LITMIR.BIZ

       [CHAPTER 4] DYING FOR SCIENCE PARIS, 1899

      AT THE CLOSE of the nineteenth century, Santos-Dumont was the only person flying powered airships. (Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in Germany was building a mammoth, 420-foot-long semirigid airship—a fabric-covered, aluminum-strutted hull that housed fifteen separate gasbags—but it had not yet gone aloft.) Santos-Dumont’s fellow aeronauts were still ascending in spherical balloons, and not always successfully. In 1898, the London Evening News challenged balloonists to make it across the Channel from London to Paris. A man named A. Williams, after months of waiting for a favorable wind, planned to take off on November 22. When he was nearly ready, “a slight accident took place,” the paper said, “which delayed matters, and the start was postponed for an hour.” It seems that while the balloon was being inflated, it was somehow driven against iron railings and ripped. Once the tear was repaired and the inflation completed, Williams discovered that the balloon was not capable of lifting two companions, as he intended, so only one, a Mr. Darby, accompanied him. After an hour they descended into a tree and then briefly rose again.

      Finally, after having traversed a distance of not one quarter of that from London to Paris (and, by the way, not in the right direction), it was found that the balloon had not sufficient power to proceed, and a descent was attempted near Lancing. Then it was found that this balloon, supposed to be replete with everything that practical aeronauts could suggest, had not a single anchor on board. The aeronaut, not wishing to be carried over the sea, then adopted the extraordinary course of swarming down the guide rope, leaving his unfortunate companion to follow. Relieved of Mr. Williams’ weight, the balloon started to rise again, and the passenger found himself in the awkward predicament of either having to jump some 50 ft. down, or be wafted out to sea. He chose the former, and though badly injured, was lucky enough to escape with his life. The balloon disappeared over the Channel, but was found some days afterward in France.

      Mr. Darby was lucky. In 1899, the publication Revue Scientifique counted nearly two hundred people who had lost their lives in balloons. Usually the deaths were nasty and quick. Each monthly issue of Aeronautical Journal, a British periodical that tracked developments in flight around the world, published an accident report. In October 1899, the journal described two fatal falls:

      An Italian military captive balloon broke loose in July, carrying with it not only an officer and a corporal who were in the car, but also a soldier who had held on to the rope in hopes of keeping the balloon down. Those in the car tried to draw up the unfortunate man, but after a time he let go, and was dashed to pieces on the banks of the Tiber….

      At Beuzeville, in France, an aeronaut, named Bernard, made an ascent, but finding his balloon had too little lift, he dispensed with the car, and sat upon the hoop. It is supposed that the gas from the balloon issuing through the neck must have asphyxiated him, for he was seen to let go his hold and fall to the ground from a great height, being killed on the spot.

      Early in his planning to power an airship with an internal combustion engine, Santos-Dumont learned that Karl Wolfert, a Protestant minister, had had the same idea. Wolfert sought out the technical advice of automotive pioneer Gottlieb Daimler. On June 12, 1897, before an audience of the kaiser’s military advisers, Wolfert was set to ascend with Michael, his mechanic, and an officer of the Prussian army. Just before liftoff, the officer was overcome by a bout of claustrophobia in the balloon basket and bowed out of the trip. In Wolfert’s eagerness to take off and impress his distinguished observers, he neglected to add ballast to compensate for the missing officer’s weight. He and his mechanic ascended to exuberant cheers and waves from the crowd, and the poorly ballasted airship climbed rapidly to three thousand feet. Without warning, the gasbag exploded, and the airship was engulfed in flames. A horrible scream was heard, and then complete silence. The stunned audience scrambled out of their seats to avoid the falling, charred wreckage. Two bodies, burnt beyond recognition, smashed the seats. They had died in just the kind of accident that Santos-Dumont’s friends had feared.

      On May 12, 1902, Santos-Dumont witnessed a similar accident in Paris that claimed the life of a fellow Brazilian, Augusto Severo. Inspired by Santos-Dumont’s own efforts, Severo had built an airship called Pax. On Severo’s first free ascent, accompanied by Saché, his machinist, sparks from the engine ignited the balloon and the hydrogen exploded. The frame of the airship plunged fifteen hundred feet and struck the one-story house at No. 89, avenue du Maine, collapsing its roof into the bedroom of a man named Clichy. The bed was on the opposite side of the room from the falling debris, and Clichy and his wife were awakened to the sight of a smashed airship and two disfigured bodies crashing through the ceiling. The Herald reported, “The machinist lay near the motor, stretched out upon the willow framework, which served as the flooring. His face had been terribly burned and his hands stripped of skin. His back was broken by the shock. M. Severo, who seems to have been standing at the moment of the shock, had nearly all his bones broken. He was scarcely recognizable. The shin bones protruded through the skin, and the lower jaw was torn from the socket.” Santos-Dumont was grief-stricken, but the grisly accident only reinforced his resolve to build a safe and reliable airship.

      AERONAUTS WERE not the only martyrs for science at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The pace of industrial and scientific progress was so exhilarating that men and women were willing to sacrifice their own well-being to ensure that the progress continued. Scientists had always known that there was a general risk in exploring the uncharted—it was an occupational hazard. But in fin de siècle Europe and America, the stakes were raised. As the prestigious new American journal Science announced in 1883: “Higher than all, [science] must be devoted to the truth. It must cheerfully undertake the severest labor to secure it, and must deem no sacrifice too great in order to preserve it.” Science had become the new secular religion, and its practitioners, like the aeronauts, were expected to proceed

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