Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight. Paul Hoffman
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.’”
Alberto subsequently visited the Peugeot workshop in Valentigny. Although he had reservations about spending his father’s hard-earned money on a balloon flight, he had none about spending it on a 3.5-horsepower four-wheeler. Peugeot manufactured only two cars in 1891—the steering and brakes barely worked—and the eighteen-year-old Brazilian was now the proud owner of one of them. In a few months, when his father came to the realization that Parisian medicine could not restore his health, Alberto sailed with him back to Brazil. Alberto brought along the Peugeot roadster, and when he powered it up in São Paulo, he reportedly had the distinction of being the first person ever to drive a car in South America.
Henrique knew that he was dying, so he had a long talk with Alberto about his future. He had seen how happy his youngest son had been in the City of Light, and, to his wife’s chagrin, urged him to return to Paris by himself, despite cryptically warning him that the city was “a most dangerous place for a boy.” He told Alberto that he did not have to worry about earning a living and advanced him his inheritance of a half million dollars. He sent him off with the challenge “let’s see if you make a man of yourself”—strong words that reflected his concern that his son had never shown the slightest interest in the opposite sex. Alberto returned to Paris in the summer of 1892, and his father died in August.
Santos-Dumont’s first order of business in Paris was to look up other balloonists in the city directory. But “like the first,” he wrote, “all wanted extravagant sums to take me up with them on the most trivial kind of ascent. All took the same attitude. They made a danger and a difficulty of ballooning, enlarging on its risks to life and property. Even in presence of the great prices they proposed to charge me, they did not encourage me to close with them. Obviously they were determined to keep ballooning to themselves as a professional mystery. Therefore, I bought a new automobile.”
He also attended to his education. He and his father had investigated the colleges in Paris, but in the end his father, knowing that Alberto might rebel against a structured curriculum, suggested that he hire a private tutor instead. That was fine with Alberto, who had recurrent nightmares about being called upon to answer a question in a crowded classroom. In 1892, he employed a former college professor named Garcia and the two of them designed an intense program of study weighted toward the “practical sciences”—physics, chemistry, and mechanical and electrical engineering. The home-study plan appealed to the recluse and bookworm in Santos-Dumont, and for the next five years he buried himself in his textbooks. Occasionally he visited cousins in England, where he would slip into the back of lecture halls at the University of Bristol and listen to the professors; because he was not an official student, there was little danger of his being called on.
For relaxation in those studious years, Santos-Dumont drove his cars. (According to Brazilian biographies, he owned more cars in 1892 than anyone else in Paris—but the truth of this assertion, and just how many cars he owned, cannot be confirmed.) He would pass the time motoring up and down the wide boulevards, but the first internal combustion engines were so unreliable that they often broke down, stalling the predominant horse traffic. His Peugeot was such a novelty that even when it was running properly, it snarled traffic as pedestrians rushed into the street to get a better view. The police warned him to keep the car moving, and once he was fined—in what might have been the city’s first traffic violation—for causing a disturbance near the opera house. The “disturbance” was actually a convivial affair, an impromptu street party of passersby tickled by the sight of his vehicle.
Fin de siècle Parisians were great revelers. According to Eugen Weber, they turned even unpleasant experiences, such as being vaccinated against smallpox, into festive occasions. Inoculations were “done at parties, as if one were going to the theater,” the society columns reported. “One organizes an intimate luncheon; the doctor arrives at dessert, the vaccine in his pocket.” In his student days, Santos-Dumont was not much for revelry or heavy drinking, but he occasionally indulged in Parisian nightlife, that inebriated swirl of intelligent discourse and decadence. The cafés were places for learned conversation not just about art and literature but scientific and technological developments like the discovery of X rays and the construction of the Paris metro. People who fashioned themselves intellectuals stayed up all night talking, pausing to inject themselves with morphine in gold-plated syringes, sip Vin Coca Mariani (a wine permeated with cocaine), or snack on strawberries soaked in ether. End-of-the-century Paris was forgiving to someone like Santos-Dumont who was not sure about his sexuality. The avant-garde café crowd promoted erotic experimentation, and homosexuality became so fashionable that every hipster had to try it. “All remarkable women do it,” the wife of a banker wrote, “but it’s very difficult. One has to take lessons.”
In 1897, Santos-Dumont returned home to Brazil and reflected on his five years in Paris. With Garcia’s guidance, he had mastered the sciences. He was thankful for that, and yet there were things he wished he had done. “I regretted bitterly that I had not persevered in my attempt to make a balloon ascent,” he wrote. “At that distance, far from ballooning possibilities, even the high prices demanded by the aeronauts seemed to me of secondary importance.”
Before heading back to Paris, he visited a bookstore in Rio and purchased a copy of Andrée’s Balloon Expedition, In Search of the North Pole. The book, written by the Paris balloon makers Henri Lachambre and Alexis Machuron, proved to be a great diversion on the long steamship passage. Lachambre and Machuron had built a huge balloon called the Eagle for the young Swedish scientist Salomon August Andrée, who had been planning for more than a decade to make the first balloon expedition to the North Pole. Andrée finally got the opportunity on July 11, 1897, when he ascended from Dane’s Island, off the north coast of Norway near Spitsbergen, for a 2,300-mile journey that he hoped to complete in six days. Accompanying him were two companions, three dozen carrier pigeons, a boat, a stove, sleds, tents, sundry scientific instruments, cameras, and enough food and birdseed to last four months. Although the Eagle was not powered, Andrée had cleverly equipped it with large sails so that he could steer it on a course that could deviate by as much as thirty degrees from the wind.
Lachambre and Machuron had published their book within days of Andrée’s ascent, before it was evident what had happened to him. They reported that one carrier pigeon had delivered an encouraging message: