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Santos Dumont: The Man Who Gave Wings to the Mankind whose Name is Unknown

“Have I won? Have I won? ”These were the first words of the man who had just landed in his

balloon in Paris, after winning the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize for a half-hour controlled flight around

the Eiffel Tower in October 19, 1901. Those words mark the conquest of the air, and also the

development of the wristwatch for men, created especially for this winner pilot called Alberto Santos

Dumont, a Brazilian aviation pioneer eradicated in Paris, who changed the aviation’s field in the

beginning of the 1900s.

At this time, more precisely in 1906, he was the first to fly in a heavier-than-air machine that

could take off and landing by itself. The flight of the airplane, that was called 14- Bis, and had an unusual

“canard” configuration; its tail was ahead of its main wings, was witnessed by a big crowd including

official judges of the Aero-Club de France responsible for validating the flight, and a lot of reporters and

journalists. Santos Dumont’s flight had a huge repercussion around the World, crossing the Atlantic and

reaching the American aviation pioneers, the Wright Brothers. As soon as they knew about the flight, they

started claiming that they were the first to fly in a heavier-than-air machine three years before, in 1903. It

was established the controversy of Santos Dumont’s life, a question hastily and erroneous solved a

couple years later in favor of the Wrights, that obscured all of his career and made him an unknown

person in the aviation field, even if his inventions had more impact in the development of the further

aviation.

The inventions of Alberto Santos Dumont came from a restless and unlimited mind, and mainly

from much work; he had not a formal education, and learned by doing. He grew up “playing” with the

coffee engines, in other words, he learned not only how to operate and fix the equipment, but also,

became familiar with its strengthen and weakness, a skill that had a great influence in his future

inventions. He also spent his childhood reading Julio Verne’s novels. He was fascinated with his stories,

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mainly the ballooning ones, and believed that they were true; no one told that they were not, and when he

figured it out, he was eighteen.

At eighteen in 1891, Santos Dumont was a rich young man living by himself in Paris, after his

father death. At this time, he could be one more dandy living in Paris at the height of the Belle Époque,

but he was not, he would spend his money to make his dreams come true. Inspired by the frustration of

the fact that ballooning hadn’t made real progress within the last hundred years unlike in the Julio Verne’s

stories, he engaged a tutor to broaden his scientific knowledge, located a balloon maker, and started to

work on them. His first creation was a small balloon called Brazil, after it he never ceased to surprise the

World and overcome his own limits or his creations limits.

During his career, he created about twenty two aircrafts: eleven aerostats (balloons or dirigibles),

a glider, a helicopter mock-up, about 7 aircrafts and a hybrid one, it mixed a balloon with an airplane. All

Santos Dumont’s creations had some characteristics in common like they were made of unusual materials

as Japanese silk , bamboo, taffeta and piano cords; or have unusual and innovative formats, like the

dirigibles with the cigar form or the canard form( tail ahead the wings) of the 14-Bis airplane. He used to

say to his workmen: “Follow my directions and do not concern yourselves with their practicability” (as

cited in winters, 25, 1998). With this mind fulfilled of ideas, the spirit plenty of enthusiasm and with his

pockets stuffed with money he created all of those machines aiming only the development of the

ballooning and aviation, so that he paid for all his inventions and never asked for a patent or tried to sell

any of them.

All of his inventions were christened with the orders that they were built, starting after the Brazil

balloon with the number one, his first long- elongated aerostat; jumping the number eight, because he was

a very superstitious man and after his number 5 crashed in August 8 in the Trocadero Hotel in Paris and

he had to be rescued by a fireman, he believed that this number brought bad luck preventing it from then;

and finishing with the number 22 an improved version of Demoiselle airplane. Some of them never left

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the paper, were only drafts, like one biplane; or never left the ground like his helicopter mock up and his

hydroplane; and others crashed in its first flight as a Plywood biplane. Nevertheless, all of them were

important in the process of creation and upgrading of the aircrafts.

