If you were to ask the average American “who invented the aeroplane?” the answer you would most likely get is the Wright Brothers. Indeed, the two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, are generally acknowledged to have carried out the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight in history, piloting their aircraft the Flyer a distance of 36.5 metres at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. But if you were to ask the same question in Brazil, you would likely get a very different answer. To many Brazilians the true father of the aeroplane is neither Orville nor Wilbur Wright but rather a fellow countryman named Alberto Santos-Dumont. Though largely forgotten today, in his day Santos-Dumont was one of the most famous men in the world and a leading figure in the field of aviation, pioneering key innovations in airship design and making the first powered heavier-than-air flight in Europe. He was also a legendarily colourful character, whose eccentric, high-flying antics perfectly capturing the optimistic, free-wheeling spirit of the Gilded Age.

Alberto Santos-Dumont was born on July 20, 1873 in Palmira, Brazil, to Henrique Dumont and Francisca de Paula Santos, the wealthy owners of a coffee plantation. Free of the responsibilities of work, young Santos-Dumont enjoyed a charmed, free-range childhood on the family plantation, where he quickly developed a fascination for all things mechanical:

“I lived a free life there, which was indispensable to form my temperament and taste for adventure. Since childhood I had a great love for mechanical things, and like all those who have or think they have a vocation, I cultivated mine with care and passion. I always played at imagining and building little mechanical devices, which entertained me and earned me high regard in the family. My greatest joy was taking care of my father’s mechanical installations. That was my department, which made me very proud.”

These mechanical diversions included improving his father’s coffee bean-sorting machines and driving narrow-gauge steam locomotives at high speed across the plantation. But in 1888 Santos-Dumont discovered the passion which was to consume him for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing an aeronaut make a balloon ascent over São Paulo, the then 15-year-old Santos-Dumont – an avid daydreamer and reader of French science fiction author Jules Verne – became singularly obsessed with the conquest of flight, later writing:

“In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons, I would lie in the shade of the veranda and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where you have only to raise your eyes to fall in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of the aerial ocean, I too devised airships and flying machines in my imagination.”

Santos-Dumont’s obsession only intensified when he accompanied his father on a seven-month visit to Paris in 1891. At the time, France was the global centre for aeronautics research. The country had a long aeronautical tradition stretching back to 1783, when the Montgolfier Brothers made the first manned hot air balloon ascents, while in 1890 inventor Clément Ader’s [“Klem-ahn Ah-day”] steam-powered Éole [“Eh-all”] aircraft made a short but promising hop into the air. If any nation was to conquer the skies first, it was believed, it would be France. Parisians were also far more accepting of the eccentricities which made Santos-Dumont stand out in his native Brazil. Standing barely five feet tall and weighing 110 pounds, the diminutive Brazilian wore high collars, thick-soled American shoes, and a trademark floppy Panama hat to make himself look taller, and introduced himself with the words:

“I’m Santos, I weigh 41 kilos without my shoes but with my gloves.”

Later, Santos-Dumont’s fame as an aviator would turn him into a fashion icon, helping, among other things, to make high starched collars fashionable in France.

In 1892, Santos-Dumont’s father, his health failing, gifted his son a sizeable share in the family coffee company. Seizing the opportunity, Santos-Dumont moved to Paris and threw himself single-mindedly into his quest of conquering the skies. He lived simply in a modest apartment on Rue Washington, eschewing the city’s rich social life as he pursued an intense private education in science, mathematics, engineering, and all the other subjects he would need to accomplish his goal. At the same time he pursued his passion for tinkering, inventing one of the first wristwatches and building a three-wheeled motorcycle on which he tore down the streets of Paris at the then-bracing speed 32 kilometres per hour. In 1897 Santos-Dumont made his first ascent in a hired balloon, an experience which only confirmed his life’s calling:

“I observed the pilot at his work, and comprehended perfectly all he did. It seemed to me that I had been born for aeronautics.”

By the end of the year Santos-Dumont had built his own balloon and become an experienced aeronaut with 25 ascents under his belt. But mere passive ballooning was not enough; if he was truly to conquer the skies, he would have to crack the secret of building a powered, dirigible airship. Many had tried before, including Frenchman Henri Giffard [“Ghee-far”], who in 1852 made the first powered airship flight. However, like all his contemporaries, Giffard was stymied by the propulsion technology of his time. The steam engine which powered his dirigible was not only dangerous – its open-flame boiler threatening at all times to ignite the hydrogen in the balloon – but also heavy and underpowered, making it impossible for the craft to fly against the wind. The first dirigible to complete a full circuit against the wind was La France in 1884, which was powered not by steam but electricity. However, the batteries needed to accomplish this feat were crude and heavy, making this a less than optimal solution. Practical dirigible flight thus had to await the development of a compact internal combustion engine with a high enough power-to-weight ratio. Santos-Dumont had used just such an engine in one of his early motor tricycles. Weighing only 40 kilos and putting out 3.5 horsepower, it was quickly pressed into service to power Santos-Dumont’s first prototype airship.

