Читать книгу Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight - Paul Hoffman - Страница 9

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

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

“And the damages?” Santos-Dumont asked.

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

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

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

They climbed much higher. A cloud passed in front of the sun, cooling the gas in the balloon, which started to wrinkle and descend, gently at first and then rapidly. “I was frightened,” said Santos-Dumont. “I did not feel myself falling, but I could see the earth coming swiftly up to us; and I knew what that meant!” The two men jettisoned ballast until they stabilized the balloon at an elevation of ten thousand feet. Santos-Dumont had discovered “the second great fact of spherical ballooning—we are masters of our altitude by the possession of a few kilos of sand!” They were now floating above a layer of clouds. “The sun cast the shadow of the balloon on this screen of dazzling whiteness,” he recalled, “while our own profiles, magnified to giant size, appeared in the middle of a triple rainbow! As we could no longer see the earth, all sensation of movement ceased. We might be going at storm speed and not know it. We could not even know the direction we were taking, save by descending below the clouds to regain our bearings!”

They knew they had been up in the air an hour when they heard the peal of church bells, the midday Angelus. Santos-Dumont, for whom every meal was a special occasion, declared that it was time for lunch. Machuron raised his eyebrows—he had not planned to descend so soon. But Santos-Dumont had no intention of returning either. With a mischievous look, he opened his valise and produced a sumptuous spread of hard-boiled eggs, roast beef, chicken, assorted cheeses, fruit, melting ice cream, and cake. To Machuron’s delight, he also uncorked a bottle of champagne, which they thought was particularly effervescent due to the reduced air pressure at the high elevation. Santos-Dumont pulled out two crystal glasses. As he offered a toast to his host, he explained that he had never before eaten in such a splendid setting. The heat of the sun boiled the clouds, “making them throw up rainbow jets of frozen vapor like giant sheaves of fireworks…. Lovely white spangles of the most delicate ice formation scatter here and there by magic, while flakes of snow form moment by moment out of nothingness, beneath our very eyes, and in our very drinking glasses!” No dining experience was complete for Santos-Dumont without an after-dinner liqueur and fine Brazilian coffee, which he carried in a thermos.

While the two aeronauts sipped Chartreuse, the very snow that was entertaining them was quietly building up on top of the balloon. At least Machuron was sober enough to keep checking the instruments. At one point the barometer shot up five millimeters, signaling that the balloon, weighted down by the precipitation, must be falling rapidly even though they could not feel any movement. Suddenly they were plunged into half-darkness as the balloon passed through a cloud. They could still make out the basket, the instruments, and the parts of the rigging that were nearest to them, but the balloon itself was invisible. “So we had for a moment the strange and delightful sensation of hanging in the void without support,” wrote Santos-Dumont, “of having lost our last ounce of weight in a limbo of nothingness.” They furiously threw out ballast. After a few minutes they emerged from the dark fog to find themselves only one thousand feet above a village—the balloon had plunged nine thousand feet. The two men took their bearings with a compass and compared the landmarks they saw with those on a map. “Soon we could identify roads, railways, villages, and forests,” Santos-Dumont said, “all hastening toward us from the horizon with the swiftness of the wind itself!” The wind was also gusting unpredictably, tossing the balloon from side to side and bouncing it up and down, making a soup of what remained of the roast beef and ice cream.

If this maiden voyage had taught Santos-Dumont the value of ballast in maintaining a balloon’s equilibrium, it also taught him the value of the guide rope for a smooth landing and takeoff. The thick guide rope, extending three hundred feet and dangling from the basket, served as an automatic brake whenever the balloon returned to earth with disquieting speed for whatever reason. And the reasons could be many: a downward stroke of wind, the accidental loss of gas, the accumulation of snow on the balloon envelope, or a cloud passing in front of the sun. When the balloon descended below three hundred feet, more and more of the guide rope came to rest on the ground, thereby lightening the weight of the craft and arresting its fall. Under the opposite condition, when the balloon was ascending too rapidly, the lifting of the guide rope off the ground increased the weight of the balloon, thereby slowing its rise.

The guide rope, though ingeniously simple and effective, also had its “inconveniences,” as Santos-Dumont charitably put it. “Its rubbing along the uneven surfaces of the ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, roads and houses, hedges and telegraph wires—gives violent shocks to the balloon,” he wrote later. “Or it may happen that the guide rope, rapidly unraveling the snarl in which it has twisted itself, catches hold of some asperity of the surface, or winds itself around the trunk or branches of a tree.” He was writing from experience. As Machuron prepared to land, the guide rope coiled itself around a large oak, bringing the balloon to an abrupt halt, throwing the two aeronauts backward in the basket. For a quarter of an hour, the captured balloon, battered by the wind, kept them “shaking like a salad basket.”

Machuron used the occasion to dissuade Santos-Dumont from constructing a powered balloon. “Observe the treachery and vindictiveness of the wind!” he shouted. “We are tied to the tree, yet see what force it tries to jerk us loose!” At that moment Santos-Dumont was thrown again into the bottom of the basket. “What screw propeller could hold a course against it?” Machuron continued. “What elongated balloon would not double up and take you flying to destruction?”

