#28 — Sunday, 13th July 1901
This morning, in Paris, a small Brazilian man in a straw hat climbed into a wicker basket slung beneath a sausage-shaped balloon one hundred and ten feet long, started a twelve-horsepower engine, and flew toward the Eiffel Tower.
His name is Alberto Santos-Dumont. He is twenty-seven years old, the son of the wealthiest coffee planter in Brazil, and he has come to France to solve a problem that has obsessed humanity since the first person watched a bird and felt ashamed: how to leave the ground.
The Aéro-Club has offered a prize. One hundred thousand francs — a fortune, enough to buy a good Parisian apartment building — for the first man to fly from the club’s field at Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in under thirty minutes. Seven miles. A circle. In the air. Santos-Dumont has built his fifth airship for the attempt. It is powered by gasoline, steered by a rudder, filled with hydrogen, and it works — more or less. With the wind behind him, he reaches the Tower in nine minutes. He circles it, narrowly avoiding collision, and turns back toward Saint-Cloud.
And then the wind changes. Or rather, it does not change — it has always been blowing from the west — but now he is flying into it instead of with it, and the little engine cannot push the great silk bag fast enough. The minutes pass. The time limit expires. The engine sputters. He begins to descend.
Santos-Dumont crashes into a chestnut tree on the estate of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The basket catches in the upper branches. The silk drapes over the canopy like a tablecloth. A concerned neighbour sends up a package of food. Santos-Dumont, dangling above the Baron’s garden, eats lunch.
When his friends arrive, frantic, calling up to ask what they can do, he considers the question.
“I should like,” he says, “a glass of beer.”
He will try again on the 8th of August. That time, after rounding the Tower, a valve will malfunction. Hydrogen will leak. He will crash into the roof of the Trocadéro Hotel, the airship crumpling against the high-rises like a paper lantern thrown at a wall. Firemen will pull him from the wreckage. He will begin building a new machine that night.
On the 19th of October, he will succeed. Twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds. The judges will quibble — his mooring rope was not secured in time — and the public will riot on his behalf. He will be awarded the prize, give half to his mechanics and half to the poor of Paris, and resign from the Aéro-Club in disgust. He will become the most famous man in the sky.
And then the century will do what it does to dreamers.
Thirty-one years from now, in a hotel room in Guarujá, Brazil, Alberto Santos-Dumont — who wanted only to prove that a man could steer through the air the way a fish steers through water — will hang himself with two neckties knotted together. He will be fifty-nine. He will have spent his last years watching aeroplanes drop bombs on cities, on soldiers, on civilians, on the future he thought he was building, and he will not be able to bear it. The thing he loved will have become the thing he most fears. The sky, which he opened, will be full of death.
But today he is in a chestnut tree, eating lunch, asking for a beer. Today the sky is still innocent.
I want to stay here a moment.
Two days ago — Friday the 11th — two brothers arrived at a fishing village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They have come from Dayton, Ohio, where they own a bicycle shop. They have brought with them a wooden crate containing the parts of a glider they designed over the winter. It has a wingspan of twenty-two feet and weighs ninety-eight pounds, and it is the largest glider anyone has ever attempted to fly.
Their names are Wilbur and Orville Wright. Nobody outside a small circle of aviation enthusiasts has heard of them. Nobody will hear of them for two more years.
They spend their first night at the home of a local fisherman named Tate, sharing a bed with a sagging mattress. Wilbur sleeps in the dip; Orville clings to the slope. The next day they walk four miles south to Kill Devil Hills and begin hammering together a shed to house the glider. Within a week, the mosquitoes will arrive — a cloud, Orville will write to his sister, “almost darkening the sun.” The men will burn tree stumps in camp to smoke them out. A visiting colleague named Spratt will spend the night running back and forth between the mosquitoes and the smoke, unable to decide which is worse. “They chewed clear through my underwear and socks,” Orville will report. “I have lumps as big as hen’s eggs.”
They will make between fifty and a hundred glides in July and August. The longest will cover nearly four hundred feet. But the glider will produce only a third of the lift their calculations predicted. Something is wrong — not with their machine, but with the data they inherited. The lift tables published by Otto Lilienthal, the German glider pioneer who died falling from the sky five years ago, are unreliable. The numbers they have been using to design their wings are wrong.
Wilbur will be so discouraged that he will tell his brother, or so the story goes, that man will not fly for a thousand years.
He will be off by a thousand years minus twenty-eight months.
I am watching two groups of men try to solve the same problem by opposite methods, and I already know which one succeeds.
Santos-Dumont is lighter than air. He fills a balloon with gas and floats. He is wealthy, flamboyant, public. He flies over Paris in front of crowds. He ties his little airship to lampposts while he drinks coffee on the Champs-Élysées. He is the century’s first celebrity aviator, and within a decade his approach — lighter than air, steerable balloons — will be a magnificent dead end. The Hindenburg is already forming in the mathematics of this afternoon’s failure, though no one can see it yet.
The Wrights are heavier than air. They do not float. They fall — deliberately, repeatedly, studying each fall, adjusting, falling again. They are methodical, obscure, secretive. They work in sand and mosquitoes and wind. They will go home from this disappointing summer and build a wind tunnel in their bicycle shop, six feet long, made of scrap wood and an old starch box, and inside it they will test over two hundred miniature wing shapes, measuring lift and drag with instruments made from bicycle spokes. They will throw out the data of their predecessors. They will start from nothing. And on a cold morning in December 1903, for twelve seconds, at a height of ten feet, travelling one hundred and twenty feet, they will change everything.
Both approaches teach the century the same lesson: to fly, you must first be willing to fall. Santos-Dumont falls into a chestnut tree and asks for a beer. Wilbur Wright falls four hundred feet across a sand dune and takes notes. The century is learning to fall.
It will get very, very good at it.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the heat. It has not gone away. A brief respite in the first week of July — a few days in the mid-eighties, enough to let the eastern seaboard exhale — and now it is climbing again. By next week it will be back above a hundred. By the week after that, it will be the worst it has ever been.
I mentioned last week that freedom is altitude. I stand by it. Santos-Dumont rises above Paris and for nine minutes he is free — from gravity, from the ground, from everything that holds the body down. The Wrights glide for a few seconds above the dunes and in that interval the earth releases them. But in the tenements of New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore, in the cramped rooms of the Ohio Valley where the drought has already killed the crops, there is no altitude. There is no rising. There is only the ground floor and the fifth floor and neither one has enough air.
The century’s two obsessions are declaring themselves this week: the desire to leave the ground, and the inability of most people to do so. The rich fly. The poor cook. Santos-Dumont is the heir to a coffee fortune. The Wrights are bicycle mechanics, but they own their own shop and they have time and freedom and a wind tunnel made of scraps. The woman on Orchard Street has none of these things. She has a room without windows and children who cannot sleep.
The sky is being opened. It will be opened for mail, and travel, and wonder, and war. It will carry bombs to Guernica and Dresden and Hiroshima. It will carry Santos-Dumont’s dream until his dream makes him want to die. It will carry the Wrights’ twelve seconds until those twelve seconds become twelve hours and then twelve thousand miles and then the distance to the moon.
But it will never carry everyone. That is the secret the century will not admit. The sky opens, but the ground remains.
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