« MADD | Main | Second picture of the day »
September 16, 2004
Wings of Madness part 2
I do not read biographies very often, but Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight was well worth the read. It tells the life story of Alberto Santos-Dumont the son a rich Brazilian Coffee Plantation owner, who was obsessed with flight. He was determined to prove man could fly, became a fairly major international celebrity, and is responsible for several major innovations. As a child he was sure that man would someday fly and after moving to Paris went about finding balloonists who would take him up in the air. He was a skilled engineer and soon took to building his own balloons.
He was soon flying self propelled blimps over the rooftops of late 19th century Paris and was soon known by everyone in the city and eventually was known all over the industrial world. Some of the innovations he came up with over the years include using silk to make balloons, using wire for the supports, and making blimps the familiar shape they are today: cigar shaped with a basket underneath. He is also widely credited with other feats like making wristwatches on men fashionable. He needed them to keep track of time and it was too difficult to fly his machines and reach into his pocket. Before him only soldiers and women wore wristwatches. At first he had a dream of everyone owning their own personal aero ship and peacefully floating through the sky and his ships were prototypes of this. But he eventually realized, partly through the advice of Thomas Edison, that balloons needed to be smaller or nonexistent and engines more powerful to make air travel reasonable.
He then began his work on non-balloon ships, but the Wright brothers were way ahead of him and were the first to fly a fully self propelled plane. Soon they had surpassed him in celebrity and even though his self propelled machines could fly faster and farther in the short term, they were no where near as well controlled and did not have the same endurance as the Wright brothers machine, which eventually stayed up for several hours. As their fame grew, his waned and he went from being one the most popular men in France to being investigated for possibly being a German spy and grew frustrated with his life and eventually killed himself after destroying much of his research. This was ironic since he had cheated death dozens of time in his self built hydrogen filled machines.
Although he never met the Wright brothers, he was acquainted with many great scientists and inventors like Edison, Alexander Bell, and Lord Kelvin (who ridiculed the idea of flight machines). He also knew people like the Prince of Monaco, who was knocked over when trying to help land one of his blimps, many other members of royalty, and even ate at the white house with Teddy Roosevelt. His small stature (around 100 lbs.) along with his odd personal habits make him even more intriguing. He was very shy, especially around women, extremely generous, wore extremely fancy clothes, and enjoyed needlepoint.
The author goes into a lot of these details and does a good job describing the social and intellectual life of turn of the century Paris along with the history of early flight. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will be posting more on the some intellectual history the author brings up.
Oh, and Dan Rather should be fired.
Posted by Pete at September 16, 2004 08:44 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.petetheelder.com/mt-tb.cgi/29