They eventually managed to free themselves from the oak by throwing out most of the remaining ballast. But the adventure was not over. “The lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward,” recalled Santos-Dumont, “and pierced the clouds like a cannonball. Indeed, it threatened to reach dangerous heights, considering the little ballast we had remaining in store for use in descending.” The experienced Machuron had one last trick: He opened the balloon’s valve to let gas escape and the balloon began to descend again toward an open field, the guide rope behaving itself this time as it came in contact with the ground. The field would normally have been an ideal landing spot, but a strong crosswind promised a harsh touchdown in so open an area. Fortune smiled on Santos-Dumont, though, and as the balloon fell, after nearly two hours aloft, it drifted toward the edge of the field.

“The Forest of Fontainebleau was hurrying toward us,” Santos-Dumont recalled. “In a few moments we had turned the extremity of the wood, sacrificing our last handful of ballast. The trees now protected us from the violence of the wind; and we cast anchor, at the same time opening wide the emergency valve for the wholesale escape of gas.” They landed smoothly, without any damage, climbed out of the basket, and watched the balloon expire. “Stretched out in the field, it was losing the remains of its gas in convulsive agitations,” Santos-Dumont said, “like a great bird that dies beating its wings.” And they could not have found a better deathbed, the well-manicured grounds of the Château de la Ferrière, owned by Alphonse de Rothschild, the seventy-year-old head of the Bank of France, the man responsible for the wealth of his famous family. Servants and laborers helped the two aeronauts fold up the collapsed balloon; stuff it, the rigging, and the lunch-table settings into the basket; and transport all 440 pounds to the nearest railway station two and a half miles away. On the sixty-mile train trip back to Paris, Santos-Dumont told Machuron that aeronautics was his calling. The balloon maker promised to build him his own pear-shaped balloon. Santos-Dumont’s only disappointment was that he would have to put on hold his dream of a steerable airship. The two men and their balloon were back in Paris by 6:00 P.M. Santos-Dumont pronounced the day a success and started thinking about what he was going to have for dinner.

Machuron and Lachambre never had such an eager client nor a more contrary one. He was back in their workshop the next day placing an order for his first balloon, called Brazil. The misunderstandings began at once. Machuron assumed that he wanted an ordinary-size balloon that could hold between 17,000 and 70,000 cubic feet of gas. But Santos-Dumont had in mind a gasbag four times smaller than had ever been flown before, a balloon so compact, twenty feet in diameter, that when its 4,000 cubic feet of gas was released he could carry it around town in his handbag. Machuron refused to accept the order. He spent the afternoon trying to convince Santos-Dumont that Brazil would never fly.

“How often have things been proved to me impossible!” Santos-Dumont wrote later. “Now I am used to it, I expect it. But in those days it troubled me. Still I persevered.”

Machuron and Lachambre insisted that for stability a balloon had to have a certain minimum weight. The aeronaut needed the freedom to move around in the basket without fear that his actions would cause the balloon to rock or swing uncontrollably. With a small balloon, they said, that freedom would be impossible. Not so, Santos-Dumont argued. If the suspension tackle that connected the basket to the balloon were made proportionately longer, the center of gravity of even a lightweight system would not shift appreciably when the aeronaut moved about. He drew two diagrams to illustrate. The veteran balloon makers conceded that he had a point and made plans to construct Brazil from the usual materials.

Santos-Dumont had a problem with this too. The customary materials were too heavy, he said. He wanted to make the balloon out of light Japanese silk, and he brought Machuron a sample. “It will be too weak,” Machuron said. “It will not be able to withstand the enormous pressure of the gas.” Santos-Dumont wanted proof, so Machuron measured the strength of the silk with a dynamometer. The result surprised both of them. The silk was thirty times stronger than it needed to be. Although a square meter of silk weighed only a little more than an ounce, it could withstand a strain of more than 2,200 pounds.

By the time Santos-Dumont left the workshop, Machuron and Lachambre were shaking their heads. He had managed to persuade them to change every material that they ordinarily used. The silk envelope of the balloon would weigh less than four pounds. Three coats of varnish, to keep gas from seeping through, would bring the weight to thirty-one pounds. The netting that covered the balloon would be four pounds instead of hundreds of pounds, and the basket would weigh only thirteen pounds, five times lighter than usual.

Because Machuron and Lachambre had several orders to fulfill before they could start on Brazil, Santos-Dumont would have to wait a few months before he could see whether his lightweight balloon was flight-worthy. The two balloon builders were also booked for public ascents at fairs, festivals, and weddings throughout France and Belgium. Santos-Dumont preferred that Machuron and Lachambre remain in the workshop building Brazil, and so they agreed that he could ascend in their place after two training flights with Machuron. “As I got the pleasure and the experience, and paid all my expenses and damages, it was a mutually advantageous arrangement,” said Santos-Dumont. All and all, he made more than two dozen flights before Brazil was completed.

On a stormy afternoon in March 1898, he filled in for Lachambre at a fair in Péronne, in the north of France. Thunder was rumbling in the distance, and some of the onlookers who knew that he was inexperienced urged him not to ascend at all or certainly not without a copilot. The expressions of concern made him more determined to go up in the balloon by himself.

