could have ascended from a more secluded spot, but he had confidence in Brazil and wanted to show it off to the many curiosity seekers in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Because Lachambre had built a hydrogen plant there, it was also a convenient place. The little balloon with disproportionately long rigging proved equal to the challenge. Santos-Dumont showed unusual restraint in leaving behind his substantial lunch basket so that Brazil could hold the maximum amount of ballast, sixty-six pounds of sand. Although Brazil contained only one-seventh the hydrogen gas of a typical balloon, it easily carried him and the ballast aloft. As Machuron and Lachambre anxiously watched from the ground, he demonstrated Brazil’s stability by making a big show of moving around in the basket. Relieved, the two men helped themselves to a bottle of champagne that he had left behind. After the smooth descent, Santos-Dumont pulled the rip cord, waited a short while for the balloon to deflate, and packed the whole thing into his valise.
The flawless flight gave him confidence. If the veteran aeronauts had misjudged the stability of Brazil and underestimated the strength of Japanese silk, could they not also be wrong about the difficulties of building a steerable balloon? How could they be so sure that a propeller-driven airship would collapse in a strong wind? What if he changed the shape of the balloon from a near sphere to an elongated cylinder? Instead of being bandied about by the wind, would it not “cut the air”?
What eluded him at first was the power source. The petroleum engine was an unlikely candidate because it was unreliable as well as deafening and foul-smelling—characteristics that would detract from the tranquillity of ballooning. Petroleum engines in automobiles seemed to have minds of their own, slowing down and speeding up and conking out at will, which was bad enough if you had a road under you but unacceptable in the air.
Santos-Dumont had acquired half a dozen automobiles since his Peugeot roadster. Although he was not satisfied with their performance, he enjoyed taking the sputtering vehicles for a spin. His notion of an autumn holiday was driving a six-horsepower Panhard six hundred miles from Paris to Nice; he made it in fifty-four hours, stopping often to make minor repairs and tweak the engine but not to sleep. He never made a long road trip again, however, because he could not stand to be away from his balloons.
Eventually he had even stopped using his cars for everyday driving. “I was once enamored of petroleum automobiles because of their freedom,” he told a journalist some years later. “You can buy the essence everywhere: and so, at a moment’s notice, one is at liberty to start off for Rome or St. Petersburg. But when I discovered that I did not want to go to Rome or St. Petersburg, but only to take short trips about Paris, I went in for the electric buggy,” of a kind seldom seen in France.
In 1898, he imported a light electric vehicle from Chicago and “never had cause to regret the purchase.” Every day he went for a morning spin through the gardens of the Bois and on afternoon errands to the balloon makers’ workshop in Vaugirard and the Automobile Club in the place de la Concorde. The electric motor, aside from its reliability, had other advantages over the petroleum engine: It was quiet and odorless. But it was not suitable for air travel because, with its required batteries, it was much too heavy, and modifying it seemed unlikely. He knew that the French government in supporting Renard and Krebs’s efforts in the 1880s “had spent millions of francs on air-ships with electric motors whose plan had finally been abandoned chiefly because of the motor’s weight.”
One day, as he rode around Paris on a motorized De Dion tricycle, it occurred to him that he may have prematurely dismissed the petroleum motor. The single-cylinder tricycle engine, he realized, “happened to be very much perfected at the moment,” compared with the troublesome higher-powered petroleum engines in four-wheeled automobiles. Pound for pound the 1.75-horsepower motor in his De Dion was relatively powerful, although not strong enough to guide an airship. To increase the power, he planned to combine two of them. Usually he was cocky about his inventions, but this time he was not confident enough to experiment in public.
“I looked for the workshop of some little mechanic … in the central quarter of Paris,” recalled Santos-Dumont. “There I could have my plans executed under my own eyes and apply my own hands to the work. I found such a workshop in the Rue du Colisée. There I worked out a tandem of two cylinders of a petroleum motor, that is, their prolongation, one after the other, to work the same connecting rod, while fed by a single carburetor. To bring everything down to the minimum of weight, I cut out from each part what was not strictly necessary to solidity. In this way I realized something which was remarkable at the time—a 3½ horse-power motor weighing only sixty-six pounds.”
He was pleased with his handiwork and set out to test the reconstructed engine in his tricycle. The Paris – Amsterdam automobile race was approaching, and he could not think of a better way to put the engine through its paces than to enter the competition. He was disappointed to learn that his souped-up vehicle did not meet the eligibility requirements but made the best of the situation by driving the tricycle alongside the race until he convinced himself that he could keep pace with the leaders. “I might have had one of the first places at the finish (the average speed was only 40 kilometers, or 25 miles per hour),” wrote Santos-Dumont, “had I not begun to fear that the jarring of my motor in so long and strenuous an effort might at last derange it and delay the more important work on my air-ship. I, therefore, fell out of the race while still at the head of the procession.”
The shaking of the motor reminded him of how the machines on the coffee plantation had fallen apart from their own vibrations. To ensure that his balloon engine would not have a similar fate, he drove his tricycle to the Bois in the middle of the night when the park was abandoned. He had hired two burly workmen to meet him there with heavy-duty ropes and paid them generously so that they would tell no one about the nocturnal experiments. He selected an ample tree with a thick branch just above his head. The workmen tossed the ropes over the branch and tied them securely to both ends of the tricycle. He mounted the vehicle and gave the order to hoist him five feet into the air. With the engine going full throttle, he sat there feeling the vibrations; they were noticeable but were much less than they were on the ground, where the engine had something to vibrate against. He pronounced the test a success, swore the workmen to secrecy once more, and sneaked out of the park before he could be arrested for violating the curfew.
When dawn broke, he told friends about his plan. “From the beginning everybody was against the idea,” he recalled. “I was told that an explosive gas engine would ignite the hydrogen in the balloon above it, and that the resulting explosion would end the experiment with my life.” He reminded his doubters that half a century earlier Henri Giffard had gone up in a hydrogen balloon powered by a fiery steam engine and although the flight was only a qualified success (because the engine was not powerful enough to work against the wind), Giffard made it down unscathed. The tricycle engine, Santos-Dumont insisted, would spit far fewer sparks and less smoke.
He wrote down his plans for a cigar-shaped airship and returned to the balloon makers in Vaugirard. When he tried to place an order for the balloon, Lachambre at first refused to take it, Santos-Dumont recalled, “saying that such a thing had never been made, and that he would not be responsible for my rashness.” Santos-Dumont reminded him that he had voiced similar doubts before building Brazil. He also promised to indemnify Lachambre against any explosion or damages and agreed to work on the engine himself far away from the workshop. Worn down by Santos-Dumont’s persistence, Lachambre “went to work without enthusiasm.”
Santos-Dumont’s guiding principle in designing the dirigible, which he called Santos-Dumont No. 1 in anticipation of building a series of airships, was to make it the smallest elongated balloon that