Imaginatively named “Airship No.1,” the cigar-shaped craft measured 25 metres long and held 186 cubic metres of Hydrogen. It had a triangular rudder at the front for steering, a sliding-weight system for pitch control, and a basket slung beneath the envelope holding both pilot and the engine driving a paddle-shaped propeller. Santos-Dumont attempted his first test flight on September 18, 1898, launching near the Zoological Gardens in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne [“Bwah deh Boo-lung”] Park. While Santos-Dumont had originally planned to take off into the wind, his aeronaut colleagues advised him instead to take off downwind as with a balloon. Unfortunately, a gust of wind drove Airship No.1 into the trees before it could gain sufficient altitude, lightly damaging the craft and convincing Santos-Dumont of the wisdom of his original plan. He quickly repaired the damage and two days later made another attempt, this time succeeding in making a short controlled circuit. Santos-Dumont would later describe the experience in his signature breathless style:

“My first impression was surprise to feel the airship going straight ahead. It was astonishing to feel the wind in my face…I cannot describe the delight, the wonder and intoxication of this free diagonal movement onward and upward, or onward and downward, combined with brusque changes of direction horizontally when the airship answers to a touch of the rudder.”

Unfortunately, the flight was cut short when lifting gas began leaking from the envelope, causing Airship No.1 to rapidly lose altitude. Santos-Dumont called out to a group of boys flying kites in the park below, who grabbed the trailing mooring lines and brought the airship down to a rough but safe crash-landing. Though the craft was damaged beyond repair, Santos-Dumont was undeterred; he had tasted the thrill of controlled, powered flight and was hungry for more. Over the next six years he would construct a series of increasingly-sophisticated airships, breaking records by staying aloft for up to 23 hours at a time. His later dirigibles were so maneuverable and reliable that Santos-Dumont took to using them as his personal runabouts, leading to some truly outlandish escapades. In 1903 a correspondent for the Paris weekly L’Illustration described one such incident:

“I had just sat down at the terrace of a café on the Avenue fu Bois de Boulogne and was enjoying an iced orangeade. All of a sudden I was shaken with surprise on seeing an airship come right down in front of me. The guide rope coiled around the legs of my chair. The airship was just above my knees, and Monsieur Santos-Dumont got out. Whole crowds of people rushed forward and wildly acclaimed the great Brazilian aviator. He asked me to excuse him for having startled me. He then called for an apéritif, drank it down, got on board his airship again and went gliding off into space.”

On another occasion the eccentric aviator swooped down onto a birthday party in the park, snatched up a 7-year-old boy, and took the ecstatic child for a joyride over Paris. And on Bastille Day, he celebrated his adopted country’s national holiday by flying down the Champs d’Elysees and saluting the French President with 21 shots from his revolver – like an absolute legend. These antics endeared Santos-Dumont to the French people, who closely followed his exploits and affectionately dubbed him “the little Santos.” But Santos-Dumont’s greatest aerial triumphs were yet to come.

On March 24, 1900, oil magnate Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe announced a 100,000 Franc prize for the first aviator to fly from the Aero Club headquarters at Saint Cloud [“Klood”] to the Eiffel Tower and back – a total distance of 10 kilometres – in less than half an hour. Santos-Dumont eagerly accepted the challenge, but quickly realized that none of his existing airships were up to the task. To cover the distance in under a half an hour would require a top speed of at least 9 kilometres an hour, while his fastest craft, Airship No.4, topped out at only 7.5. So Santos-Dumont enlarged the envelope and added a rigid keel and a new 15-horsepower engine to create a new, faster vehicle, named – of course – Airship No.5.

Santos-Dumont his first attempt at the Deutsche de la Meurthe Prize on July 13, 1901. The flight went well at first, with Airship No.5 reaching and circling the Eiffel Tower with ease. But on the return leg, the airship stalled and crashed into a chestnut tree on the estate of the wealthy Rothschild family. Though his pride may have been wounded, Santos-Dumont was at least able to find solace in the estate footman who climbed the tree to deliver him a conciliatory picnic basket. Undeterred, Santos-Dumont repaired Airship No.5 and made his second attempt on August 8. Once again he successfully reached and rounded the Eiffel Tower, but on his return a faulty valve caused the envelope to rapidly lose gas. Santos-Dumont attempted to guide the sinking craft to a crash landing in the Seine river, but at the last moment the envelope snagged on a chimney pot atop the Trocadero Hotel and burst. The whole airship collapsed in a heap of wreckage down the side of the hotel, with Santos-Dumont barely escaping death by leaping onto a window ledge. There he remained stranded for several hours before being rescued by the Paris fire brigade. But though the flight had ended in complete failure, “Little Santos” continued to be hailed as a hero by the people of France.

