Reading the autobiography of my idol, Alberto Santos=Dumont.
He was a Brazilian inventor who designed and flew the first practical airplane.
The Wright Bros achieved the first powered, heavier than air flight. A huge deal! Alberto met & collaborated with them, and used their wing warping system for his plane.
But the Wright Bros flyer could only launch from a rail. It had to be retrieved and rolled back to the starting point.
Alberto's could land in any flat field and take off again.
But planes are only half the story.
I said the Wright Bros achieved the first powered, heavier than air flight.
But Alberto achieved the first powered flight a few years before they did: in a dirigible balloon.
This dude just showed up in Paris one day, asked some balloonists to teach him how it was done, then changed the ballooning game forever by throwing a motorcycle engine on it.
Everyone told him it was impossible. He won 100,000 francs cruising around the Eiffel Tower.
By the way, Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian citizen (Santos, from his mother), but his father was French (Dumont). Since he spent most of his career working out of Paris, the French papers liked to downplay his Brazilian heritage and would just call him Alberto Dumont.
So, to push back against this, he started signing his name Alberto Santos=Dumont, which I think is awesome. Everything about this guy makes him like more of a historic neurodivergent power icon.
Something I'm taking away from this book is he was really able to connect with, inspire, & take inspiration from the everyday people in Paris.
He refused to keep any of the prize money, since he was already wealthy enough. He donated 75,000 to be distributed to poor folks in Paris, and split the rest amongst his employees (mechanics, ground crew, etc).
In his first experimental flight of a dirigible balloon -- AKA, the first powered flight by any human in history -- he was about to crash.
His balloon was going down and he was having engine trouble, so he couldn't get moving fast enough to gain altitude.
But there were some boys playing with kites nearby. Alberto yelled at them to grab the guide rope hanging below his balloon and pull. The boys immediately got it. Just the force of them pulling against the rope was enough to avoid a catastrophic crash.
Kids playing around directly contributed to the development of flight!
Also, he was a first-gen electric car guy
“While experimenting I was tied down to Paris. I could take no long trips, and the petroleum automobile, with its wonderful facility for finding fuel in every hamlet, lost its greatest use in my eyes. In 1898 I happened to see what was to me an unknown make of light American electric buggy. It appealed alike to my eye, my needs, and my reason, and I bought it. I have never had cause to regret the purchase. It serves me for running about Paris, and it goes lightly, noiselessly, and without odour.”
He introduced a ton of innovations that might seem obvious to us in retrospect, but weren't obvious at the time.
Like he built his balloons out of Japanese silk instead of canvas, which was lighter and tougher. He used piano wire instead of ropes for the same reason. Basically he made better balloons by consistently going off-script and disregarding what the "traditional balloonist" advice was.
The previous big attempt at a dirigible (1860's) failed because it had a heavy steam engine that also spewed red-hot ashes, which is.. a bad idea to mix with hydrogen.
Alberto was like, but now we have these little petrol engines from motorcycles. They're lighter and the exhaust can be piped downward, away from the balloon, while the hydrogen vents upward, in the opposite direction.
No one listened, they just said "mixing petrol and hydrogen is too dangerous"
Turns out it worked... fine
He has some pretty eloquent stuff in here, where he talks about how the development of aeronautic tech was like an insect starting as an egg (balloons), going through a coccoon stage (dirigibles), and emerging as fully formed, beautiful and powerful butterflies (airplanes).
People talk about dudes being ahead of their time, but this dude was like. Ahead of every time. Maybe outside of time. Truly a visionary.
This was his first practical airship, "No. 6," and it basically has everything that a modern one would have. Honestly, the designs haven't changed that much. That dark patch in the bottom of the balloon is a ballonet filled with an air pump, to retain the rigidity of the larger balloon as the hydrogen gas expands and contracts due to heat.
He's got a solid "keel," which has shifting weights to control pitch, a rudder to steer with, and a propellor attached to the central motor by a long shaft.
My personal favorite of his airships is "No. 9" which he called his "Runabout." This dude would just ride this bad boy into Paris for a day, park it on the roof of his favorite cafe, and go get coffee.
The first female pilot of a flying machine in history? Was some Cuban high society lady he was trying to impress. She was stoked and kept coming by his workshop, he was just like "hell yeah bb girl, you can totally fly my airship"
This is real life. This really happened in the fucking 1890's.
I feel like even amongst the incredibly small group of aviation nerds in the USA who even know who Santos=Dumont is, his accomplishments as an architect aren't appreciated. In addition to building all of these airships, he also had to build places to store them in. Some of those hangars ended up being some of the largest buildings in Europe for a few years, with huge doors on rails that, again, people told him were too big and would collapse in on themselves.
This is an early, small one
lobelia
sidereal
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Rachel Gustave Lee Mathes
Christine Malec