Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight. Paul Hoffman
toward the north. All goes well on board. This message is the third by pigeon. Andrée.” After Santos-Dumont disembarked in France, he learned that only one other pigeon had made it back. The Andrée expedition was the talk of Paris cafés. The prevailing sentiment was that he would not return, and indeed that turned out to be the case. Three decades would pass before a hunting party discovered Andrée’s body and diary on White Island, a deserted expanse of pack ice only 150 miles from the Eagle’s starting point. The sails had apparently failed, and Andrée could not steer the balloon out of a fierce snowstorm that finally forced it down. He described in the diary how he and his companions had survived on lichen and seal blubber for three months. Then the journal entries ended. The brutal winter had set in, and the men froze to death in a blizzard.
In his own journal, Santos-Dumont noted how much Andrée’s story had affected him: “The reading of the book during the long voyage proved a revelation to me, and I finished by studying it like a textbook. Its description of materials and prices opened my eyes. At last I saw clearly. Andrée’s immense balloon—a reproduction of whose photograph on the book cover showed how those that gave it the final varnishing climbed up its sides and over its summit like a mountain—cost only 40,000 francs to construct and equip fully! I determined that, on arriving in Paris, I would cease consulting professional aeronauts and would make the acquaintance of constructors.”
Santos-Dumont saw a little of himself in Salomon Andrée. He liked Andrée’s adventurous spirit and shared his belief in the unbounded power of technology to end human misery. Andrée had described, in a series of sanguine articles, the likely benefits that the electric light and other new inventions would have on human evolution, liberty, hygiene, athletics, language, architecture, military planning, home life, marriage, and education. Despite his loquaciousness in print, Andrée was a man of few words at public functions, and Santos-Dumont too was tongue-tied at formal affairs.
Both men shunned intimate relationships with women and never married. “In married life, one has to deal with factors which cannot be arranged according to a plan,” Andrée wrote. “It is altogether too great a risk to bind oneself into a condition of things where another individual would be fully entitled—and what right would I have to repress this individuality?—to demand the same place in my life that I myself occupied! As soon as I feel any heart-leaves sprouting, I hasten to uproot them, for I know that any feeling which I allowed to live would become so strong that I should not dare to submit to it.”
[CHAPTER 3] FIRST FLIGHT VAUGIRARD, 1897
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