and actually worked to counteract the balloon’s rise. The lift came not from the imprisoned smoke but the captured hot air, which was lighter than the cooler ambient air. Most of the observers did not care why the spectacular blue-and-gold balloon was aloft—they just marveled at the fact that it was. And the world’s first aerial travelers, a sheep, a rooster, and a duck, were suspended in a cage below the balloon. The animals emerged unscathed from their two-mile trip to the forest of Vaucresson, except for the rooster, whose right wing had suffered a nasty kick from the sheep.
Charles and the Montgolfiers independently told the king that on the next ascension they themselves would be the passengers, but his majesty forbade such valuable subjects from risking their lives. Instead he offered prisoners as the first pilots, proposing to set them free if they survived. But Charles ultimately convinced him that the first person aloft should be a man of science who could describe the voyage if he were fortunate enough to make it back. The honor went to Francis Pilâtre de Rozier, a distinguished member of the Academy of Sciences who was the superintendent of the king’s natural-history collection. On October 15, 1783, he ascended in a captive balloon (one tethered to the ground), the hot air replenished by the burning of straw and wood in an iron basket hung below the balloon. Having found it easy to stoke the fire when he was in the air, Pilâtre de Rozier and a companion, the Marquis d’Arlandes, went up in a free balloon for the first time on November 21. Ascending from the Bois de Boulogne at 1:54 P.M., they reached an elevation of five hundred to one thousand feet and, after twenty-five minutes, descended beyond the Paris city limits, some nine thousand yards from where they had started. Ten days later, Charles and Ainé Robert had the honor of being the first people to ascend in a hydrogen balloon, in a two-hour journey that began in the Tuileries and ended twenty-seven miles away in the town of Nesle.
Within a few months of Charles’s trip, the skies of Paris were populated with both hydrogen balloons, known as charlières, and montgolfières (hot-air balloons). Charlières were safer because they did not require an open flame, but montgolfières were more practical because hydrogen was expensive and scarce. “Balloonomania,” as historian Lee Kennett called it, was sweeping France: “The decade of the 1780s was in many ways a frivolous and jaded age, and it took the new ‘aerostatic machines’ to its heart. Ascensions became as fashionable as costume balls, and so numerous that the Paris city authorities had to issue an ordinance governing their use—the world’s first air traffic regulations. The distinctive form of the balloon lent itself to objects as diverse as chair backs and snuff boxes.”
IN 1883, Alberto Santos-Dumont, age ten, had not yet seen a balloon, but he duplicated the Mongolfiers’ invention in miniature. Working from illustrations in books, he made handheld balloons out of tissue paper and filled them with hot air from the stove flame. At holiday celebrations he demonstrated the gasbags to the field hands. Even his parents, who did not approve of his incendiary experiments, could not conceal their amazement when the montgolfières soared higher than the house. He also made a toy wooden plane whose propeller, or “air screw” as it was called in those days, was powered by a wound-up rubber string.
From reading Verne, Alberto was convinced that people had already gone beyond the hot-air balloon and flown airships, also known as dirigibles (steerable powered balloons). His family and childhood friends tried to disabuse him of the notion. He used to play a game with the other children called Pigeon flies! One boy was chosen as the leader, and he would shout, “Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!” and so on. “At each call we were supposed to raise our fingers,” Santos-Dumont wrote many years later. “Sometimes, however, he would call out: ‘Dog flies! Fox flies!’ or some other like impossibility to catch us. If anyone raised a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called ‘Man flies!’ for at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was, hoping that someday the laugh would be on my side.”
It was not until Alberto was fifteen that he actually saw a manned balloon. At a fair in São Paulo, in 1888, he watched a performer ascend in a nearly spherical gasbag and descend by parachute. Alberto’s imagination took off:
In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, when the hum of insects, punctuated by the far-off cry of some bird, lulled me, I would lie in the shade of the veranda and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to fall in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of the aerial ocean, I, too, devised airships and flying machines in my imagination.
These imaginings I kept to myself. In those days, in Brazil, to talk of inventing a flying machine, or dirigible balloon, would have been to stamp one’s self as unbalanced and visionary. Spherical balloonists were looked on as daring professionals not differing greatly from acrobats; and for the son of a planter to dream of emulating them would have been almost a social sin.
Santos-Dumont’s parents were politically conservative. They supported the emperor, whose railroad Henrique had eagerly constructed. But they could not keep their curious son from being exposed to all sorts of ideologies that they found distasteful. When Alberto was in the coffee-processing plant, even though he generally kept to himself, he would overhear conversations. Sometimes the workers talked about the democratic movement and spoke with passion of the patriot Tiradentes. The revolutionary dentist had become the hero of ordinary Brazilians, and his life was being turned into myth, as would Santos-Dumont’s years later. Tiradentes was depicted in numerous paintings as a bearded Christ-like figure, although in reality he was clean-shaven and short-haired. The day of his execution, April 21, became a national holiday, which is still celebrated today. Young Alberto had little interest in politics, and obviously no desire to be drawn and quartered, but he was attracted to the immortality that Tiradentes had achieved. He decided then that he wanted to do something with his life that would stir the hearts of men and women—an extraordinary aspiration for an adolescent to have. He had no idea what profession he would take up—it may not even have crossed his mind that one could become an aeronaut or an inventor. But he knew that whatever he did, it should have a profound impact on the people around him. Certainly no other aeronautical pioneer had such grand ambitions a decade before taking to the air.
[CHAPTER 2] “A MOST DANGEROUS PLACE FOR A BOY” PARIS, 1891
SANTOS-DUMONT’S INSULAR world expanded when he was eighteen. His sixty-year-old father, who still lorded over both his family and the plantation, was thrown from his horse and suffered a severe concussion and partial paralysis. When he did not fully recover, Henrique abruptly sold the coffee business for $6 million and headed to Europe in search of medical treatment with his wife and Alberto in tow. The threesome took a steamer to Lisbon. After a brief respite in Oporto, where two of Alberto’s sisters had taken up residence with their Portuguese husbands, two brothers by the name of Villares (and a third sister back in Brazil was married to yet another Villares brother), they boarded a train for Paris. Henrique had faith that the city’s doctors would cure him. After all, it was the place where Louis Pasteur was performing medical miracles, saving children from rabid canines by vaccinating them.
From the moment in 1891 when Santos-Dumont disembarked at the Gare d’Orléans, he fell in love with the city. “All good Americans are said to go to Paris when they die,” he wrote. For a teenager who loved inventions, fin de siècle Paris represented “everything that is powerful and progressive.” He lost no time immersing himself in the city’s technological wonders. On his first day, he visited the two-year-old Eiffel Tower, which
