Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight. Paul Hoffman
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Название: Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight
Автор: Paul Hoffman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007441082
isbn:
The Wright brothers had a different motivation from Santos-Dumont in developing the plane. They were not idealists. They did not dream about bringing distant peoples together. They were not thrill-seekers. They did not rhapsodize about the joys of flying or preach a kind of aerial spirituality. They were not playful men and certainly did not host dinners at high tables. They were intent on building flying machines for financial gain, and when the U.S. government initially refused to fund them, they had no moral compunctions about approaching foreign militaries.
In the aftermath of the Great War, when it was evident that the plane could be used as a weapon of mass destruction, Santos-Dumont was the first aeronaut to press for the demilitarization of aircraft. His was a lonely voice, calling on heads of state to decommission their bombers. Orville Wright did not join his call (and Wilbur by then was dead).
Santos-Dumont was perhaps the most revered man in Paris in the first years of the twentieth century. His dapper countenance stared out from cigar boxes, matchbooks, and dinner plates. Fashion designers did a brisk business with replicas of his trademark panama hat and the stiff, high shirt collars that he favored. Toy makers could not turn out enough models of his balloons. Even French bakers honored him, offering cigar-shaped pastries decorated in the colors of the Brazilian flag.
He was famous on both sides of the English Channel—indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic. “When the names of those who have occupied outstanding positions in the world have been forgotten,” the London Times declared in 1901, “there will be a name which will remain in our memory, that of Santos-Dumont.”
The irony in the Times’s statement of course is that today he is barely remembered outside Brazil, where he is still a hero of mythic proportion. A town, a major airport, and dozens of streets are named for him. The mere mention of his name brings a smile to most Brazilians, as they picture the bygone era when their daring countryman proudly ruled the skies in a tiny balloon. As the rest of the world has largely forgotten Santos-Dumont, Brazilians themselves, in their romanticizing of the man in poems, songs, statues, busts, paintings, biographies, and memorial celebrations, have neglected his darker side. He was a tortured genius, a free spirit who strove to escape the confines of gravity, the peer pressure of his aeronautical confreres, the isolation of his rural upbringing, the small-mindedness of science’s ruling elders, the conformity of married life, the stereotypes of gender, and even the fate of his own cherished invention.
Many boys have dreamed of owning a personal flying machine, a kind of winged car that could take off and land anywhere, without the need of a runway. No one in the twenty-first century has realized that dream. A few elite corporate moguls have come close: They commute to work by helicopter, flying between backyard landing pads and office rooftops. But even a globe-trotting captain of industry cannot fly to his favorite restaurant, the theater, or the store. Only one man in history has enjoyed that freedom. His name was Alberto Santos-Dumont, and his aerial steed was an engine-driven balloon.
[CHAPTER 1] ARRIVAL MINAS GERAIS, 1873
IN THE LATE eighteenth century, the professional class in Brazil was chafing after three hundred years of Portuguese rule. Deprived of books and newspapers, because the royal family back in Lisbon did not want them to acquire rebellious ideas, the Brazilian colonists nonetheless learned about the American Revolution and the egalitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment. In 1789, a dentist and second lieutenant in the army named Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, better known by his nickname Tiradentes (“tooth-puller”), helped organize Brazil’s first independence movement, Inconfidência Mineira, and conspired with other army officers, gold-mine owners, priests, and lawyers to oust the Visconde of Barbacena, the Portuguese representative who governed the state of Minas Gerais. An informer within the movement tipped off the authorities, and Tiradentes was arrested before he could unseat the governor. To discourage other potential fomenters, the authorities hung the dentist in public, hacked his body to pieces, and propped his head and other organs on prominent signposts, all the while proclaiming their loyalty to the queen of Portugal, Dona Maria, also known as the Crazy One because of her incapacitating melancholy.
After making an example of Tiradentes, the Portuguese crown was lulled into a false sense of security that insurrection was no longer possible in Brazil. The royal family had more pressing things on their minds. Napoleon Bonaparte was on the warpath in Western Europe. In 1807, his forces moved into Portugal, the one country that was still a leak in his European-wide trade blockade against his enemy Great Britain. Prince Dom João VI, who had ruled Portugal since 1792, when his mother was officially declared insane, decided to get out of harm’s way by shifting the entire royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. It was the first time a European monarchy set up court in the New World. A convoy of ships escorted by the British navy transported the royal family and some ten thousand top Portuguese minds—Supreme Court justices, bankers, clergymen, doctors, and a surgeon named Joaquim José dos Santos. The man was Santos-Dumont’s maternal grandfather.
When the Crazy One died in 1816, Dom João assumed the throne. He encouraged immigration to Brazil not just from Portugal but from Spain, France, and Britain. He made the country attractive to professionals by lifting the ban on reading material. He opened theaters and libraries and established scientific and literary academies. He promoted Brazil as offering the best of European culture with a more pleasant climate, exotic plants and animals, and enough land that a person need never see his neighbor. One of the tens of thousands of immigrants lured by this image was Francois Honoré Dumont, a Parisian jeweler, who moved with his wife to Brazil. He was Santos-Dumont’s paternal grandfather.
Brazil’s new residents and its Portuguese population benefited from the royal presence in Rio de Janeiro, but disciples of Tiradentes continued to incite rebellion among native Brazilians who felt themselves to be second-class citizens. There were sporadic acts of insurrection, but none really threatened Dom João’s rule. The king’s most serious challenge was in Portugal itself. Since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, there had been a power vacuum in Lisbon. In April 1821, Dom João, fearing that someone in Portugal might try to usurp his throne, sailed home with five thousand loyal supporters. He left behind his son Pedro as prince regent, a decision he would regret. Pedro was alarmed by the growing independence movement in Brazil itself, and he made the pragmatic decision to sever ties with both his father and Portugal and declare Brazil an independent entity. On December 1, 1821, the disloyal son, only twenty-four years of age, was crowned the first emperor of Brazil, making the country the only constitutional monarchy in Latin America, among republics cast off from the Spanish Empire. It would remain that way until 1899.
Dom Pedro I’s reign lasted a decade. He was more imperial than his father and showed little interest in working with the legislature empowered by Brazil’s new constitution. In 1831, faced with congressmen conspiring against him, he abdicated his throne, fled the country, and left behind as the sovereign his five-year-old son, also named Pedro. The constitution СКАЧАТЬ