“I would listen to nothing,” he recalled. He went up late in the afternoon, as he had originally planned. “Soon I had cause to regret my rashness,” he said. “I was alone, lost in the clouds, amid flashes of lightning and claps of thunder, in the rapidly approaching darkness of the night. On, on I went tearing in the blackness. I knew I must be going with great speed, yet felt no motion. I heard and felt the storm…. I felt myself in great danger, yet the danger was not tangible.” He stayed up all night, waiting for the storm to break. The longer he waited, with no discernible damage to the balloon, the less fearful he was. “There was a fierce kind of joy,” he said. “Up there in the black solitude, amid the lightning flashes and the thunderclaps, I was a part of the storm.”

Once the bad weather passed, the joyous thrill of night ballooning turned to bliss. “In the black void,” he said,

one seems to float without weight, without a surrounding world, a soul freed from the weight of matter! Yet, now and again there are the lights of earth to cheer one. You see a point of light far on ahead. Slowly it expands. Then where there was one blaze, there are countless bright spots. They run in lines, with here and there a brighter cluster. You know that it is a city…. And when the dawn comes, red and gold and purple in its glory, one is almost loath to seek the earth again, although the novelty of landing in who knows what part of Europe affords still another unique pleasure…. There is the true explorer’s zest of coming on unknown peoples like a god from a machine. “What country is this?” Will the answer come in German, Russian, or Norwegian?

On this occasion the answer came in Flemish, because Santos-Dumont had landed far inside Belgium.

As soon as he returned to Paris, he urged his young male friends whose lust for adventure had been snuffed by the demands of family and business to take up ballooning. “At noon you lunch peacefully amid your family,” he said. “At 2:00 P.M. you mount. Ten minutes later you are no longer a commonplace citizen—you are an explorer, an adventurer of the unknown as truly as those who freeze on Greenland’s icy mountains or melt on India’s coral strands.” And the adventure did not always end with the landing. Other aeronauts, he told his friends, had been shot at when they descended in foreign countries. Some had been taken prisoner “to languish as spies while the telegraph clicked to the far-off capital, and then to end the evening over champagne at an officer’s enthusiastic mess. Still others have had to strive with the dangerous ignorance, and superstition even, of some remote little peasant population. These are the chances of the winds!”

Santos-Dumont chose to make his first ascent in Brazil on July 4, 1898, at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the zoological gardens in the Bois de Boulogne. The Bois was a huge wooded park, with two and a half times the acreage of New York City’s Central Park. Earlier in the century it had been the stalking ground of thieves and ruffians. Napoleon III asked Baron Haussmann to redesign the Bois along the lines of London’s Hyde Park. He turned some of the woods into open fields and added policemen, bungalows, pavilions, landscaping, and roads wide enough for horse-drawn carriages to make a U-turn. By Santos-Dumont’s day, the Bois was the playground of the rich, with its neat polo grounds and the Longchamp horse-racing track.

The Jardin d’Acclimatation at the north end of the Bois opened in 1856. It was originally conceived as a scientific research center where animals of interest to French breeders would be acclimatized. Among the first inhabitants were yaks from Tibet, porcupines from Java, water pigs from South America, zebus from India, and zebras, kangaroos, cheetahs, llamas, ostriches, and armadillos. There were also Spanish mastiffs, Siberian greyhounds, and other dog breeds. Santos-Dumont’s new friend Alphonse de Rothschild was a director of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, but the operation proved too expensive to run as a scientific venture and so by 1865 it was turned into a tourist destination with the introduction of crowd-pleasing zoo animals such as bears, elephants, hippopotamuses, and dromedaries. Children could ride a train towed by a zebra or watch a car pulled by llamas that had a monkey as a coachman. But the zoo’s directors were not content with showing animals. In the interest of drawing even more spectators, they decided to present living people too, “from the four corners of the world.” American Indians, Eskimos, Nubians, Hindus, and Kurds were exhibited, complete with labels and maps of their range, as if they were exotic apes. On Sunday fashionably dressed women and their escorts strolled through the zoological gardens and gawked at the natives on display.

Santos-Dumont could have ascended from a more secluded spot, but he had confidence in Brazil and wanted to show it off to the many curiosity seekers in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Because Lachambre had built a hydrogen plant there, it was also a convenient place. The little balloon with disproportionately long rigging proved equal to the challenge. Santos-Dumont showed unusual restraint in leaving behind his substantial lunch basket so that Brazil could hold the maximum amount of ballast, sixty-six pounds of sand. Although Brazil contained only one-seventh the hydrogen gas of a typical balloon, it easily carried him and the ballast aloft. As Machuron and Lachambre anxiously watched from the ground, he demonstrated Brazil’s stability by making a big show of moving around in the basket. Relieved, the two men helped themselves to a bottle of champagne that he had left behind. After the smooth descent, Santos-Dumont pulled the rip cord, waited a short while for the balloon to deflate, and packed the whole thing into his valise.

The flawless flight gave him confidence. If the veteran aeronauts had misjudged the stability of Brazil and underestimated the strength of Japanese silk, could they not also be wrong about the difficulties of building a steerable balloon? How could they be so sure that a propeller-driven airship would collapse in a strong wind? What if he changed the shape of the balloon from a near sphere to an elongated cylinder? Instead of being bandied about by the wind, would it not “cut the air”?

