now a cliché but may have been original to him). He could not hear their voices. The only sounds were the faint barking of dogs and the occasional locomotive whistle.
They climbed much higher. A cloud passed in front of the sun, cooling the gas in the balloon, which started to wrinkle and descend, gently at first and then rapidly. “I was frightened,” said Santos-Dumont. “I did not feel myself falling, but I could see the earth coming swiftly up to us; and I knew what that meant!” The two men jettisoned ballast until they stabilized the balloon at an elevation of ten thousand feet. Santos-Dumont had discovered “the second great fact of spherical ballooning—we are masters of our altitude by the possession of a few kilos of sand!” They were now floating above a layer of clouds. “The sun cast the shadow of the balloon on this screen of dazzling whiteness,” he recalled, “while our own profiles, magnified to giant size, appeared in the middle of a triple rainbow! As we could no longer see the earth, all sensation of movement ceased. We might be going at storm speed and not know it. We could not even know the direction we were taking, save by descending below the clouds to regain our bearings!”
They knew they had been up in the air an hour when they heard the peal of church bells, the midday Angelus. Santos-Dumont, for whom every meal was a special occasion, declared that it was time for lunch. Machuron raised his eyebrows—he had not planned to descend so soon. But Santos-Dumont had no intention of returning either. With a mischievous look, he opened his valise and produced a sumptuous spread of hard-boiled eggs, roast beef, chicken, assorted cheeses, fruit, melting ice cream, and cake. To Machuron’s delight, he also uncorked a bottle of champagne, which they thought was particularly effervescent due to the reduced air pressure at the high elevation. Santos-Dumont pulled out two crystal glasses. As he offered a toast to his host, he explained that he had never before eaten in such a splendid setting. The heat of the sun boiled the clouds, “making them throw up rainbow jets of frozen vapor like giant sheaves of fireworks…. Lovely white spangles of the most delicate ice formation scatter here and there by magic, while flakes of snow form moment by moment out of nothingness, beneath our very eyes, and in our very drinking glasses!” No dining experience was complete for Santos-Dumont without an after-dinner liqueur and fine Brazilian coffee, which he carried in a thermos.
While the two aeronauts sipped Chartreuse, the very snow that was entertaining them was quietly building up on top of the balloon. At least Machuron was sober enough to keep checking the instruments. At one point the barometer shot up five millimeters, signaling that the balloon, weighted down by the precipitation, must be falling rapidly even though they could not feel any movement. Suddenly they were plunged into half-darkness as the balloon passed through a cloud. They could still make out the basket, the instruments, and the parts of the rigging that were nearest to them, but the balloon itself was invisible. “So we had for a moment the strange and delightful sensation of hanging in the void without support,” wrote Santos-Dumont, “of having lost our last ounce of weight in a limbo of nothingness.” They furiously threw out ballast. After a few minutes they emerged from the dark fog to find themselves only one thousand feet above a village—the balloon had plunged nine thousand feet. The two men took their bearings with a compass and compared the landmarks they saw with those on a map. “Soon we could identify roads, railways, villages, and forests,” Santos-Dumont said, “all hastening toward us from the horizon with the swiftness of the wind itself!” The wind was also gusting unpredictably, tossing the balloon from side to side and bouncing it up and down, making a soup of what remained of the roast beef and ice cream.
If this maiden voyage had taught Santos-Dumont the value of ballast in maintaining a balloon’s equilibrium, it also taught him the value of the guide rope for a smooth landing and takeoff. The thick guide rope, extending three hundred feet and dangling from the basket, served as an automatic brake whenever the balloon returned to earth with disquieting speed for whatever reason. And the reasons could be many: a downward stroke of wind, the accidental loss of gas, the accumulation of snow on the balloon envelope, or a cloud passing in front of the sun. When the balloon descended below three hundred feet, more and more of the guide rope came to rest on the ground, thereby lightening the weight of the craft and arresting its fall. Under the opposite condition, when the balloon was ascending too rapidly, the lifting of the guide rope off the ground increased the weight of the balloon, thereby slowing its rise.
The guide rope, though ingeniously simple and effective, also had its “inconveniences,” as Santos-Dumont charitably put it. “Its rubbing along the uneven surfaces of the ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, roads and houses, hedges and telegraph wires—gives violent shocks to the balloon,” he wrote later. “Or it may happen that the guide rope, rapidly unraveling the snarl in which it has twisted itself, catches hold of some asperity of the surface, or winds itself around the trunk or branches of a tree.” He was writing from experience. As Machuron prepared to land, the guide rope coiled itself around a large oak, bringing the balloon to an abrupt halt, throwing the two aeronauts backward in the basket. For a quarter of an hour, the captured balloon, battered by the wind, kept them “shaking like a salad basket.”
Machuron used the occasion to dissuade Santos-Dumont from constructing a powered balloon. “Observe the treachery and vindictiveness of the wind!” he shouted. “We are tied to the tree, yet see what force it tries to jerk us loose!” At that moment Santos-Dumont was thrown again into the bottom of the basket. “What screw propeller could hold a course against it?” Machuron continued. “What elongated balloon would not double up and take you flying to destruction?”
They eventually managed to free themselves from the oak by throwing out most of the remaining ballast. But the adventure was not over. “The lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward,” recalled Santos-Dumont, “and pierced the clouds like a cannonball. Indeed, it threatened to reach dangerous heights, considering the little ballast we had remaining in store for use in descending.” The experienced Machuron had one last trick: He opened the balloon’s valve to let gas escape and the balloon began to descend again toward an open field, the guide rope behaving itself this time as it came in contact with the ground. The field would normally have been an ideal landing spot, but a strong crosswind promised a harsh touchdown in so open an area. Fortune smiled on Santos-Dumont, though, and as the balloon fell, after nearly two hours aloft, it drifted toward the edge of the field.
“The Forest of Fontainebleau was hurrying toward us,” Santos-Dumont recalled. “In a few moments we had turned the extremity of the wood, sacrificing our last handful of ballast. The trees now protected us from the violence of the wind; and we cast anchor, at the same time opening wide the emergency valve for the wholesale escape of gas.” They landed smoothly, without any damage, climbed out of the basket, and watched the balloon expire. “Stretched out in the field, it was losing the remains of its gas in convulsive agitations,” Santos-Dumont said, “like a great bird that dies beating its wings.” And they could not have found a better deathbed, the well-manicured grounds of the Château de la Ferrière, owned by Alphonse de Rothschild, the seventy-year-old head of the Bank of France, the man responsible for the wealth of his famous family. Servants and laborers helped the two aeronauts fold up the collapsed balloon; stuff it, the rigging, and the lunch-table settings into the basket; and transport all 440 pounds to the nearest railway station two and a half miles away. On the sixty-mile train trip back to Paris, Santos-Dumont told Machuron that aeronautics was his calling. The balloon maker promised to build him his own pear-shaped balloon. Santos-Dumont’s only disappointment was that he would have to put on hold his dream of a steerable airship. The two men and their balloon were back in Paris by 6:00 P.M. Santos-Dumont pronounced the day a success and started thinking about what he was going to have for dinner.
Machuron
