My Air-Ships the Story of My Life (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from My Air-Ships the Story of My Life
Two young...)
Excerpt from My Air-Ships the Story of My Life
Two young Brazilian boys strolled in the shade, conversing. They were simple youths Of the interior, knowing only the plenty of the primi tive plantation where, undisturbed by labour saving devices, Nature yielded man her fruits at the price of the sweat Of his brow.
They were ignorant of machines to the extent that they had never seen a waggon or a wheel barrow. Horses and oxen bore the burdens of plantation life on their backs, and placid Indian labourers wielded the spade and the hoe.
Yet they were thoughtful boys. At this moment they discussed things beyond all that they had seen or heard.
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O que eu vi, o que nós veremos (Portuguese Edition)
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(Two young Brazilian boys strolled in the shade, conversin...)
Two young Brazilian boys strolled in the shade, conversing. They were simple youths of the interior, knowing only the plenty of the primitive plantation where, undisturbed by labour-saving devices, Nature yielded man her fruits at the price of the sweat of his brow. They were ignorant of machines to the extent that they had never seen a waggon or a wheelbarrow. Horses and oxen bore the burdens of plantation life on their backs, and placid Indian labourers wielded the spade and the hoe.
(Este eBook foi convertido ao formato digital por uma comu...)
Este eBook foi convertido ao formato digital por uma comunidade de voluntários. Você pode encontra-lo gratuitamente online. A compra da edição Kindle inclui os custos da entrega sem fio.
Alberto Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian inventor of dirigibles and airplanes.
Background
Santos-Dumont was born on 20 July 1873 in Cabangu in the Brazilian town of Palmira (today named Santos Dumont) in the state of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. He was youngest of the seven children born to Henrique Dumont, an engineer of French descent, and Francisca de Paula Santos. Santos-Dumont's father managed a coffee plantation on land owned by his wife's family, and later bought land in Ribeirão Preto on which he established a plantation of his own. His extensive use of labor-saving inventions earned him a fortune, and he was known for a time as the "Coffee King of Brazil. "
Education
Santos-Dumont was fascinated by machinery, and while still a child he learned to drive the plantation's steam tractors and locomotives.
After basic instruction with private tutors, Santos-Dumont studied for a time at the Colégio Culto à Ciência in Campinas, after which he was sent to the Colégio Morton in São Paulo and the Escola de Minas in Minas Gerais.
Career
His father's death the next year left Alberto a fairly wealthy young man. After 4 years of desultory studies, the alternately dreamy and practical Brazilian began to devote all his money and energy to his inventions.
The idea of flight had long exerted a strange fascination for the boy; and as a wealthy and daring young man, he was also one of the first Parisians to invest in a gasoline-driven automobile. He made his first balloon flight in the spring of 1898, blown by the wind and depending for ascent and descent on the careful balancing of ballast and gas-produced lift. Like many others at the time, he was struck by the possibility of attaching a gasoline motor with propeller to a balloon and thus being able to drive against the wind as well as to change altitude by pointing the craft upward or downward. He was the first to succeed in doing so (fall 1898), 2 years before the successful flight of the rigid dirigibles later known as Zeppelins. In 1901, after several setbacks, he won the Deutsch de la Meurthe Prize of 100, 000 francs and much acclaim for the first airship to complete a specified circuit around the Eiffel Tower and back within a half hour.
A few years later Santos-Dumont turned his attention to manned flight in craft that were heavier than air. In September 1906 he flew the "14-bis, " an awkward machine resembling a box kite, for a few feet, and within the next 2 months he won prizes for the first aircraft to fly 25 meters and the first to do 100. Three years earlier the Wright brothers had flown in the United States, but their feat had been at first ignored and then systematically denied by most of the American press, so that Europeans hailed Santos-Dumont as the first man to fly. As often happens with inventors, others were fast on his heels, and his own achievement hastened their work. A few months later he himself flew all over Paris in a new and graceful instrument of his design that resembled a modern airplane.
In 1910 Santos-Dumont retired from aviation, apparently because of the onset of multiple sclerosis. He then entered a period of slow physical and mental decline ending in his suicide in Brazil at the age of 59.
(Two young Brazilian boys strolled in the shade, conversin...)
Views
Quotations:
"I never thought that my creation, would allow brothers to kill brothers. " (after seeing his invention being used in war, The Airplane) Alberto Santos-Dumont
"Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called 'Man flies!' for at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was, hoping that some day the laugh would be on my side. "
"The balloon seems to stand still in the air while the earth flies past underneath. "
"To propel a dirigible balloon through the air is like pushing a candle through a brick wall. "
"Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings. "
Membership
He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1931 until his suicide in 1932.
He was also a Member of the Aéro-Club de France.
Interests
Writers
In childhood he read a great deal of the works of Jules Verne.
Connections
Santos-Dumont, a lifelong bachelor, did seem to have a particular affection for a married Cuban-American woman named Aida de Acosta, who in 1903 became the only other person that he ever permitted to fly one of his airships – his No. 9 (and thereby most likely becoming the first woman to pilot a powered aircraft). Until the end of his life, he kept a picture of her on his desk alongside a vase of fresh flowers. Nonetheless, there is no indication that Santos-Dumont and Acosta stayed in touch after her flight; upon his death she was reported as saying that she hardly knew him.