What eluded him at first was the power source. The petroleum engine was an unlikely candidate because it was unreliable as well as deafening and foul-smelling—characteristics that would detract from the tranquillity of ballooning. Petroleum engines in automobiles seemed to have minds of their own, slowing down and speeding up and conking out at will, which was bad enough if you had a road under you but unacceptable in the air.

Santos-Dumont had acquired half a dozen automobiles since his Peugeot roadster. Although he was not satisfied with their performance, he enjoyed taking the sputtering vehicles for a spin. His notion of an autumn holiday was driving a six-horsepower Panhard six hundred miles from Paris to Nice; he made it in fifty-four hours, stopping often to make minor repairs and tweak the engine but not to sleep. He never made a long road trip again, however, because he could not stand to be away from his balloons.

Eventually he had even stopped using his cars for everyday driving. “I was once enamored of petroleum automobiles because of their freedom,” he told a journalist some years later. “You can buy the essence everywhere: and so, at a moment’s notice, one is at liberty to start off for Rome or St. Petersburg. But when I discovered that I did not want to go to Rome or St. Petersburg, but only to take short trips about Paris, I went in for the electric buggy,” of a kind seldom seen in France.

In 1898, he imported a light electric vehicle from Chicago and “never had cause to regret the purchase.” Every day he went for a morning spin through the gardens of the Bois and on afternoon errands to the balloon makers’ workshop in Vaugirard and the Automobile Club in the place de la Concorde. The electric motor, aside from its reliability, had other advantages over the petroleum engine: It was quiet and odorless. But it was not suitable for air travel because, with its required batteries, it was much too heavy, and modifying it seemed unlikely. He knew that the French government in supporting Renard and Krebs’s efforts in the 1880s “had spent millions of francs on air-ships with electric motors whose plan had finally been abandoned chiefly because of the motor’s weight.”

One day, as he rode around Paris on a motorized De Dion tricycle, it occurred to him that he may have prematurely dismissed the petroleum motor. The single-cylinder tricycle engine, he realized, “happened to be very much perfected at the moment,” compared with the troublesome higher-powered petroleum engines in four-wheeled automobiles. Pound for pound the 1.75-horsepower motor in his De Dion was relatively powerful, although not strong enough to guide an airship. To increase the power, he planned to combine two of them. Usually he was cocky about his inventions, but this time he was not confident enough to experiment in public.

“I looked for the workshop of some little mechanic … in the central quarter of Paris,” recalled Santos-Dumont. “There I could have my plans executed under my own eyes and apply my own hands to the work. I found such a workshop in the Rue du Colisée. There I worked out a tandem of two cylinders of a petroleum motor, that is, their prolongation, one after the other, to work the same connecting rod, while fed by a single carburetor. To bring everything down to the minimum of weight, I cut out from each part what was not strictly necessary to solidity. In this way I realized something which was remarkable at the time—a 3½ horse-power motor weighing only sixty-six pounds.”

He was pleased with his handiwork and set out to test the reconstructed engine in his tricycle. The Paris – Amsterdam automobile race was approaching, and he could not think of a better way to put the engine through its paces than to enter the competition. He was disappointed to learn that his souped-up vehicle did not meet the eligibility requirements but made the best of the situation by driving the tricycle alongside the race until he convinced himself that he could keep pace with the leaders. “I might have had one of the first places at the finish (the average speed was only 40 kilometers, or 25 miles per hour),” wrote Santos-Dumont, “had I not begun to fear that the jarring of my motor in so long and strenuous an effort might at last derange it and delay the more important work on my air-ship. I, therefore, fell out of the race while still at the head of the procession.”

The shaking of the motor reminded him of how the machines on the coffee plantation had fallen apart from their own vibrations. To ensure that his balloon engine would not have a similar fate, he drove his tricycle to the Bois in the middle of the night when the park was abandoned. He had hired two burly workmen to meet him there with heavy-duty ropes and paid them generously so that they would tell no one about the nocturnal experiments. He selected an ample tree with a thick branch just above his head. The workmen tossed the ropes over the branch and tied them securely to both ends of the tricycle. He mounted the vehicle and gave the order to hoist him five feet into the air. With the engine going full throttle, he sat there feeling the vibrations; they were noticeable but were much less than they were on the ground, where the engine had something to vibrate against. He pronounced the test a success, swore the workmen to secrecy once more, and sneaked out of the park before he could be arrested for violating the curfew.

When dawn broke, he told friends about his plan. “From the beginning everybody was against the idea,” he recalled. “I was told that an explosive gas engine would ignite the hydrogen in the balloon above it, and that the resulting explosion would end the experiment with my life.” He reminded his doubters that half a century earlier Henri Giffard had gone up in a hydrogen balloon powered by a fiery steam engine and although the flight was only a qualified success (because the engine was not powerful enough to work against the wind), Giffard made it down unscathed. The tricycle engine, Santos-Dumont insisted, would spit far fewer sparks and less smoke.