The first stage of process of creation aimed the development of one safe, affordable, steerable

balloon, and started with the small balloon Brazil, his favorite, and then it walked through the

development of dirigibles. In this first stage he created four different dirigibles with elongated shapes, and

petrol engines. The number five was a cigar-shape dirigible with an air-cooled engine and piano wires

used in his first attempt to win the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize, occasion that he crashed in the Trocadero

Hotel and had to be rescued by a fireman. A serious accident that could have had a terrible end, but didn’t

stop him, as he said once in an interview: “One is frightened, only when he still thinks that he has a

chance.”(As cited in Winters, N. (1998).Man Flies, the story of the Alberto Santos-Dumont.p.39).

At this time and for the following years Santos-Dumont was constantly seen flying over Paris in

his yellows airships due to the Japanese silk. He became a well know and popular person in Paris, he was

a slight and trim man, with a remarkable mustache, a slick and centre parted hair, who was always elegant

dressed wearing a Panama hat and high white collars, and using a gold bracelet holding the St. Benedict’s

medal as a protection against further crashes. Santos Dumont’s popularity was not only due to what he

did, but also how he did. He captivated the Parisians, as Page said in his article [Santos Dumont]

exemplifies the mix of sweetness and greatness that marks the most seductive aspect of ‘Brazilian-ness’

(Page, J.A. (1993). Brazil daredevil’s of the air. Americas .45(2), 6).

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Figure1. Santos Dumont. Adapted from Winters, J. (1998).Man Flies, the story of Alberto Santos-

Dumont.

Due to his popularity all Santos Dumont’s exhibitions were crowded of curious and admirers, and

it was not different when he did his third attempt to win the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize in October 19th

of 1901 flying in his number six, another semi-rigid airship with a Butchet/ Santos Dumont water cooled

engine. He won the prize for a half-hour controlled flight around the Eiffel Tower, receiving 100,000

francs as prize, which he gave half to his assistants and half to recover the tools pawned by Parisian

workmen. This conquest showed that a controllable balloon flight was possible, initiating the balloon era

including at the military field, something that saddened Alberto Santos Dumont.

During this era, Santos Dumont kept flying over Paris with his dirigibles, he created more 3

dirigibles: the number 7 a big one that never raced, the number 9 a small one use to leisure trips, which he

stopped in front of shops and restaurants to show people that air transportation was possible; and his last

dirigible was Omnibus, a large one built to transport people, five passengers including the pilot, who was

always him. Only once he allowed someone else pilot one of his dirigibles, it was in 1903 when after

three lessons a famous New York society beauty called Aida d’Acosta, flew alone in his number 9. At

this time, he was in the height of his fame, and seemed to be without further plans, inasmuch as Winters

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highlights “his aim had been flight, not fame, and he had achieved it”( Winters, J.(1998).Man Flies, the

story of Alberto Santos-Dumont. p. 90), however his restless mind was working in something bigger that

would change the aviation.

He started his big project in 1905, it was a hybrid: an airship, number 14, attached to a fuselage

and biplane wings with the tail ahead them, a canard configuration. It also attached an Antoinette engine

of 24 hp driving the propeller. The project failed, the airplane went first than the airship, so he took off

the airship and put a more powerful engine in the airplane, and this was their famous 14-bis airplane. To

learn how to control it, he attached the airplane to the ground using winches and gears to let it roll down,

building the first flight simulator of the history. He failed in his first attempt to fly in August 1906

because it was underpowered, so a change in the engine was made (a new carburetor made the increased

the power of engine from 24 to 50 hp) and it flew in September about 7 or 13 meters. In October 22th of

the same year, he prepared the 14-bis to fly in the Le Bagatelle airfield to try to win the Archdeacon Prize,

that was actually two prizes one of 1500 francs from the Aero Club de France for the first heavier- than-

air flight of 330 ft. and another one of 3000 francs for just 82 ft. flight offered by its new president Ernest

Archdeacon as a way to incentive the developing of airplanes. In this day he flew only 60 meters, winning

only the prize for the 82 ft. flight. However, he did not give up, and tried again in November 12th, and

despite of the attempt of Louis Bleriot who flew first, but crashed before leaving the ground, at this time

he was successful and flew over 220 meters. He had officially conquered the air.

