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

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СКАЧАТЬ hydrogen. Although illuminating gas had only half the lifting power of hydrogen, No. 3 could still carry aloft 50 percent more weight than the hydrogen-filled No. 2. In fact No. 3 could transport a motor, the basket, and the rigging, as well as the aeronaut, with 231 pounds to spare for emergency ballast and a full lunch.

      Santos-Dumont scheduled No. 3’s first flight for the thirteenth of November, over the protest of skittish members of the newly formed Paris Aéro Club who urged him not to fly on an unlucky day. (France was notorious in its dread of the number thirteen; a quatorzième, or professional fourteenth guest, could be hired on the spur of the moment to round out an otherwise ill-fated dinner party.) And November 13, 1899, was not just any unlucky day—it was the day on which centennial alarmists had predicted the world would end. Santos-Dumont enjoyed mocking the superstitions of others. He once rounded off the pay of a triskaidekaphobic housekeeper to a multiple of thirteen and gave her a necklace with thirteen beads. But he had his own peculiar beliefs. “He only entered a place with his right foot first,” recalled Antoinette Gastambide, whose father manufactured one of his engines. “He told me that whenever he flew he would wrap a female stocking around his neck,” hidden under his shirt so that no one knew. “It was the stocking of Madame Letellier, one of the most famous women in Europe, who had had a lot of luck in her life.” Before he ascended, he would also never say good-bye for fear that it would be his last farewell. He could not sleep unless his hat was next to him. As for numbers, he went out of his way to avoid the number fifty, refusing to carry fifty-franc notes or fifty thousand reis bills in his wallet, and later in life—after a scary crash on the eighth of the month—he shunned the number eight. His friends surmised that his preference for flying on “unlucky” days was his way of thumbing his nose at the obvious dangers of aerostation. In general, he preferred to ascend on days of historic importance such as the Fourth of July, Brazil’s Independence Day (September 7), or the Feast of the Ascension.

      On November 13, 1899, the weather was unremarkable—a cool, crisp day with no signs of precipitation—and the world showed no sign of coming to an end. Santos-Dumont spent the morning inspecting the airship, testing the motor, and checking the all-important exhaust valve. By early afternoon, his workmen had filled the balloon with lamp gas and he was ready to take off from the Parc d’Aérostation in Vaugirard. His friend Antônio Prado asked him whether he was afraid to go up after the two close calls in his previous airships. Santos-Dumont confessed that he was nervous. Prado wanted to know how he faced the fear. “I grow pale,” he said, “and try to gain control over myself by thinking of other things. If I do not succeed, I feign courage before those watching me, and face the danger. But even so I am still afraid.”

      At 3:30 P.M. Santos-Dumont set off on his most successful flight to date. As soon as he was in the air, he headed for the Eiffel Tower. “Around that wonderful landmark for twenty minutes, I had the immense satisfaction of describing circles, figure eights, and whatever other maneuvers it pleased me to undertake, and in all directions, diagonally up and down as well as laterally,” he recalled. “I had at last realized my fullest expectations. Very faithfully the airship obeyed the impulse of propeller and steering-rudder.” From the Eiffel Tower he made a straight course to the Bois. He did not want to return to Vaugirard because the balloon shed there was surrounded by houses, which meant that there would be little room for error when landing, and the wind that had picked up would make the descent even riskier. “Landing in Paris, in general, is dangerous for any kind of balloon,” he said, “amid chimney pots that threaten to pierce its belly and tiles that are always ready to be knocked down on the heads of passersby.” So he chose to touch down in the Bois, this time in the most controlled way “at the exact spot where the kite-flying boys had pulled on my guide rope and saved me from a bad shaking up.”

      Santos-Dumont inspected No. 3 and was pleased that it had not lost any gas whatsoever. “I could well have housed it overnight,” he recalled, if he had had a place to shelter it, “and gone out again in it the next day! I had no longer the slightest doubt of the success of my invention.”

      That night at Maxim’s he boasted about his achievement. Having made one controlled descent, the rooftops no longer seemed so threatening, and he wagered good money that he could land No. 3 at any specified place in the city. To tweak the members of the Automobile Club, he bragged that he was going to descend in a dirigible on the roof garden of their clubhouse in the place de la Concorde. He told everyone in the restaurant that he was “going into air-ship construction as a sort of life-work.”

      He contacted the Paris Aéro Club, which had purchased land in Saint-Cloud, just west of the Bois, and persuaded the club to let him build a giant aerodrome, a balloon hangar, at his own expense, complete with a hydrogen-generating plant and a state-of-the-art workshop. He wanted the hundred-foot-long aerodrome to have thirty-six-foot-high doors so that an inflated airship could easily be moved in and out. But again he encountered resistance to his plans. “Even here,” said Santos-Dumont, “I had to contend with the conceit and prejudice of the Parisian artisans, who had already given me such trouble at the Jardin d’Acclimatation.” They declared that the sliding doors would be too big to open properly. “Follow my directions,” he replied, “and do not concern yourself with their practicability. I will answer for the sliding.” They were still reluctant. “Although the men had named their own pay,” he said, “it was a long time before I could get the better of this vainglorious stubbornness of theirs. When finished, the doors worked—naturally.” (Three years later the Prince of Monaco would build him an even bigger aerodrome, and the fifty-foot-high doors that Santos-Dumont requested would have the distinction of being the tallest working doors in the world.)

      While the Saint-Cloud aerodrome was under construction, Santos-Dumont continued to fly No. 3, which did not require the elaborate preparations that its predecessors did. “To fill five hundred cubic mètres with hydrogen takes all day, whereas with the ordinary burning gas it takes only an hour,” he told the New York Herald. “Think how much time is saved! I have only to look out my window and see what are the weather indications, and if they prove favorable I am in my balloon an hour afterward.” Because he no longer ascended in bad weather, and the airship was demonstrably more stable than its predecessors, the flights were by and large uneventful, until the final one, when the rudder fell off and he had to make an unplanned descent. Luckily there was an open space, the plain at Ivry, below him. He made dozens of trips in No. 3, and set a record for the longest time aloft, twenty-three hours.

      He would have designed a new rudder for No. 3 if it were not for a challenge laid down at a meeting of the Paris Aéro Club in April 1900. To stimulate aerostation in the new century, Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe, a petroleum magnate and founding member of the club, announced that he was offering a hundred thousand francs (twenty thousand dollars) to the first airship that “between May 1 and October 1, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, or 1904 should rise from the Parc d’Aérostation of the Aéro Club at St. Cloud and, without touching ground, and by its own self-contained means on board alone, describe a closed curve in such a way that the axis of the Eiffel Tower should be within the interior of the circuit, and return to the point of departure in the maximum time of half an hour. Should more than one accomplish the task in the same year, the one hundred thousand francs were to be divided in proportion to their respective times.” Deutsch added that if the prize was not claimed in any given year, he would, as a gesture of encouragement, award the interest on the hundred thousand francs to the aeronaut who had accomplished the most in the previous twelve months. Santos-Dumont, who had attended the Aéro Club meeting, told his friends that Deutsch would not have to part with the interest. СКАЧАТЬ