He wrote down his plans for a cigar-shaped airship and returned to the balloon makers in Vaugirard. When he tried to place an order for the balloon, Lachambre at first refused to take it, Santos-Dumont recalled, “saying that such a thing had never been made, and that he would not be responsible for my rashness.” Santos-Dumont reminded him that he had voiced similar doubts before building Brazil. He also promised to indemnify Lachambre against any explosion or damages and agreed to work on the engine himself far away from the workshop. Worn down by Santos-Dumont’s persistence, Lachambre “went to work without enthusiasm.”

Santos-Dumont’s guiding principle in designing the dirigible, which he called Santos-Dumont No. 1 in anticipation of building a series of airships, was to make it the smallest elongated balloon that could carry aloft the reconfigured engine, a propeller, a rudder, the balloon basket, the rigging, a minimum of ballast, the guide rope, and of course his own weight, which fluctuated between a hundred and a hundred ten pounds depending on how well he had been eating. The sketch he gave Lachambre called for “a cylinder terminating at each end by a cone.” It would be 82.5 feet long by 11.5 feet in diameter, with a gas capacity of 6,454 cubic feet, which would give it a lifting power of 450 pounds. Knowing the weight of everything the balloon would have to take aloft, Santos-Dumont computed that only sixty-six pounds remained for the balloon material, the varnish, and the chemise (the outer cover, or netting, by which the balloon was attached to the basket). The use of Japanese silk, which had proved so staunch in Brazil, would not by itself keep the weight within sixty-six pounds. He needed another innovation. First he considered alternatives to the varnish, but he could not find a lighter liquid that would sufficiently seal the silk. Then he focused on the chemise, and ended up doing away with it entirely. The rigging lines from the basket would now be attached directly to the balloon envelope, the lines joined to long wooden rods housed in horizontal hems stitched into the balloon fabric. Santos-Dumont was proud of this simple idea, and instructed a reluctant Lachambre to sew the balloon accordingly. The veteran balloon maker was worried that the stitches might rip, releasing the basket for a fatal free-fall. As with the engine, Santos-Dumont absolved him of all responsibility.

While Lachambre went to work, Santos-Dumont busied himself in the rue du Colisée workshop getting the motor ready. He switched the motor from his tricycle to the rear of the balloon basket and attached an aluminum propeller directly to the motor shaft. By suspending the basket, the motor, and the 6.6-foot propeller from the rafters of the workshop, he got an idea of how the machinery would perform in the air. With the motor full throttle, the basket shot violently forward. Pulling the basket back with a horizontal rope attached to a dynamometer, Santos-Dumont measured the traction power of the propeller to be as high as twenty-five pounds, “promising good speed for a cylindrical balloon of my dimensions, whose length was equal to seven times its diameter.” He repeated the trials daily to be sure of the results. If all went well, he concluded, the airship would cruise along at eighteen miles an hour.

Having introduced the propeller (and a rudder made from silk stretched over a triangular steel frame) to wrest control of the balloon’s horizontal motion from the vagaries of the wind, he turned his attention to the question of vertical equilibrium, which was uneasily maintained in spherical balloons by the jettisoning of ballast or the venting of gas. “Suppose you are in equilibrium at five hundred meters height,” he wrote.

All at once a little cloud, almost imperceptible, masks the sun for a few seconds. The temperature of the gas in your balloon cools down a little; and if, at the very moment, you do not throw out enough ballast to correspond to the ascensional force lost by the condensation of the gas, you will begin descending. Imagine that you have thrown out the ballast—just enough, for if you throw too much, you will become too light and go too high. The little cloud ceases to mask the sun. Your gas heats up again to its first temperature and regains its old lifting-power. But, having less to lift by the amount of ballast thrown out, it now shoots higher into the air, and the gas in the balloon dilates still more, and either escapes through the safety-valve or has to be deliberately sacrificed, and the trouble recommences. These montagnes-russes, or shoot-the-chutes, vagaries of spherical ballooning must be avoided to the utmost with my air-ship.

It occurred to Santos-Dumont that his new propeller might give him control of his elevation if he could figure out how to tilt the airship, raising or lowering its nose, so that the motor would drive the balloon’s ascent or descent. Once again his solution was simple: a system of movable weights by which the center of gravity of the airship could easily be shifted. The weights were merely two bags of ballast, one fore and one aft, suspended from the balloon envelope by long, heavy cords. Extending from each weight to the basket was a lighter cord, by which the weight could be pulled into the basket, shifting the center of gravity of the whole system. If the front weight was drawn in, the nose of the airship would point up, and if the aft weight was pulled in, the nose would point down. Other than the two-hundred-foot guide rope, which would be useful during takeoff and landing, No. 1 would not require additional ballast. Santos-Dumont hoped that he had minimized the ballast enough to have weight to spare for an ample lunch basket. He was ready to fly No. 1 as soon as Lachambre applied the varnish.

