weak air pump, “which,” he dryly noted, “had all but killed me.” The fan and pump did not force air directly into the belly of the balloon but rather into a separate pocket, a small inner balloon, sewn into the fabric of the outer envelope. That way the air was kept apart from the hydrogen (it is only the mixture of the two, not hydrogen itself, that is highly flammable). The expanding “balloonet” served to prop up the outer balloon envelope so that it kept its cylindrical form.

The first trial was set for May 11, 1899, on the Feast of the Ascension. In the morning, the skies were clear, and Santos-Dumont supervised No. 2’s inflation at the captive balloon station in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. “In those days,” he recalled, “I had no balloon house of my own…. As there was no shed there for me, the work had to be done in the open, and it was done vexatiously, with a hundred delays, surprises, and excuses.” By the afternoon, storm clouds blotted the sun and it had started to rain. Because he had no place to store the inflated balloon, he faced an unpalatable choice. He could empty the balloon, wasting the hydrogen and losing the money he had paid for it. Or he could attempt an ascension with an engine that was sputtering from the dampness and a rain-soaked balloon that was heavier, perhaps dangerously so, than it ought to be. He went ahead but as a measure of security tethered the airship to the ground. The drizzle turned into a downpour, and he was unable to rise above the trees before encountering a high-pressure system that compressed the hydrogen so that the balloon visibly shrank. Before the air pump and fan could inflate the balloonet, a strong gust of wind folded up No. 2 worse than No. 1 and tossed it into the trees. The balloon ripped, cords snapped, and No. 2 fell to the ground.

Santos-Dumont’s friends rushed over and, finding him in one piece, strongly admonished him. “This time you have learned your lesson,” they said. “You must understand that it is impossible to keep the shape of your cylindrical balloon rigid. You must not again risk your life by taking a petroleum motor up beneath it.”

“What has the rigidity of the balloon’s form to do with danger from a petroleum motor?” replied Santos-Dumont. “Errors do not count,” he continued. “I have learned my lesson, but it is not that lesson.” Drenched and a bit scraped up, his panama hat squashed, he was in no hurry to climb out of the dented basket. He surveyed the damage and satisfied himself that the problem was the balloon’s long, slender shape, “so seductive from certain points of view, but so dangerous from others.” No. 2, after just a brief life, would have to be retired, the motor and basket salvaged. In the morning he drew up plans for a plumper airship that would be less sensitive to changes in air pressure.

He made No. 3 in the shape of a football. “The rounder form of this balloon also made it possible to dispense with the interior air-balloon and its feeding air-pump that had twice refused to work adequately at the critical moment,” he wrote. “Should this shorter and thicker balloon need aid to keep its form rigid, I relied on the stiffening effect of a 33-foot bamboo pole fixed lengthwise to the suspension-cords above my head and directly beneath the balloon.” Sixty-six feet long by twenty-five-feet wide, No. 3 had a gas capacity of 17,650 cubic feet, nearly three times that of No. 2. When filled with hydrogen, his third airship also had three times the lifting power of his second airship and twice that of the first. The lifting power was more than required, and so he was able to substitute ordinary lamp gas, which was cheap and obtainable everywhere, for the scarce and expensive hydrogen. Although illuminating gas had only half the lifting power of hydrogen, No. 3 could still carry aloft 50 percent more weight than the hydrogen-filled No. 2. In fact No. 3 could transport a motor, the basket, and the rigging, as well as the aeronaut, with 231 pounds to spare for emergency ballast and a full lunch.

Santos-Dumont scheduled No. 3’s first flight for the thirteenth of November, over the protest of skittish members of the newly formed Paris Aéro Club who urged him not to fly on an unlucky day. (France was notorious in its dread of the number thirteen; a quatorzième, or professional fourteenth guest, could be hired on the spur of the moment to round out an otherwise ill-fated dinner party.) And November 13, 1899, was not just any unlucky day—it was the day on which centennial alarmists had predicted the world would end. Santos-Dumont enjoyed mocking the superstitions of others. He once rounded off the pay of a triskaidekaphobic housekeeper to a multiple of thirteen and gave her a necklace with thirteen beads. But he had his own peculiar beliefs. “He only entered a place with his right foot first,” recalled Antoinette Gastambide, whose father manufactured one of his engines. “He told me that whenever he flew he would wrap a female stocking around his neck,” hidden under his shirt so that no one knew. “It was the stocking of Madame Letellier, one of the most famous women in Europe, who had had a lot of luck in her life.” Before he ascended, he would also never say good-bye for fear that it would be his last farewell. He could not sleep unless his hat was next to him. As for numbers, he went out of his way to avoid the number fifty, refusing to carry fifty-franc notes or fifty thousand reis bills in his wallet, and later in life—after a scary crash on the eighth of the month—he shunned the number eight. His friends surmised that his preference for flying on “unlucky” days was his way of thumbing his nose at the obvious dangers of aerostation. In general, he preferred to ascend on days of historic importance such as the Fourth of July, Brazil’s Independence Day (September 7), or the Feast of the Ascension.

