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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