On September 18, 1898, three and a half months after his first ascent in Brazil, Santos-Dumont put No. 1 to the test. By then, he had floated over Paris more than a hundred times in spherical balloons, and his reputation as a courageous and ingenious balloonist was known throughout the city. No other Parisian aeronaut was flying for his own pleasure; the others were paid professionals, and they ascended mostly in rural areas. He had already earned the nickname Petite Santos. It was meant affectionately but it bothered him. He had gone to great lengths—dark, vertically striped suits, lifts in his shoes, a panama hat—to boost his short stature. He had even designed custom-made high collars for his dress shirts to make his neck appear longer. He drew the knot in the tie excessively tight so as not to accentuate his small size, preserving the tightness by piercing the knot with a pearl or jeweled pin. His suit jacket and turned-up trousers were always crisply pressed. He was the most impeccably dressed aeronaut the world would ever know.

People turned out at his ascensions as much to see him as to watch him fly. The accessories to his wardrobe were decidedly feminine and piqued the interest of spectators and journalists alike, who could not reconcile them with his manly risk-taking in novel airships. One foreign correspondent described him this way:

Santos, as he prefers to be called, is a little, thin, swarthy chap of 5 feet and maybe 4 or 5 inches. His face would be effeminate were it not for the thick, though closely cropped, mustache, which shades his upper lip, and lends strength to his whole face. His chin shows, however, whence he gets the dogged sticktoitiveness and the wonderful grit which has enabled him to keep on working until at last he has reached his present eminence. The lower jawbone is long and angular, and when he closes it the protrusion of the muscles denoting determination is very pronounced. The roof of his mouth is inclined to protrude also, and his lips are a trifle thicker than the average. He is not a handsome man. His teeth are, however, beautifully white and regular, and his smile is charming. It spreads all over his face, beginning with his eyes, and as it steals over his features it softens and lightens them delightfully…. It is his voice, too, which is low and strangely gentle, which somehow conveys the idea of effeminacy which one cannot help but feel no matter how often one is reminded of his daring feats of courage. This effect is added to by a gold bracelet which Santos wears on his wrist, although his sleeve hides it, except occasionally, when some gesture of the arm shows it for a moment. This is rare, however, for Santos thinks much more than he talks, and talks much more than he gestures.

Fellow aeronauts and members of the Automobile Club turned out early at the Jardin d’Acclimatation on September 18 to watch him prepare No. 1. The zoological gardens were home now to one of Lachambre’s large tethered balloons. Lachambre sold hydrogen to him at the favorable rate of one franc per cubic meter, the gas for No. 1 costing $1,270. As Santos-Dumont inflated the airship, the assembled aeronauts spoke nervously among themselves. Finally one of them shared their concern about the potentially lethal combination of a fire-spitting motor and a highly flammable gas: “If you want to commit suicide, why not sit on a cask of gunpowder with a lighted cigar in your mouth?”

Santos-Dumont laughed and assured the onlookers that he most decidedly wanted to live, if only to witness the future of flying machines. He pointed to the exhaust pipe on the engine. He proudly showed them how he had bent the pipe with his own hands so that any sparks were directed away from the balloon. Besides, he said, he was so familiar with the tricycle engine that he could tell by subtle changes in its sound if it was starting to burn uncontrollably, in which case he would just shut it off.

The issue of the motor was abandoned, however, when the bystanders saw him doing something that looked far more perilous: He was preparing to start his ascension at the downwind end of the open turf, next to the woods. Although the airship was facing upwind, many assumed that the motor would not be a match for the wind and that he would be swept backward a few feet into the nearby trees. Santos-Dumont was convinced that his motor was more powerful than the wind. He planned to adjust it until the force of the propeller exactly canceled out the wind, so that the balloon would rise straight up. The other aeronauts pleaded with him not to make such a risky takeoff on the first flight. Why not adopt the time-honored approach in spherical ballooning of starting the ascent at the upwind end of the open space? That way the balloon, pushed by the wind as it climbed, would have the entire expanse to cross before reaching the woods. Santos-Dumont gave in to the crowd and moved No. 1 to the other end of the field. It was the wrong approach.

He aimed the airship downwind across the open field and, with the engine idling, climbed into the basket. Then he shouted, “Let go all!” Machurin and Albert Chapin, Santos-Dumont’s chief mechanic, released the mooring ropes and the Brazilian throttled up the engine. No. 1 raced forward, propelled by the wind and motor working together, and in a matter of seconds traversed the field and smashed into the trees on the other side. “I had not time to rise above them,” Santos-Dumont recalled, “so powerful was the impulse given by my motor.” The airship fell to the ground—fortunately the descent was cushioned by the scraping of the basket along the branches—and he emerged with no injuries except to his pride. He berated his fellow aeronauts for talking him out of his plan. Never again, he said, would he have the “weakness to yield.” But the episode had its dividends. “This accident,” he said, “at least served to show the effectiveness of the petroleum motor in the air to those who doubted it before.”

In two days he repaired the airship and returned to the Jardin d’Acclimatation for a second attempt. The crowd was larger this time, drawing strangers who were torn between fear and excitement that they might witness another crash. There was a stiff breeze, and this time Santos-Dumont stuck to his instinct of positioning the airship at the downwind end of the lawn and aiming it into the wind. No. 1 rose slowly and was never in danger of crashing into the trees. He reeled the front ballast weight into the basket, and, with the center of gravity shifted toward the back, the balloon’s giant nose swung upward. The crowd cheered. He tipped his hat and began to demonstrate that he could indeed steer the balloon. He grasped the rudder and guided No. 1 in a tight loop around Lachambre’s captive balloon. The applause was even louder, and Lachambre saluted his protégé.