With Airship No.5 a complete loss, Santos-Dumont and his workmen designed and built a new, more powerful airship in only 22 days. Meanwhile, however, the Aero Club had changed the rules of the Prize, dictating that the 30 minute time limit now be measured from takeoff to landing rather than a flying start and finish. This change was introduced by patriotic club members in an attempt to hold off Santos-Dumont until a fellow Frenchman could claim the prize. Yet despite this handicap, Santos-Dumont was confident he could still meet the challenge, and at 2:45 PM on October 19, 1901, he lifted off from St. Cloud for his third attempt at the Prize. As before the outbound leg went perfectly, with Airship No.6 covering the distance in only 9 minutes. And while Santos-Dumont faced a 7 km/hr headwind on the return leg, with 21 minutes to cover the distance he seemed assured of clinching the Prize. But soon after rounding the Eiffel Tower his engine began to sputter and stall, slowing his progress to a crawl. As a stunned Paris came to a standstill and turned its gaze to the tiny airship floating 300 metres overhead, Santos-Dumont, with no safety harness, climbed out of the basket and up to the keel to fix the stubborn machine. After a few tense minutes the engine resumed its steady chug, and Santos-Dumont drove the airship at full speed towards St. Cloud, crossing the finish line 29 minutes and 30 seconds after takeoff. Unfortunately, it took around a minute for him to actually land the airship, and when the waiting Aero Club delegates finally approached him he was sadly informed that he had missed the prize by 40 seconds. A devastated Santos-Dumont returned to his apartment empty-handed while throngs of his supporters shouted at the delegation to award him the prize. In the end, the Aero Club bowed to public pressure and declared Santos-Dumont the winner of the Deutsch de la Meurthe Prize. In an act of extreme generosity, Santos-Dumont donated 75,000 Francs to the poor of Paris and divided the rest among his own workmen. He did, however, keep an additional 125,000 Franc prize awarded to him by his native Brazil. But his true pride lay not in the monetary awards but in having successfully demonstrated the practicality of powered, dirigible flights.

Though Santos-Dumont would go on to build three more airships, by 1903 he had become disillusioned with the technology. The vagaries of wind and weather made flying an airship, in his words, like “pushing a candle through a brick wall.” Convinced he had pushed airship technology as far as it would go, Santos-Dumont instead turned his energies to the next great challenge: heavier-than-air flight. By this time the Wright Brothers had completed a highly-successful series of gliding experiments and were preparing to test their first powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. News of the Wrights’ achievements sent the French aviation community into a panic, with French aviation pioneer Ferdinand Ferber writing Aero Club President Ernest Archdeacon in April 1903:

“The airplane must not be allowed to reach successful development in America!”

A tireless promoter of aviation in France and around the world, Ferber was considered one of the frontrunners in the race for heavier-than-air flight. In 1902 he constructed an aircraft based on vague descriptions of the Wright Brothers’ designs, which he tested by suspending it beneath a giant spinning crane-like contraption outside the city of Nice. But Ferber had fundamentally misunderstood the Wrights’ key innovation of wing warping for roll control, and his copycat aircraft proved all but uncontrollable. Ferber’s failure was typical of a general flaw shared by French aeronautics pioneers compared to their American counterparts. Whereas the Wrights took a methodical, scientific approach, basing their designs on glider flights and wind tunnel tests, the French, in their haste to get into the air, rushed forward with all manner of hastily-conceived and impractical flying machines. Thus it was all but inevitable that on December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers beat the French – and the rest of the world – into the air. But the French were not so easily defeated, and to spur the development of heavier-than-air flight in France, in 1905 Aero Club President Ernest Archdeacon announced a 1500 Franc prize for the first pilot to fly an aeroplane over 100 metres. And among the pioneering aviators who took up the challenge was Alberto Santos-Dumont.

In 1906, Santos-Dumont built an aircraft nearly as eccentric as its designer. Dubbed the Quatorze Bis [“Cat-oars Biss”] or “Fourteen B”, the craft appeared to have been built backwards, with the wings, engine, and propellor in the back and the horizontal stabilizer in the front – a design known today as a canard configuration due to its resemblance to a flying duck. Adding to its awkward appearance, it featured boxy, kite-like wings and stabilizers canted upwards at steep angle, while the pilot flew the aircraft while standing up. Stranger still, the aircraft was designed to be test-flown while suspended beneath Santos-Dumont’s Airship No.14 – hence the name.

