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

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">The x-ray mania began early and grew quickly,” social historian Nancy Knight noted:

      “Hidden Solids Revealed!” trumpeted the New York Times in January 1896. The press was enchanted with the possibilities of the new rays. With the information that they rendered “Wood and Flesh More Easily Penetrated … Than Plain Glass,” many observers immediately speculated on various applications and uses. Even the most mundane experiments with the new technique were labeled miraculous. “Startling results” announced by professors at Yale turned out to be x-ray photographs of uncracked walnuts showing “a splendid view of the kernels.” Some popular magazines and journals showed x-ray photographs of feet in boots, coins in wooden boxes, and shapely women in tight lacing. One popular cartoon hinted at the possible leveling effects of the rays by revealing that beneath the superficial layer the well-to-do of the Gilded Age were the same as the common people.

      Well-fed or hungry, fat or thin, everyone’s skeleton looked roughly the same. Another cartoon, called “The March of Science,” showed an eavesdropper behind a door. The caption said, “Interesting result attained, with the aid of Röntgen rays, by a first-floor lodger when photographing his sitting-room door.”

      Even as the X-ray craze abated, physicians continued to be smitten with the invisible new light. Within two months of Roentgen’s discovery, the medical community knew that X rays were a powerful tool for revealing the interior of the human body. Physicians welcomed X rays because the Industrial Revolution had largely passed them by. The nineteenth century had seen great advances in the prevention of disease (through vaccines, antiseptic practices, and public-health initiatives) but before the X-ray machine there had been no exciting new technology for the diagnosis or treatment of disease.

      The enthusiasm of roentgenologists did not dampen when it was established by the turn of the century that repeated exposure to X rays was injurious to their own health. To the contrary, as Rebecca Herzig observed in the article “In the Name of Science: Suffering, Sacrifice, and the Formation of American Roentgenology,” the X-ray pioneers took pride in their painful boils, cancerous lesions, and amputated limbs that were the by-products of their diagnostic work. Frederick H. Baetjer, a roentgenologist at Johns Hopkins, lost eight fingers and an eye to years of working with X rays. “Despite the suffering he has undergone in the interest of science,” the New York Times reported after the seventy-second operation to save his body, he planned to “continue his work as long as he lives, fingers or no fingers.” Elizabeth Fleischmann, famous for her X-ray images of American servicemen wounded in the Spanish-American War, was eulogized as America’s Joan of Arc after she died in 1905 of radiation-induced cancer following a series of amputations.

      “The emerging field of roentgenology,” Herzig wrote, “gained definition through the spectacular deaths and mutilations of its adherents.” They wore their hideous injuries as badges of honor. “Scarred and limb-less roentgenologists came to embody the abstract cause of ‘science,’ much as stigmata render palpable the ineffable presence of divinity. At one 1920 professional gathering, historian Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles reports, so many attendees were missing at least one hand that when the chicken dinner was served, no one could cut the meat.”

      WHEN SANTOS-DUMONT risked his life for aeronautical progress, he was following the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of his time, but his motives were not entirely selfless. He enjoyed being an inventor and an aeronaut but also liked being a showman, and airship trials that courted disaster made for a better performance. He believed that if his legacy was going to rival Tiradentes’, he needed to do more than perfect the powered balloon. Men and women had wept at the news of the Brazilian patriot’s gruesome death. As significant an invention as the flying machine undoubtedly was, Santos-Dumont did not expect people to cry after a successful flight unless they saw the sacrifices—his brushes with death—that he chose to endure.

      In the spring of 1899, Santos-Dumont dismantled No. 1, salvaging the basket, the motor, and the propeller for an airship that he hoped would better hold its shape. No. 2 had the same length as No. 1 and the same general cylindrical form but was slightly wider, and, as a result, held 10 percent more gas, increasing its lifting power by forty-four pounds. He took advantage of the additional carrying capacity by adding a small rotary fan to supplement the weak air pump, “which,” he dryly noted, “had all but killed me.” The fan and pump did not force air directly into the belly of the balloon but rather into a separate pocket, a small inner balloon, sewn into the fabric of the outer envelope. That way the air was kept apart from the hydrogen (it is only the mixture of the two, not hydrogen itself, that is highly flammable). The expanding “balloonet” served to prop up the outer balloon envelope so that it kept its cylindrical form.

      The first trial was set for May 11, 1899, on the Feast of the Ascension. In the morning, the skies were clear, and Santos-Dumont supervised No. 2’s inflation at the captive balloon station in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. “In those days,” he recalled, “I had no balloon house of my own…. As there was no shed there for me, the work had to be done in the open, and it was done vexatiously, with a hundred delays, surprises, and excuses.” By the afternoon, storm clouds blotted the sun and it had started to rain. Because he had no place to store the inflated balloon, he faced an unpalatable choice. He could empty the balloon, wasting the hydrogen and losing the money he had paid for it. Or he could attempt an ascension with an engine that was sputtering from the dampness and a rain-soaked balloon that was heavier, perhaps dangerously so, than it ought to be. He went ahead but as a measure of security tethered the airship to the ground. The drizzle turned into a downpour, and he was unable to rise above the trees before encountering a high-pressure system that compressed the hydrogen so that the balloon visibly shrank. Before the air pump and fan could inflate the balloonet, a strong gust of wind folded up No. 2 worse than No. 1 and tossed it into the trees. The balloon ripped, cords snapped, and No. 2 fell to the ground.

      Santos-Dumont’s friends rushed over and, finding him in one piece, strongly admonished him. “This time you have learned your lesson,” they said. “You must understand that it is impossible to keep the shape of your cylindrical balloon rigid. You must not again risk your life by taking a petroleum motor up beneath it.”

      “What has the rigidity of the balloon’s form to do with danger from a petroleum motor?” replied Santos-Dumont. “Errors do not count,” he continued. “I have learned my lesson, but it is not that lesson.” Drenched and a bit scraped up, his panama hat squashed, he was in no hurry to climb out of the dented basket. He surveyed the damage and satisfied himself that the problem was the balloon’s long, slender shape, “so seductive from certain points of view, but so dangerous from others.” No. 2, after just a brief life, would have to be retired, the motor and basket salvaged. In the morning he drew up plans for a plumper airship that would be less sensitive to changes in air pressure.

      He made No. 3 in the shape of a football. “The rounder form of this balloon also made it possible to dispense with the interior air-balloon and its feeding air-pump that had twice refused to work adequately at the critical moment,” he wrote. “Should this shorter and thicker balloon need aid to keep its form rigid, I relied on the stiffening effect of a 33-foot bamboo pole fixed lengthwise to the suspension-cords above my head and directly beneath the balloon.” Sixty-six feet long by twenty-five-feet wide, No. 3 had a gas capacity of 17,650 cubic feet, nearly three times that of No. 2. When filled with hydrogen, his third airship also had three times the lifting power of his second airship and twice that of the first. The lifting power was more than required, СКАЧАТЬ