_A British "Blimp" Photographed from Above._]
From dreaming, the boy's ambitions rapidly developed into actions. Good South Americans, whatever the practice of their northern neighbours, do not wait to die before going to Paris. At the age of eighteen the youth found himself in the capital of the world. To his amazement he found that the science of aeronautics, such as it was, had stopped with Giffard's work in 1852. No dirigible was to be heard of in all Paris. The antiquated gas ball was the only way to approach the upper air. When the boy tried to arrange for an ascension the balloonist he consulted put so unconscionable a price on one ascent that he bought an automobile instead--one of the first made, for this was in 1891--and with it returned to Brazil. It was not until six years later that, his ambition newly fired by reading of Andrée's plans for reaching the Pole in a balloon, Santos-Dumont took up anew his ambition to become an aviator. His own account of his first ascent does not bear precisely the hall-mark of the enthusiast too rapt in ecstasy to think of common things. "I had brought up," he notes gravely, "a substantial lunch of hard-boiled eggs, cold roast beef and chicken, cheese, ice cream, fruits and cakes, champagne, coffee, and chartreuse!"
The balloon with its intrepid voyagers nevertheless returned to earth in safety.
A picturesque figure, an habitué of the clubs and an eager sportsman, Santos-Dumont at once won the liking of the French people, and attracted attention wherever people gave thought to aviation. Liberal in expenditure of money, and utterly fearless in exposing his life, he pushed his experiments for the development of a true dirigible tirelessly. Perhaps his major fault was that he learned but slowly from the experiences of others. He clung to the spherical balloon long after the impossibility of controlling it in the air was accepted as unavoidable by aeronauts. But in 1898 having become infatuated with the performances of a little sixty-six pound tricycle motor he determined to build a cigar-shaped airship to fit it, and with that determination won success.
Amateur he may have been, was indeed throughout the greater part of his career as an airman. Nevertheless Santos-Dumont has to his credit two very notable achievements.
