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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