Santos- Dumont became known as "the Father of Aviation, the first to fly in a heavier- than- air

machine that was capable to take off and fly by itself using only the power of its engine. However, when

two American brothers the Wright Brothers, knew about his flight they started to claiming that they were

the pioneers, they had flew in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, in 1903, three years before. The

controversy was established, who had been in fact the first to fly, The Wright or Santos Dumont? The

press who some time before the Wright’s story show up cheered Santos Dumont, now was considering

the Wright’s as the first to fly, due to the huge success of Wilbur Wright’s flight in Le man Paris, in

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1908.They used the superiority of the Wright’s plane as proof of their pioneering, changing the headlines

from “Flying or liars” to “A decisive victory for Aviation!.”

In the middle of this new scenario, Santos Dumont once said: “What would have you been said

by Edison, Graham Bell or Marconi, if, after they had presented to the world the electric lamp, the

telephone and the wireless, somebody else turned up with a better lamp, a better telephone or a better

wireless and said that he had invented them long before? To whom then does the world owe flight

heavier-than-air machines? It is to the Wright brothers who, according to their own account, kept the

results of their experiment a carefully guarded secret, and were so little known to the world that my flight

was described as ‘a memorable moment in the history of aviation’, or is it to Farmanm to Bleriot and to

me who made all our demonstrations before scientific commissions and in the plain light of the day?”(As

cited in Winters, J. (1998).Man Flies, the story of Alberto Santos-Dumont. pp. 126- 127).This was

everything that Santos Dumont said about the controversy.

The other side of this question was not showed at that time, the facts were not analyzed to prove

the Wright’s first flight in 1903.The first point of this discussion is that, if they had flew before Santos

Dumont, why they didn’t attempt to win any of those award prizes, or even presented their invention to

the world to have official records? It should be considered that the only records of the flight was a picture

that could be taken at any time, and a letter written by a John Daniels a worker at the Kill Devis Hills

lifeguard station about what he saw in the day of the flight twenty years later. Furthermore, the Wrights

send a telegram to their father after the flight saying that they had achieved the velocity of 31 mph against

a wind of 21 mph, what means that only 10 mph were due to the engine power and do not characterizes a

mechanical flight, but a gliding.

Other question to point out is that the Wright Brother’s plane, the Wright Flyer’s, has a

remarkable difference in its power-loading (the weight-to-power ratio), a measurement used to compare

the performance of aircrafts or design another models; it is much larger than for other contemporaries or

more modern aircrafts. For instance, Wright Flyer’s power loading it’s about 3 times larger than the value

of 14-Bis. This shows that it belongs to another group of aircrafts, in which the weight is much more

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relevant than the power generated by its engines, as a glider. This is easily visualized in the graphic below

that shows the power loading of five aircrafts including the Wright Flyer and the 14-Bis.

Figure 2. Adapted from Power loading of a Single-engine aircraft De Mattos, B. (2004). Santos Dumont and the Dawn of

Aviation. AIAA Paper, ISSU PAGE), 3743-3769)

Even if any of those questions had been completely answered or solved, the International

Aeronautics Federation recognized the Wright Brothers as pioneers of the flight of a heavier-than-air

aircraft basing in a change of criteria. It considered the first flight was one controllable, and of stable

performed by an aircraft who could sustain itself in the air using his own engine, independent if it can

take off by itself or not, so the Wright’s flight accomplished all of them. Based on this the arguments like

this used by Peter Jakab , chairman of the Aeronautics division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and

Space in Washington in an interview in the occasion of the centennial of the Santos Dumont’s flight :

“The claims that the Brazilians make that he was the first to fly are ridiculous. It's like saying a modern jet

fighter that uses a catapult to take off from an aircraft carrier isn't a real plane."(Downie, 2006).A century

on, Brazil still claims the flight’s first. The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved from); or the used by a

Brazilian taxi driver called Wagner, "It's one of the biggest frauds in history, No one saw it, and they used

a catapult to launch the airplane” (Wired. (2003, September).Wright Brothers the Wrong Guys? Retrieved

from Wired online doesn’t make any sense and the controversy remains unsolved.