Santos-Dumont’s first surprise was that he could actually sense the airship moving, unlike the experience in a spherical balloon. He was astonished to feel the wind in his face and his coat fluttering as No. 1 plowed ahead. He likened it to standing on the deck of a fast-moving steamship. He had wondered whether the sensation of mounting and descending obliquely with his shifting weights would be unpleasant. But it turned out not to bother him at all even though No. 1 pitched considerably. He attributed his composure to sea legs earned on voyages between France and Brazil. “Once, on the way to Brazil,” he recalled,

the storm was so violent that the grand piano went loose and broke a lady’s leg; yet I was not seasick…. I know that what one feels most distressingly at sea is not so much the movement as that momentary hesitation just before the boat pitches, followed by the malicious dipping or mounting, which never comes quite the same, and the shock at top and bottom. All this is powerfully aided by the smells of the paint, varnish, and tar, mingled with the odors of the kitchen, the heat of the boilers, and the stench of the smoke and the hold. In the air-ship there is no smell. All is pure and clean. And the pitching itself has none of the shocks and hesitations of the boat at sea. The movement is suave and flowing, which is doubtless owing to the lesser resistance of the airwaves. The pitches are less frequent and rapid than those at sea; the dip is not brusquely arrested, so that the mind can anticipate the curve to its end; and there is no shock to give that queer “empty” sensation to the solar plexus.

And the navigator of the air, he observed, has one great advantage over the sea captain—he can easily move laterally to trade an undesirable current for an advantageous one.

At first the flight of No. 1 could not have gone better. “For a while we could hear the motor spitting and the propeller churning the air,” reported an eyewitness. “Then, when he had reached equilibrium, we could still observe Santos manipulating the machinery and the ropes. Around and around he maneuvered in great circles and figure 8’s, showing that he had perfect control of his direction.”

Santos-Dumont was encouraged by the ease with which he controlled No. 1. “Being inexperienced,” he said, and overconfident, “I made the great mistake of mounting high in the air—some 1300 feet—an altitude that is considered nothing for a spherical balloon, but which is absurd and uselessly dangerous for an air-ship under trial.” At that height he commanded a view of the entire city and was enthralled by the beautiful grounds of Longchamp. He headed toward the racetrack.

“As the air-ship grew smaller in the distance, those who had opera-glasses began crying that it was ‘doubling up,’” the eyewitness continued. “We saw it coming down rapidly, growing larger and larger. Women screamed. Men called hoarsely to one another. Those who had bicycles or automobiles hastened to the spot where he must be dashed to the ground. Yet within an hour M. Santos-Dumont was among his friends again, unhurt, laughing nervously, and explaining all about the unlucky air-pump.”

He told his friends that he had encountered no problems when he ascended. As the atmospheric pressure decreased, the hydrogen simply expanded, keeping the balloon taut. And when the expansion became too great, a valve automatically released some of the gas. The valve was another one of Santos-Dumont’s innovations. Spherical balloons generally had a free vent, a small open hole, in the bottom through which gas could escape as it expanded. The free vent meant that there was never any danger of the balloon bursting, “but the price paid for this immunity,” he noted, “is a great loss of gas and, consequently, a fatal shortening of the spherical balloon’s stay in the air.” And it was not just an issue of prolonging the flight that was on his mind when he substituted a valve for the open hole. He was also concerned about maintaining the airship’s cylindrical shape. When a spherical balloon lost a bit too much gas, it had a limp shape but was still flightworthy. If his cylindrical balloon leaked gas, it started to fold and was difficult, if not impossible, to fly. The introduction of the valve eliminated the accidental leaking of gas, but its proper functioning was critical to his safe return. He repeatedly checked the valve just before the trip, because, although his friends saw fire as the chief danger, his principal concern was the valve failing and the balloon exploding.

But on the actual flight the problems occurred on the descent. The increase in atmospheric pressure compressed the balloon, as he had expected. He had equipped No. 1 with an air pump that was supposed to direct air into the balloon to compensate for any contraction. That was the idea anyway, but in practice the pump proved to be too weak.

As Santos-Dumont descended, No. 1 began to lose its shape, folding in the middle like a portfolio. The cords were subjected to unequal tension, and the balloon envelope was in danger of being torn apart. “At that moment I thought that all was over,” recalled Santos-Dumont, “the more so as the descent which had already become rapid could no longer be checked by any of the usual means on board, where nothing worked.” The cords suspending the ballast bags became tangled, so he could no longer control where the nose of the airship pointed. He thought of throwing out ballast. That would certainly cause the airship to rise, and the decreased atmospheric pressure would enable the expanding hydrogen gas to restore the balloon to its taut, cylindrical shape. But when he eventually returned to earth, the problem would undoubtedly repeat itself, only worse; the balloon would be flaccid because of the gas lost in the interim. Santos-Dumont could think of nothing to do as No. 1 plummeted. He feared that the cords connecting the basket to the balloon would snap one by one. He looked down, and the sight of the housetops, “with their chimney pots for spikes,” made him queasy.

