of intelligent discourse and decadence. The cafés were places for learned conversation not just about art and literature but scientific and technological developments like the discovery of X rays and the construction of the Paris metro. People who fashioned themselves intellectuals stayed up all night talking, pausing to inject themselves with morphine in gold-plated syringes, sip Vin Coca Mariani (a wine permeated with cocaine), or snack on strawberries soaked in ether. End-of-the-century Paris was forgiving to someone like Santos-Dumont who was not sure about his sexuality. The avant-garde café crowd promoted erotic experimentation, and homosexuality became so fashionable that every hipster had to try it. “All remarkable women do it,” the wife of a banker wrote, “but it’s very difficult. One has to take lessons.”
In 1897, Santos-Dumont returned home to Brazil and reflected on his five years in Paris. With Garcia’s guidance, he had mastered the sciences. He was thankful for that, and yet there were things he wished he had done. “I regretted bitterly that I had not persevered in my attempt to make a balloon ascent,” he wrote. “At that distance, far from ballooning possibilities, even the high prices demanded by the aeronauts seemed to me of secondary importance.”
Before heading back to Paris, he visited a bookstore in Rio and purchased a copy of Andrée’s Balloon Expedition, In Search of the North Pole. The book, written by the Paris balloon makers Henri Lachambre and Alexis Machuron, proved to be a great diversion on the long steamship passage. Lachambre and Machuron had built a huge balloon called the Eagle for the young Swedish scientist Salomon August Andrée, who had been planning for more than a decade to make the first balloon expedition to the North Pole. Andrée finally got the opportunity on July 11, 1897, when he ascended from Dane’s Island, off the north coast of Norway near Spitsbergen, for a 2,300-mile journey that he hoped to complete in six days. Accompanying him were two companions, three dozen carrier pigeons, a boat, a stove, sleds, tents, sundry scientific instruments, cameras, and enough food and birdseed to last four months. Although the Eagle was not powered, Andrée had cleverly equipped it with large sails so that he could steer it on a course that could deviate by as much as thirty degrees from the wind.
Lachambre and Machuron had published their book within days of Andrée’s ascent, before it was evident what had happened to him. They reported that one carrier pigeon had delivered an encouraging message: “13th July, 12:30 P.M., 82.2° N. Lat., 15.5° E. Long. Good progress toward the north. All goes well on board. This message is the third by pigeon. Andrée.” After Santos-Dumont disembarked in France, he learned that only one other pigeon had made it back. The Andrée expedition was the talk of Paris cafés. The prevailing sentiment was that he would not return, and indeed that turned out to be the case. Three decades would pass before a hunting party discovered Andrée’s body and diary on White Island, a deserted expanse of pack ice only 150 miles from the Eagle’s starting point. The sails had apparently failed, and Andrée could not steer the balloon out of a fierce snowstorm that finally forced it down. He described in the diary how he and his companions had survived on lichen and seal blubber for three months. Then the journal entries ended. The brutal winter had set in, and the men froze to death in a blizzard.
In his own journal, Santos-Dumont noted how much Andrée’s story had affected him: “The reading of the book during the long voyage proved a revelation to me, and I finished by studying it like a textbook. Its description of materials and prices opened my eyes. At last I saw clearly. Andrée’s immense balloon—a reproduction of whose photograph on the book cover showed how those that gave it the final varnishing climbed up its sides and over its summit like a mountain—cost only 40,000 francs to construct and equip fully! I determined that, on arriving in Paris, I would cease consulting professional aeronauts and would make the acquaintance of constructors.”
Santos-Dumont saw a little of himself in Salomon Andrée. He liked Andrée’s adventurous spirit and shared his belief in the unbounded power of technology to end human misery. Andrée had described, in a series of sanguine articles, the likely benefits that the electric light and other new inventions would have on human evolution, liberty, hygiene, athletics, language, architecture, military planning, home life, marriage, and education. Despite his loquaciousness in print, Andrée was a man of few words at public functions, and Santos-Dumont too was tongue-tied at formal affairs.
Both men shunned intimate relationships with women and never married. “In married life, one has to deal with factors which cannot be arranged according to a plan,” Andrée wrote. “It is altogether too great a risk to bind oneself into a condition of things where another individual would be fully entitled—and what right would I have to repress this individuality?—to demand the same place in my life that I myself occupied! As soon as I feel any heart-leaves sprouting, I hasten to uproot them, for I know that any feeling which I allowed to live would become so strong that I should not dare to submit to it.”
[CHAPTER 3] FIRST FLIGHT VAUGIRARD, 1897
IN THE FALL of 1897, Santos-Dumont sought out the builders of Andrée’s balloon, in the hope that the architects of such a risky and fanciful project as the first flight to the North Pole would be receptive to his aeronautical interests. Santos-Dumont visited Lachambre and Machuron in their Parc d’Aérostation in Vaugirard, a town that had been incorporated into Paris. The two men warmed to him at once. They did not dismiss him as a feckless dreamer; nor did they demand a large fee or exaggerate the obvious dangers of aerostation. “When I asked M. Lachambre how much it would cost me to make a short trip in one of his balloons,” Santos-Dumont recalled, “his reply so astonished me that I asked him to repeat it.”
“For a long trip of three or four hours,” Lachambre said, “it will cost you 250 francs, all expenses and return of balloon by rail included.”
“And the damages?” Santos-Dumont asked.
“We shall not do any damage!” he replied, laughing. Santos-Dumont accepted the deal before Lachambre had a chance to change his mind. Machuron offered to take him up the next day.
Santos-Dumont did not trust any of his beloved motorized vehicles to get him to the ascension on time, so he traveled by horse-cab, arriving early in Vaugirard so that he could watch the preparations. The deflated balloon lay flat and formless on the grass. On Lachambre’s order, the workmen turned on the gas and the balloon slowly swelled into a forty-foot-diameter sphere, holding 26,500 cubic feet of gas. By 11:00 A.M. the preparations were complete. A mild breeze was gently rocking the narrow wicker basket; Machuron stood in one corner, and opposite him was the diminutive Brazilian, impatient and fidgety, clutching a large bag of sand ballast so that the basket would not tip too much in the direction of Machuron, who weighed twice as much as he. “Let go, all!” Machuron yelled. The workmen released the balloon, and Santos-Dumont’s first sensation in the air was that the wind had ceased altogether.
“The air seemed motionless around us,” recalled Santos-Dumont. “We were off, going at the speed of the air current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed, for us, there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt movement forward and upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves, but the earth that sinks down and away.” The other surprise was that the horizon appeared elevated: “At the bottom of the abyss which already opened 1500 yards below us, the earth, instead of appearing round like a ball, shows concave like a bowl by a peculiar phenomenon of refraction whose effect is to lift up constantly to the aëronaut’s eyes the circle