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Avoiding to get involved in this polemic, Santos Dumont kept working and built five more

machines including a plywood plane, a hydroplane, another hybrid( an airship –airplane combination),

and his last creation the airplane Demoiselle, it was a small high-wing monoplane whose weight was

only 242.5 pounds. The first model of Demoiselle was called number 20, and that the number 21 was an

improved version of it with a more powerful engine and reinforced structure, and the number 22 was

basically the same as number 21. It was a very safe plane ( nobody died piloting it ), that could be built in

only fifteen days, and according to the words of De Mattos: “ With excellent performance, easily

covering 200 m of ground during the initial flights and flying at speeds more than 100 km/h…” (De

Mattos, B. (2004). Santos Dumont and the Dawn of Aviation. AIAA Paper, ISSU (PAGE), 3743-3769).

As soon as it was projected other inventors started to build it, including a great Santos Dumont’s friend

Louis Bleriot, who used an airplane built following the Demoiselle Design’s the Bleriot XI to cross the

English Channel in 1909.

At this year, Santos –Dumont was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and since then his life was

spent wandering between Brazil and France, sometimes in sanatoriums, and also receiving awards and

honors. The symptoms were getting worse and worse over the years, and besides this some other episodes

let him even worst, like when he was accused by the French to be a spy for the German due to his

telescope in his roof of his house in Normandy, and burned all of his documents and annotations as an

extreme reaction, or when a hydroplane named after him crashed killing everyone on board in one

ceremony in his tribute in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil on 1928. During the following years, he started blaming

himself by the dropping bombs from zeppelins, airships and airplanes, and sent a petition to League of

Nations to ban further aerial warfare, that was denied letting him more perturbed. After all of this in 1932,

he was back in Brazil, and from his house in Guaruja he watched some planes, which were fighting in the

Constitutional Revolution of 1932, flew over the beach, and then heard the sound of dropping bombs.

Seeing that his inventions had been twisted to such ghastly end, he couldn’t stand anymore, he choose a

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tie that he had used to throw to cheering the crowds and hanged himself. A sad end for a life of a kind,

gently and humble man, who was proud for didn’t hold any patents of his inventions.

“The Little Santos”, how we was affectionately called by the Parisians, gave a lot of more

contributions to the aeronautics and aviation, like the experiments made with wheels, gyroscopes and

ailerons, the 14-Bis had octahedral ailerons in both wings. He also worked on the technical methods for

calculation of propeller size and shape, the integration of internal combustion engines into hydrogen

airships, development of the opposed cylinder V-engine, and the improvement of the carburetor and

engine system. He also created the first modern single-engined monoplane configuration and the wings

with dihedral angles; he conceived the first artificial horizon, one movable weight system to change the

altitude of the airplane, and the first “flight simulator”, an aerial cables system to test the aircraft stability.

He also brought the first automobile to the South America, a Peugeot known as “voiturette” by the French

which landed in Brazil in 1891, and developed a system for the engine start which modern version was

later used by The Royal Air Force in the World War Two.

Alberto Santos Dumont gave wings to the men with all of his inventions and further contributions

to the aviation and aeronautics. He showed the World that the man could fly and that machines capable to

fly totally by themselves were possible, proving that famous scientists as Lord Kelvin who didn’t believe

that the men could reach the sky were wrong. In the words of Page “ […] Santos-Dumont was a true

original-a complex, dapper daredevil, a comet who blazed briefly but brightly, both a shaper and a mirror

of the era embellished, a legend in his own time, and ultimately a tortured soul to whom fate dealt a cruel

hand.” (Page, J.A. (1993). Brazil daredevil’s of the air. Americas. 45(2), 6). The Brazilian aviation

pioneer could be small, but his dreams were huge and his determination to made it come true was bigger;

it didn’t matter if they said that couldn’t be done, the same way he didn’t mind with his friends’ laugh

when he raised his fingers every time someone said “Men flies” and refused to pay the forfeit playing the

game “Pigeon flies”. For him the impossible was nothing and the possible was his next goal, so every

time that you check the hours in our wristwatch, or fasten your belts to took off in an airplane remember

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that the guy who made all of this possible was a Brazilian named Santos Dumont, whose dream was to fly

and he not only did, but also make it possible for everyone, including you.