Early Ages of Flight

It was a still September day in 1898 when Alberto Santos-Dumont, a wealthy young Brazilian, was ready to fly over Paris in an ‘airship’. This strange invention was a cigar-shaped bag of varnished silk, eighty feet long, filled with hydrogen and driven by a three-and-a-half horse-power petrol engine. Experienced balloonists has told Santos-Dumont that he would shake himself to pieces if he used a petrol engine of a tree, and found that, buzzing away in mid-air, it was as effective off the ground as on it. The experts said that the hydrogen in the bag would catch fire and explode. Santos-Dumont thought otherwise. He announced that he would take off from a park in Paris. There, before a gaping crowd, he climbed into his ‘aerial automobile’. It looked like a wicker laundry-basket with a petrol engine and two-bladed propeller, hung by cords from a balloon. Ropes dangled from the bag of the airship. “Let go, everyone! “ he shouted. The crew fell back, the engine started, he propeller turned and the Santos-Dumont No. 1 soared up in the air triumphantly. Man flies! The crowd cheered and wept. It was the first time any of them had ever seen a human being steering himself through the air. Suddenly a little girl shouted, “ it’s broken!” it was. The air-pump had failed, and the great silk bag was crumpling in the middle. It was a matter of moments before it would crash. Santos-Dumont was now over a field where some boys were flying kites. “ Take my guide rope,” he shouted as soon as his dangling ropes touched the ground, “and run against the wind, like a kite!” . They did so, and the wind checked his fall. “In this way,” he reported later. “ I was saved for the first time.” But he had flown. He had gone up under his own power, and had steered his airship as he pleased. Santos-Dumont was the first man ever to fly with a petrol engine. At the time of his first triumph, Santos-Dumont was only twenty-five years old. He was born in Brazil in 1873, one of ten children of a Sao Paulo coffee king. On his father’s huge plantations the most up-to-date machinery of the day was used, and here the boy’s interest in mechanical things began to develop. Inspired by the novels of Jules Verne, he built toy balloons and dreamed of a ship that would ago through the air. In his spare time he worked in the plantation workshops as a mechanic. At the university in Rio de Janeiro he studied science, then went to Paris to study aeronautics. To his astonishment, Santos-Dumont found that while there were a number of balloons in Paris, there was non that could be steered. A steam airship and an electric airship had been tried, but the former had caught fire and the latter had blown up. Unfortunately, the men in them had been killed. Nevertheless, Santos-Dumont began experiments which led at last to his triumph in 1898. Encouraged by this success, he built four more mechanics. Then he was ready to try for a large money prize which was offered to the man who could fly round the Eiffel Tower and back to St. Cloud (a town not far from Paris) in half an hour. On August 8th, 1901, in the Santos-Dumont No.5 he sailed from the starting point to the Eiffel Tower in nine minutes. It looked as if he had the prize in his grasp. But as he reached the tower there was a violent jerk on the cords which held his wicker basket. Those in front slackened, and the propeller blades cut into them. In a few seconds Santos-Dumont would be thrown into space. In a flash he turned off the engine, and the propeller fluttered to a stop. The big machine, half folded up, drifted with the wind until it bumped into the roof of a building. There was a loud explosion, and the Santos-Dumont No-5- and the Santos-Dumont-disappeared from sight. Paris firemen galloped to the scene to find him clinging to a narrow window-ledge a hundred feet above the ground. The long keel of the airship had come down across the roofs of two houses and had held firm, saving him from death. Undismayed, the inventor gave the order for Santos-Dumont No.6 that very night, and in a month he was in the air, steering for the Eiffel Tower once more. An immense crowd watched him. As before, the motor almost stopped. Santos-Dumont left the controls, made an adjustment, then flew triumphantly back to the starting point-this time to win the prize, which he promptly divided between his ground crew and the poor people of Paris. Alberto Santos-Dumont was forty years ahead of his time. He foresaw a new world, united by airways, along which passengers, mails and goods would be carried. He wanted to share his vision with the world, but leading men of the day did not agree with his beliefs. The news-papers , in reporting his many crashes, nicknamed him ‘ Santos-Dismount’. However, he continued his efforts to improve his airships. They were still far from perfect- they could fly only in calm weather. The next step was to build a heavier-than –air machine. After many experiments with machines that were half aeroplane, half balloon, he finally succeeded. In 1906, he made the world’s first public flight of a heavier-than-air machine. Later he developed the first successful monoplanes, built of bamboo and silk, and weighing, with engine and owner, only two hundred and forty-two pounds. He called them his ‘Dragonflies’. In 1909, in his second Dragonfly, he set a speed record by travelling five miles at 591/2 miles per hour. It was his last triumph; but today Santos-Dumont’s influence is seen of every hand. The giant passenger liners and cargo carriers of the air- aerial ties that will unite lands and peoples as nothing else can-have a common ancestor in his Santos-Dumont No. 1 and Dragonfly.