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

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СКАЧАТЬ was abandoned, however, when the bystanders saw him doing something that looked far more perilous: He was preparing to start his ascension at the downwind end of the open turf, next to the woods. Although the airship was facing upwind, many assumed that the motor would not be a match for the wind and that he would be swept backward a few feet into the nearby trees. Santos-Dumont was convinced that his motor was more powerful than the wind. He planned to adjust it until the force of the propeller exactly canceled out the wind, so that the balloon would rise straight up. The other aeronauts pleaded with him not to make such a risky takeoff on the first flight. Why not adopt the time-honored approach in spherical ballooning of starting the ascent at the upwind end of the open space? That way the balloon, pushed by the wind as it climbed, would have the entire expanse to cross before reaching the woods. Santos-Dumont gave in to the crowd and moved No. 1 to the other end of the field. It was the wrong approach.

      He aimed the airship downwind across the open field and, with the engine idling, climbed into the basket. Then he shouted, “Let go all!” Machurin and Albert Chapin, Santos-Dumont’s chief mechanic, released the mooring ropes and the Brazilian throttled up the engine. No. 1 raced forward, propelled by the wind and motor working together, and in a matter of seconds traversed the field and smashed into the trees on the other side. “I had not time to rise above them,” Santos-Dumont recalled, “so powerful was the impulse given by my motor.” The airship fell to the ground—fortunately the descent was cushioned by the scraping of the basket along the branches—and he emerged with no injuries except to his pride. He berated his fellow aeronauts for talking him out of his plan. Never again, he said, would he have the “weakness to yield.” But the episode had its dividends. “This accident,” he said, “at least served to show the effectiveness of the petroleum motor in the air to those who doubted it before.”

      In two days he repaired the airship and returned to the Jardin d’Acclimatation for a second attempt. The crowd was larger this time, drawing strangers who were torn between fear and excitement that they might witness another crash. There was a stiff breeze, and this time Santos-Dumont stuck to his instinct of positioning the airship at the downwind end of the lawn and aiming it into the wind. No. 1 rose slowly and was never in danger of crashing into the trees. He reeled the front ballast weight into the basket, and, with the center of gravity shifted toward the back, the balloon’s giant nose swung upward. The crowd cheered. He tipped his hat and began to demonstrate that he could indeed steer the balloon. He grasped the rudder and guided No. 1 in a tight loop around Lachambre’s captive balloon. The applause was even louder, and Lachambre saluted his protégé.

      Santos-Dumont’s first surprise was that he could actually sense the airship moving, unlike the experience in a spherical balloon. He was astonished to feel the wind in his face and his coat fluttering as No. 1 plowed ahead. He likened it to standing on the deck of a fast-moving steamship. He had wondered whether the sensation of mounting and descending obliquely with his shifting weights would be unpleasant. But it turned out not to bother him at all even though No. 1 pitched considerably. He attributed his composure to sea legs earned on voyages between France and Brazil. “Once, on the way to Brazil,” he recalled,

      the storm was so violent that the grand piano went loose and broke a lady’s leg; yet I was not seasick…. I know that what one feels most distressingly at sea is not so much the movement as that momentary hesitation just before the boat pitches, followed by the malicious dipping or mounting, which never comes quite the same, and the shock at top and bottom. All this is powerfully aided by the smells of the paint, varnish, and tar, mingled with the odors of the kitchen, the heat of the boilers, and the stench of the smoke and the hold. In the air-ship there is no smell. All is pure and clean. And the pitching itself has none of the shocks and hesitations of the boat at sea. The movement is suave and flowing, which is doubtless owing to the lesser resistance of the airwaves. The pitches are less frequent and rapid than those at sea; the dip is not brusquely arrested, so that the mind can anticipate the curve to its end; and there is no shock to give that queer “empty” sensation to the solar plexus.

      And the navigator of the air, he observed, has one great advantage over the sea captain—he can easily move laterally to trade an undesirable current for an advantageous one.

      At first the flight of No. 1 could not have gone better. “For a while we could hear the motor spitting and the propeller churning the air,” reported an eyewitness. “Then, when he had reached equilibrium, we could still observe Santos manipulating the machinery and the ropes. Around and around he maneuvered in great circles and figure 8’s, showing that he had perfect control of his direction.”

      Santos-Dumont was encouraged by the ease with which he controlled No. 1. “Being inexperienced,” he said, and overconfident, “I made the great mistake of mounting high in the air—some 1300 feet—an altitude that is considered nothing for a spherical balloon, but which is absurd and uselessly dangerous for an air-ship under trial.” At that height he commanded a view of the entire city and was enthralled by the beautiful grounds of Longchamp. He headed toward the racetrack.

      “As the air-ship grew smaller in the distance, those who had opera-glasses began crying that it was ‘doubling up,’” the eyewitness continued. “We saw it coming down rapidly, growing larger and larger. Women screamed. Men called hoarsely to one another. Those who had bicycles or automobiles hastened to the spot where he must be dashed to the ground. Yet within an hour M. Santos-Dumont was among his friends again, unhurt, laughing nervously, and explaining all about the unlucky air-pump.”

      He told his friends that he had encountered no problems when he ascended. As the atmospheric pressure decreased, the hydrogen simply expanded, keeping the balloon taut. And when the expansion became too great, a valve automatically released some of the gas. The valve was another one of Santos-Dumont’s innovations. Spherical balloons generally had a free vent, a small open hole, in the bottom through which gas could escape as it expanded. The free vent meant that there was never any danger of the balloon bursting, “but the price paid for this immunity,” he noted, “is a great loss of gas and, consequently, a fatal shortening of the spherical balloon’s stay in the air.” And it was not just an issue of prolonging the flight that was on his mind when he substituted a valve for the open hole. He was also concerned about maintaining the airship’s cylindrical shape. When a spherical balloon lost a bit too much gas, it had a limp shape but was still flightworthy. If his cylindrical balloon leaked gas, it started to fold and was difficult, if not impossible, to fly. The introduction of the valve eliminated the accidental leaking of gas, but its proper functioning was critical to his safe return. He repeatedly checked the valve just before the trip, because, although his friends saw fire as the chief danger, his principal concern was the valve failing and the balloon exploding.

      But on the actual flight the problems occurred on the descent. The increase in atmospheric pressure compressed the balloon, as he had expected. He had equipped No. 1 with an air pump that was supposed to direct air into the balloon to compensate for any contraction. That was the idea anyway, but in practice the pump proved to be too weak.

      As Santos-Dumont descended, No. 1 began to lose its shape, folding in the middle like a portfolio. The cords were subjected to unequal tension, and the balloon envelope was in danger of being torn apart. “At that moment I thought that all was over,” recalled Santos-Dumont, “the more so as the descent which had already become rapid could no longer be checked by any of the usual means on board, where nothing worked.” The cords suspending the ballast bags became tangled, so he could no longer control where the nose of the airship pointed. He thought of throwing out ballast. That would certainly cause the airship to rise, and the decreased atmospheric pressure would enable the expanding hydrogen gas to restore the balloon to СКАЧАТЬ