THE DIRIGIBLE BALLOON OF M. SANTOS-DUMONT
accomplished by any other aëronaut. The case and precision with which he executes them have called forth the special admiration of competent authorities. Thus M. Armengaud jeune, the engineer, who, with the late M. Hureau de Villeneuve, was one of the founders of the Société de Navigation Aérienne, and was for a long time its vice-president, owns frankly: “I can say that what most strikes me is the ease with which M. Santos-Dumont, by inclining his aërostat at will, is able to dive or rise so readily in the air, and thus bring himself on a level with the more layers of the atmosphere by crossing through contrary currents.”
How M. Santos-Dumont made his sensational trips between St. Cloud and the Eiffel Tower, to show Paris what he could do, and incidentally to win the Deutsch Prize of one hundred thousand francs for the first dirigible balloon or flying-machine that should make the round trip in half an hour, is a matter of common knowledge. At the first official trial he missed winning the prize by only nine minutes. At the second he covered the distance from St. Cloud to the Eiffel Tower in eight minutes fifty seconds, turned the tower in forty seconds more, and in twelve minutes from his start was over the Bois de Boulogne on his return, with eighteen minutes to spare for the short distance remaining, when an accident, which might have been tragic, brought him to the ground with a wrecked air-ship.
The fact that M. Santos-Dumont really navigates the air is in itself the all-sufficient explanation of the universal chorus of wonderment that has gone up in response to the news of his performances. In Paris they have also excited recriminations from friends of the official military balloonists of the Chalais-Mendon Park, reaching to denial of the new air-ship’s novelty of invention and superiority of action. These military balloonists have been for many years the supposed possessors of the secret of dirigible ballooning. In a spirit of emulation more admirable than their first movement of detraction, they now announce the rapid construction of a steerable balloon of their own, and expected to offer “great resistance to the wind” and to be “capable of facing any weather.” In this way the young inventor will have to his honor not only his own performances, but the renewed efforts to which they shall have excited others. As for himself, he is occupied with his new balloon, the “Santos-Dumont No. 6,” his perfected model embodying all that he has learned from experimenting with the five which preceded it.
THE YEARS OF PREPARATION.
This young Brazilian inventor works for the love of the thing, not for lucre. He has never felt moved to apply for a single patent. He is a son of the “Coffee King” of Brazil, the proprietor of the Santos-Dumont plantations of São Paulo, the friend of the former Emperor Dom Pedro, and the benefactor and adviser of whole populations, Santos-Dumont, the father, although a Brazilian by birth and nationality, was French by descent, and had his technical education at the École Centrale (Arts and Industries) in Paris. Thanks to this education, he was the first to apply scientific methods to Brazilian coffee-culture, so that his plantations became the most flourishing in the land, having four million coffee-plants, occupying nine thousand laborers, comprising towns, manufactories, docks, and steamships, and served by one hundred and forty-six miles of private railroads. It was on these railroads that the young Santos-Dumont, before he was twelve years of age, drove locomotive-engines for his pleasure, and developed the taste for mechanics and invention which saved him, coming young and rich to Paris, from a life of mere sporting leisure. Until eighteen years of age, when he completed his education at the University of Rio de Janeiro, he remained in Brazil, always returning in vacation-time to the wild back-country of the plantation, where he became a mighty hunter, killing wild pigs and small tigers by preference, and great snakes out of a sense of duty.
Arriving in Europe in 1891, he made a tourist trip and ascended Mont Blanc. A part of 1891 and 1892 he spent between London and Brighton, perfecting his English, which he now speaks as well and as often as French; but he always returned to Paris, where in 1892 he was already driving automobiles. In 1894 he made a short trip to the United States, visiting New York, Chicago, and Boston. He did not begin ballooning until 1897, in the summer of which year he made his first ascent in company with the late M. Machuron. In the same year he made twenty other ascensions, a number of them unaccompanied, and became a reliable pilot of spherical balloons. He has, indeed, an ideal figure for the sport, uniting remarkable strength, agility, and coolness to his jockey’s weight of scarcely one hundred pounds. For this reason he was