“For the moment,” he wrote, “I was sure that I was in the presence of death…. ‘What is coming next?’ I thought. ‘What am I going to see and know in a few minutes? Whom shall I see after I am dead?’ The thought that I would be meeting my father in a few minutes thrilled me. Indeed, I think that in such moments there is no room for either regret or terror. The mind is too full of looking forward. One is frightened only so long as one still has a chance.”

But then he realized that he did have a chance. A charitable wind was sweeping him away from the rocky streets and jagged roofs toward the soft grassy pelouse of Longchamp, where a few boys were flying kites. He shouted to them to grab the two-hundred-foot guide rope and run with it as fast as they could against the wind. “They were bright young fellows,” he recalled, “and they grasped the idea and the guide-rope at the same lucky instant. The effect of this help in extremis was immediate, and such as I had expected. By this maneuver we lessened the velocity of the fall, and so avoided what would otherwise have been a bad shaking-up, to say the least. I was saved for the first time!” The boys helped him pack everything into the airship’s basket. He secured a cab and returned to the center of Paris.

He immediately put the troublesome aspects of the flight behind him, like a mother forgetting the pains of labor once she has seen her newborn’s face. “The sentiment of success filled me,” he recalled. “I had navigated the air…. I had mounted without sacrificing ballast. I had descended without sacrificing gas. My shifting weights had proved successful, and it would have been impossible not to recognize the capital triumph of these oblique flights through the air. No one had ever made them before.”

That night he celebrated at Maxim’s, the famous restaurant at No. 3, rue Royale that is still in business today. He was one of Maxime Gaillard’s first customers, when the dark-wooded bistro opened in the early 1890s. The restaurant initially catered to carriage drivers who passed the time while their bosses dined elsewhere, but soon they too discovered its fine, hearty cuisine—French onion soup, oysters on the half shell, poached lobster, sole in brandy sauce, roast chicken, scallops of veal, grilled pigs’ feet and tails—and displaced the coachmen. As a night spot for the well-to-do, Maxim’s was ideally located in the center of the city, on the same block as the Automobile Club, the aristocratic Hotel Crillon, and the elite Jockey Club. Maxim’s attracted what working-class Parisians derisively called des fils à papa, rich young men who spent their fathers’ money on women and wine. When it came to the wine, Santos-Dumont fit right in. Maxim’s did not serve lunch in those days. The restaurant opened at 5:00 P.M. for the evening aperitif, dinner was served from 8:00 until 10:00, and supper from midnight until dawn.

Santos-Dumont always came for supper and sat at the same table in the corner of the candlelit main room. With his back to the wall, he could watch everything that transpired, and the goings-on in the wee hours of the night were legendary. A beautiful blonde who became a silent movie star used to shed all her clothes, climb onto one of the tables, and sing torch songs. A Russian named Aristoff arrived every morning precisely at four and consumed the identical meal: grilled kipper, scrambled eggs, minute steak, and a bottle of champagne. For his bachelor party, a French count ordered the waiters to dress up as undertakers and arrange the tables to looks like funeral biers. Maxim’s was the spark for many romantic assignations. In the 1890s strangers rarely approached each other directly but flirted with their eyes across the dining room. Many couples got together because of the intervention of the notorious “Madame Pi-Pi,” who sat outside the bathrooms and cleaned the toilets after each use. A woman who was interested in a man would excuse herself to the toilet and slip Madame Pi-Pi her address or phone number along with a tip. When she returned, the man could go to the bathroom and pay Madame Pi-Pi for the information.

Santos-Dumont dined alone or with close friends like Louis Cartier and George Goursat, better known by his nom de plume Sem, who carved the Brazilian’s likeness on the restaurant’s wall. At Maxim’s Santos-Dumont met James Gordon Bennett, the American millionaire publisher, who had the most prominent table in the front of the restaurant. Bennett owned the New York Herald and the Paris Herald, the only English-language daily in the city. He had an odd sense of humor, which infused his papers. For instance, he ordered the New York Herald to print the same letter to the editor day after day for seventeen years—an 1899 note from “Old Philadelphia Lady” who wanted to know how to convert centigrade temperatures into Fahrenheit—because he enjoyed hearing from readers who pointed out the repetition. Bennett was a fan of fast cars, slick yachts, and hot-air balloons. He assigned a reporter to cover every trial of Santos-Dumont’s airships. The Herald, with its hundreds of cliff-hanging stories about his perilous flights, made Santos-Dumont a celebrity in the United States.

On the days when Santos-Dumont planned to fly, the kitchen at Maxim’s packed him lunch. H. J. Greenwall, the author of I’m Going to Maxim’s, described the Brazilian’s routine: “Out to the hangar to get Santos-Dumont I tuned up for a flight; lunch put in the wicker undercarriage in which the pilot flew. Up in the air went Santos-Dumont I; usually some minor accident or incident occurred. Back to the hangar. Back to his apartment,” at the fancy address of No. 9, rue Washington, on the corner of the Champs-Elysées, near the Arc de Triomphe. “Back to Maxim’s … all night; leave in the dawn with a lunch of say a wing of cold chicken, a salad, and some peaches. A short sleep. Then to the hangar and up goes Santos-Dumont again.”