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Santos-Dumont: from the airship on the roof to the 14-Bis

In 1901, Santos-Dumont's airship got stuck on the roof of a Paris hotel. Five years later, the 14-Bis took off before the public at Bagatelle.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Alberto Santos-Dumont was born on July 20, 1873, in Minas Gerais, on a coffee farm. He went to Paris, the aviation capital of the time, and began building and flying his own machines.

The no

In 1900, the millionaire Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe offered a prize of 100,000 francs to whoever could leave the Saint-Cloud park, round the Eiffel Tower and return within thirty minutes. Santos-Dumont tried with airship No. 5.

On August 8, 1901, a faulty valve made the balloon lose gas. The airship came down over Paris, snagged on a chimney of the Hotel Trocadéro and burst. Santos-Dumont hung from the side of the building until he was rescued by firefighters, unhurt. Of the airship, only the engine could be salvaged.

He didn't wait. He built No. 6.

What they did

On October 19, 1901, with No. 6, Santos-Dumont rounded the Eiffel Tower and returned in about 29 and a half minutes, despite an engine failure on the way. He won the Deutsch prize and gave a good part of it to his crew and to the poor of Paris.

Then he moved from the airship to the airplane. On October 23, 1906, at the Bagatelle field, in Paris, the 14-Bis took off under its own power and flew about 60 meters, before the public, winning the Archdeacon cup, created for the first flight of 25 meters. On November 12, 1906, he flew 220 meters and won the Aéro-Club de France prize for the first flight of 100 meters.

Who flew first is an old debate. In the United States, the honor belongs to the Wright brothers, for the flights of December 17, 1903. In Brazil, it belongs to Santos-Dumont, because the 14-Bis took off without rail or catapult, before witnesses and an official commission. This page doesn't settle the dispute; it tells both and links to the Wrights' page.

What this has to do with Bairo

Santos-Dumont is the story of someone who fell in public, in a foreign city, and started again the following week. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, a Colombian who made his life in Brazil, knows well the weight of starting over far from home, with another language and no safety net.

The parallel is one of gesture, not size. The airship on the Trocadéro's roof is what, in Bairo's story, the businesses that didn't hold up were: a No. 5 that leaves its engine to No. 6. He tells this in Fifty lives and in Capoeira was the bridge, about his arrival in Brazil.

The date of the 14-Bis has its own page: October 23.

Sources

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