Scientifique counted nearly two hundred people who had lost their lives in balloons. Usually the deaths were nasty and quick. Each monthly issue of Aeronautical Journal, a British periodical that tracked developments in flight around the world, published an accident report. In October 1899, the journal described two fatal falls:
An Italian military captive balloon broke loose in July, carrying with it not only an officer and a corporal who were in the car, but also a soldier who had held on to the rope in hopes of keeping the balloon down. Those in the car tried to draw up the unfortunate man, but after a time he let go, and was dashed to pieces on the banks of the Tiber….
At Beuzeville, in France, an aeronaut, named Bernard, made an ascent, but finding his balloon had too little lift, he dispensed with the car, and sat upon the hoop. It is supposed that the gas from the balloon issuing through the neck must have asphyxiated him, for he was seen to let go his hold and fall to the ground from a great height, being killed on the spot.
Early in his planning to power an airship with an internal combustion engine, Santos-Dumont learned that Karl Wolfert, a Protestant minister, had had the same idea. Wolfert sought out the technical advice of automotive pioneer Gottlieb Daimler. On June 12, 1897, before an audience of the kaiser’s military advisers, Wolfert was set to ascend with Michael, his mechanic, and an officer of the Prussian army. Just before liftoff, the officer was overcome by a bout of claustrophobia in the balloon basket and bowed out of the trip. In Wolfert’s eagerness to take off and impress his distinguished observers, he neglected to add ballast to compensate for the missing officer’s weight. He and his mechanic ascended to exuberant cheers and waves from the crowd, and the poorly ballasted airship climbed rapidly to three thousand feet. Without warning, the gasbag exploded, and the airship was engulfed in flames. A horrible scream was heard, and then complete silence. The stunned audience scrambled out of their seats to avoid the falling, charred wreckage. Two bodies, burnt beyond recognition, smashed the seats. They had died in just the kind of accident that Santos-Dumont’s friends had feared.
On May 12, 1902, Santos-Dumont witnessed a similar accident in Paris that claimed the life of a fellow Brazilian, Augusto Severo. Inspired by Santos-Dumont’s own efforts, Severo had built an airship called Pax. On Severo’s first free ascent, accompanied by Saché, his machinist, sparks from the engine ignited the balloon and the hydrogen exploded. The frame of the airship plunged fifteen hundred feet and struck the one-story house at No. 89, avenue du Maine, collapsing its roof into the bedroom of a man named Clichy. The bed was on the opposite side of the room from the falling debris, and Clichy and his wife were awakened to the sight of a smashed airship and two disfigured bodies crashing through the ceiling. The Herald reported, “The machinist lay near the motor, stretched out upon the willow framework, which served as the flooring. His face had been terribly burned and his hands stripped of skin. His back was broken by the shock. M. Severo, who seems to have been standing at the moment of the shock, had nearly all his bones broken. He was scarcely recognizable. The shin bones protruded through the skin, and the lower jaw was torn from the socket.” Santos-Dumont was grief-stricken, but the grisly accident only reinforced his resolve to build a safe and reliable airship.
AERONAUTS WERE not the only martyrs for science at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The pace of industrial and scientific progress was so exhilarating that men and women were willing to sacrifice their own well-being to ensure that the progress continued. Scientists had always known that there was a general risk in exploring the uncharted—it was an occupational hazard. But in fin de siècle Europe and America, the stakes were raised. As the prestigious new American journal Science announced in 1883: “Higher than all, [science] must be devoted to the truth. It must cheerfully undertake the severest labor to secure it, and must deem no sacrifice too great in order to preserve it.” Science had become the new secular religion, and its practitioners, like the aeronauts, were expected to proceed with an important experiment even if it might kill them.
Physicians at that time had few reservations about experimenting on themselves. In Who Goes First?, Lawrence Altman told the story of the French doctors who developed the rabies vaccine (and whose reputation drew Santos-Dumont’s ailing father to Paris). Transmitted by the bite or lick of an infected animal, rabies was a relatively rare disease but notorious because of its horrifying symptoms—the slow but fatal destruction of the brain and central nervous system that leaves the victim gasping for air and shaking spasmodically—and its painful treatment—“cauterization of the bite with a red-hot iron.” In 1880, Louis Pasteur, who was already revered for his “pasteurization” of milk and beer, turned his attention to the disease. Within a year he had found a method of transmitting the virus, by injecting brain material extracted from a rabid dog into a healthy canine. Soon he developed a technique for treating the brain extract so that he could adjust the virulence of the inoculation. Rabies acquired through a bite had a long incubation period. By giving a bitten dog a series of progressively stronger inoculations, the animal would develop immunity to the disease before the incubation period was over. In 1884, Pasteur reported that twenty-three immunized dogs had warded off the disease, but he was still afraid of using the live vaccine on human beings. He rebuffed the emperor of Brazil, who had pleaded with him to apply the vaccine in a country where the incidence of rabies was much greater than in Europe.
“Experimentation permitted on animals,” Pasteur said, “is criminal when it comes to man.” Rabies was a fatal disease, so the failure of the vaccine promised almost certain death. In 1885, he told three of his colleagues that he wanted to test the vaccine on himself. He took off his shirt and begged them to inject him with the live virus. They refused. They did not want to be accomplices to the possible suicide of one of France’s most beloved scientists. Instead, the three men assumed the risk themselves. When weeks passed and none of them contracted the disease, Pasteur had the confidence to inoculate victims of rabid-dog bites. By 1886, he had treated 350 people and all but one was saved from the disease.
Medical self-experimentation was not confined to France. In 1892, seventy-four-year-old Max von Pettenkofer, the German public-health advocate who had purified Munich’s drinking water, purposely swallowed a solution of cholera bacteria. He believed that the bacteria could not by itself cause the often-fatal disease, that other cofactors he identified needed to be present as well. Because he personally did not possess the cofactors, his dramatic experiment was intended to prove that cholera bacteria was not the sole causative agent. He had diarrhea for a week but never became seriously ill, confirming for himself the validity of his theory (although science would ultimately prove him wrong and attribute his mild symptoms to immunity from an earlier, accidental exposure to cholera). Pettenkofer had prepared himself for the worst. “Even if I had deceived myself,” he wrote, “and the experiment endangered my life, I would have looked Death quietly in the eye for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honor. Health and life are, as I have so often said, very great earthly goods but not the highest for man. Man, if he will rise above the animals, must sacrifice both life and health for the higher ideals.”
On November 8, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X rays in his laboratory in Würzburg. The discovery was serendipitous: Roentgen had been experimenting with a cathode-ray tube in his darkened laboratory when he noticed that metals and other materials far from the tube were emitting an eerie green fluorescence. He suspected that radiation from the tube was causing the materials to glow but it could not be the familiar, short-distance cathode rays because they would not have reached the materials. When he inadvertently passed his hand between the tube and a glowing screen, he saw the outline of his bones. He hurriedly “photographed” his wife’s hand and announced his discovery to the world. The “penetrating” radiation captured the public’s imagination. X rays