On November 13, 1899, the weather was unremarkable—a cool, crisp day with no signs of precipitation—and the world showed no sign of coming to an end. Santos-Dumont spent the morning inspecting the airship, testing the motor, and checking the all-important exhaust valve. By early afternoon, his workmen had filled the balloon with lamp gas and he was ready to take off from the Parc d’Aérostation in Vaugirard. His friend Antônio Prado asked him whether he was afraid to go up after the two close calls in his previous airships. Santos-Dumont confessed that he was nervous. Prado wanted to know how he faced the fear. “I grow pale,” he said, “and try to gain control over myself by thinking of other things. If I do not succeed, I feign courage before those watching me, and face the danger. But even so I am still afraid.”

At 3:30 P.M. Santos-Dumont set off on his most successful flight to date. As soon as he was in the air, he headed for the Eiffel Tower. “Around that wonderful landmark for twenty minutes, I had the immense satisfaction of describing circles, figure eights, and whatever other maneuvers it pleased me to undertake, and in all directions, diagonally up and down as well as laterally,” he recalled. “I had at last realized my fullest expectations. Very faithfully the airship obeyed the impulse of propeller and steering-rudder.” From the Eiffel Tower he made a straight course to the Bois. He did not want to return to Vaugirard because the balloon shed there was surrounded by houses, which meant that there would be little room for error when landing, and the wind that had picked up would make the descent even riskier. “Landing in Paris, in general, is dangerous for any kind of balloon,” he said, “amid chimney pots that threaten to pierce its belly and tiles that are always ready to be knocked down on the heads of passersby.” So he chose to touch down in the Bois, this time in the most controlled way “at the exact spot where the kite-flying boys had pulled on my guide rope and saved me from a bad shaking up.”

Santos-Dumont inspected No. 3 and was pleased that it had not lost any gas whatsoever. “I could well have housed it overnight,” he recalled, if he had had a place to shelter it, “and gone out again in it the next day! I had no longer the slightest doubt of the success of my invention.”

That night at Maxim’s he boasted about his achievement. Having made one controlled descent, the rooftops no longer seemed so threatening, and he wagered good money that he could land No. 3 at any specified place in the city. To tweak the members of the Automobile Club, he bragged that he was going to descend in a dirigible on the roof garden of their clubhouse in the place de la Concorde. He told everyone in the restaurant that he was “going into air-ship construction as a sort of life-work.”

He contacted the Paris Aéro Club, which had purchased land in Saint-Cloud, just west of the Bois, and persuaded the club to let him build a giant aerodrome, a balloon hangar, at his own expense, complete with a hydrogen-generating plant and a state-of-the-art workshop. He wanted the hundred-foot-long aerodrome to have thirty-six-foot-high doors so that an inflated airship could easily be moved in and out. But again he encountered resistance to his plans. “Even here,” said Santos-Dumont, “I had to contend with the conceit and prejudice of the Parisian artisans, who had already given me such trouble at the Jardin d’Acclimatation.” They declared that the sliding doors would be too big to open properly. “Follow my directions,” he replied, “and do not concern yourself with their practicability. I will answer for the sliding.” They were still reluctant. “Although the men had named their own pay,” he said, “it was a long time before I could get the better of this vainglorious stubbornness of theirs. When finished, the doors worked—naturally.” (Three years later the Prince of Monaco would build him an even bigger aerodrome, and the fifty-foot-high doors that Santos-Dumont requested would have the distinction of being the tallest working doors in the world.)

While the Saint-Cloud aerodrome was under construction, Santos-Dumont continued to fly No. 3, which did not require the elaborate preparations that its predecessors did. “To fill five hundred cubic mètres with hydrogen takes all day, whereas with the ordinary burning gas it takes only an hour,” he told the New York Herald. “Think how much time is saved! I have only to look out my window and see what are the weather indications, and if they prove favorable I am in my balloon an hour afterward.” Because he no longer ascended in bad weather, and the airship was demonstrably more stable than its predecessors, the flights were by and large uneventful, until the final one, when the rudder fell off and he had to make an unplanned descent. Luckily there was an open space, the plain at Ivry, below him. He made dozens of trips in No. 3, and set a record for the longest time aloft, twenty-three hours.

He would have designed a new rudder for No. 3 if it were not for a challenge laid down at a meeting of the Paris Aéro Club in April 1900. To stimulate aerostation in the new century, Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe, a petroleum magnate and founding member of the club, announced that he was offering a hundred thousand francs (twenty thousand dollars) to the first airship that “between May 1 and October 1, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, or 1904 should rise from the Parc d’Aérostation of the Aéro Club at St. Cloud and, without touching ground, and by its own self-contained means on board alone, describe a closed curve in such a way that the axis of the Eiffel Tower should be within the interior of the circuit, and return to the point of departure in the maximum time of half an hour. Should more than one accomplish the task in the same year, the one hundred thousand francs were to be divided in proportion to their respective times.” Deutsch added that if the prize was not claimed in any given year, he would, as a gesture of encouragement, award the interest on the hundred thousand francs to the aeronaut who had accomplished the most in the previous twelve months. Santos-Dumont, who had attended the Aéro Club meeting, told his friends that Deutsch would not have to part with the interest. He planned to come away with the prize, and the attendant glory, before the year was out.

The Eiffel Tower was three and a half miles from Saint-Cloud, and so an airship would have to travel fourteen miles an hour to make the round-trip in thirty minutes (actually the necessary speed was probably closer to fifteen and a half miles per hour if one considers the time lost in turning around the tower). No. 3