Paul Hoffman - Wings of Madness - Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight

IN 1883, Alberto Santos-Dumont, age ten, had not yet seen a balloon, but he duplicated the Mongolfiers’ invention in miniature. Working from illustrations in books, he made handheld balloons out of tissue paper and filled them with hot air from the stove flame. At holiday celebrations he demonstrated the gasbags to the field hands. Even his parents, who did not approve of his incendiary experiments, could not conceal their amazement when the montgolfières soared higher than the house. He also made a toy wooden plane whose propeller, or “air screw” as it was called in those days, was powered by a wound-up rubber string.

From reading Verne, Alberto was convinced that people had already gone beyond the hot-air balloon and flown airships, also known as dirigibles (steerable powered balloons). His family and childhood friends tried to disabuse him of the notion. He used to play a game with the other children called Pigeon flies! One boy was chosen as the leader, and he would shout, “Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!” and so on. “At each call we were supposed to raise our fingers,” Santos-Dumont wrote many years later. “Sometimes, however, he would call out: ‘Dog flies! Fox flies!’ or some other like impossibility to catch us. If anyone raised a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called ‘Man flies!’ for at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was, hoping that someday the laugh would be on my side.”

It was not until Alberto was fifteen that he actually saw a manned balloon. At a fair in São Paulo, in 1888, he watched a performer ascend in a nearly spherical gasbag and descend by parachute. Alberto’s imagination took off:

In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, when the hum of insects, punctuated by the far-off cry of some bird, lulled me, I would lie in the shade of the veranda and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to fall in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of the aerial ocean, I, too, devised airships and flying machines in my imagination.

These imaginings I kept to myself. In those days, in Brazil, to talk of inventing a flying machine, or dirigible balloon, would have been to stamp one’s self as unbalanced and visionary. Spherical balloonists were looked on as daring professionals not differing greatly from acrobats; and for the son of a planter to dream of emulating them would have been almost a social sin.

Santos-Dumont’s parents were politically conservative. They supported the emperor, whose railroad Henrique had eagerly constructed. But they could not keep their curious son from being exposed to all sorts of ideologies that they found distasteful. When Alberto was in the coffee-processing plant, even though he generally kept to himself, he would overhear conversations. Sometimes the workers talked about the democratic movement and spoke with passion of the patriot Tiradentes. The revolutionary dentist had become the hero of ordinary Brazilians, and his life was being turned into myth, as would Santos-Dumont’s years later. Tiradentes was depicted in numerous paintings as a bearded Christ-like figure, although in reality he was clean-shaven and short-haired. The day of his execution, April 21, became a national holiday, which is still celebrated today. Young Alberto had little interest in politics, and obviously no desire to be drawn and quartered, but he was attracted to the immortality that Tiradentes had achieved. He decided then that he wanted to do something with his life that would stir the hearts of men and women—an extraordinary aspiration for an adolescent to have. He had no idea what profession he would take up—it may not even have crossed his mind that one could become an aeronaut or an inventor. But he knew that whatever he did, it should have a profound impact on the people around him. Certainly no other aeronautical pioneer had such grand ambitions a decade before taking to the air.

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