On July 23, 1926, a crowd gathered outside the Bois de Boulogne park to witness Santos-Dumont’s first flight tests. In true flamboyant style, Santos Dumont in his Mercedes car led a bizarre procession consisting of the 14 Bis aircraft and No.14 airship towed by a donkey, followed by a handcart loaded with 10 cans of gasoline. However, a guard at the park gate refused to let the gasoline through, and threatened to poke holes in the airship if anyone challenged him. Thankfully, Ernest Archdeacon was on hand and siphoned gas from his own car to fuel up both airship and aeroplane. But it was all for naught, for Santos-Dumont discovered the 14 Bis had been damaged in transit and announced to a disappointed crowd that he would not be flying that day.

Over the next month Santos-Dumont and his team conducted a number of pre-flight tests with the 14 Bis suspended beneath the No.14 airship and a zipline-like device, making a number of adjustments until they were at last ready to make a free flight attempt. On September 13, the 14 Bis made a short 13-metre hop before crash-landing on its tail, while on October 23 it flew a more respectable 60 metres, making Santos-Dumont the first person to make a controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight in Europe. Finally, on November 12, Santos-Dumont remained airborne for 21 seconds, covering a distance of 220 metres and clinching the Archdeacon Prize. The nation erupted in celebration, with Ferdinand Ferber exclaiming:

“Santos is the conquering hero…a new world [is] opening before man.”

Even the British joined in the adulation, though some struck a more alarmist tone. Among these was publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe, who prophetically wrote:

“Santos-Dumont flies 722 feet! Let me tell you, there will be no more sleeping safely behind the wooden walls of old England with the Channel as our safety moat. If war comes, the aerial chariots of the enemy will descend on British soil.”

Yet despite the excitement on both sides of the Channel in reality, Santos-Dumont’s achievement was a case of too little, too late. Like most early French aircraft, the 14 Bis lacked adequate roll control, barely qualifying as a controllable aircraft. Furthermore, a full year before in late 1905 the Wrights had made history by flying their aircraft an astonishing 39 kilometres over Huffman Prairie in Ohio, utterly dwarfing Santos-Dumont’s 220-metre hop. In August 1908 Wilbur Wright would demonstrate the superior agility of the brothers’ Model A Flyer over Le Mans racetrack outside Paris, prompting French aviation pioneer Leon Delagrange [“Lay-ohn Duh-lah-grahnje”] to exclaim “we are beaten!” Yet some, especially in Brazil, continue to maintain that it was Santos-Dumont, not the Wright Brothers, who was first into the air. This assertion is based on the fact that the 14 Bis had wheels while the early Wright aircraft had skids and were launched from a track using a falling-wight catapult device. Later rules set out by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale or FAI dictate that to qualify for a flight record an aircraft must take off and land entirely under its own power, meaning, according to Wright Brothers detractors, that only Santos-Dumont’s attempts technically count as actual flights. However, this argument ignores that on the Wrights’ historic 1903 flight, the Flyer did indeed take off under its own power. Furthermore, as with the argument that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was not the first into space in 1961 because he ejected and did not land with his spacecraft, the FAI has proven itself willing to ignore minor technicalities if the case for a record is obvious enough.

Santos-Dumont performed several more short flights in the 14 Bis before moving on to a more sophisticated design he dubbed the Demoiselle or “damselfly”. Built of lightweight bamboo struts with the pilot seated in a frame suspended directly beneath the wing, the Demoiselle is considered by many historians to be the very first ultralight aircraft. Santos-Dumont piloted the fast and agile Demoiselle on numerous record-breaking flights, including a 200 kilometre cross-country trip between St. Cyr [“Saint Seer”] and Buc [“Book”] in September 1909. With his typical generosity and enthusiasm for aviation, Santos-Dumont released the plans for the aircraft for free, and over 300 copies were built in Europe and the United States. But the Demoiselle was to be Santos-Dumont’s last aerial achievement. In 1909 he began suffering the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and, after making his last flights at the first great Air Show at Riems, closed up his shop, disbanded his workmen, and withdrew into depression and exile. Over the next 20 years he drifted between Europe and his native Brazil, dabbling in astronomy, tinkering with various inventions, and making impassioned pleas against the use of aircraft in warfare. All the while his mental and physical health continued to fail, friends and acquaintances describing the “little Santos” as a “living skeleton.” In 1932, revolution broke out in Brazil, and military aircraft began attacking positions around São Paulo. This sight proved too much for the chronically depressed Santos-Dumont, and on July 23 he took his own life at the age of 59. The Government decreed a three-day period of national mourning, and on December 21 Santos-Dumont was buried at São João Batista Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, under a statue of Icarus the aviator had designed himself.

Alberto Santos-Dumont is still considered a national hero in Brazil, with countless streets and other sites named in his honour. Though he may not have been first into the air, “little Santos” did more than most to cement the promise and romance of flight in the popular imagination, his dashing and eccentric escapades bringing an air of genteelness and wide-eyed optimism to the field of aviation the likes of which it would never see again.