Topic: Oddities
It wasn't the Arabs! It was the Brazilians!
On December 1st I posted an item - Now what? The Wright Brothers weren't first? The Arabs invented manned flight? Oh no! - that linked to an article from NovaPlanet in Paris, Les Arabes ont invent? l'avion.
Well, in Reuters today one finds another view - it seems it wasn't the Arabs at all.
See Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course
Reuters, Tuesday, December 09, 2003
The claim?
PETROPOLIS, Brazil - As Americans prepare to celebrate the centennial of the Wright brother's first flight, a whole country is cringing at what it believes to be a historical injustice against one of its most beloved heroes.Well. That settles it!
Ask anyone in Brazil who invented the airplane and they will say Alberto Santos-Dumont, a 5-foot-4-inch bon vivant who was as known for his aerial prowess as he was for his dandyish dress and high society life in Belle Epoque Paris.
As Paul Hoffman recounts in his Santos-Dumont biography "Wings of Madness," the eccentric Brazilian was the first and only person to own a personal flying machine that could take him just about anywhere he wanted to go.
"He would keep his dirigible tied to a gas lamp post in front of his Paris apartment at the Champs-Elysees and every night he would fly to Maxim's for dinner. During the day he'd fly to go shopping, he'd fly to visit friends," Hoffman told Reuters.
Reuters notes Santos-Dumon was an idealist who believed flight was "spiritually soothing." Santos-Dumont financed his lavish lifestyle and aerial experiments in Paris with the inheritance his coffee-farming father had advanced him as a young man. Always impeccably dressed, he regularly took a gourmet lunch with him on his ballooning expeditions. But of course....
Here's the real controversy:
... it was on Nov. 12, 1906, when Santos-Dumont flew a kite-like contraption with boxy wings called the 14-Bis some 722 feet on the outskirts of Paris. It being the first public flight in the world, he was hailed as the inventor of the airplane all over Europe.A fraud?
It was only later that the secretive Orville and Wilbur Wright proved they had beaten Santos-Dumont at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, three years earlier on Dec. 17.
But to bring up the Wright brothers with a Brazilian is bound to elicit an avalanche of arguments - some more reasonable than others - as to why their compatriot's flight didn't count.
"It's one of the biggest frauds in history," scoffs Wagner Diogo, a taxi driver in Rio de Janeiro, of the Wright's inaugural flight. "No one saw it, and they used a catapult to launch" the airplane.
Apparently, the debate comes down to how you define the first flight of an airplane.
Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist and Santos-Dumont expert, argues that the Wright brothers' flight did not fulfill the conditions that had been set up at the time to distinguish a true flight from a prolonged hop.
But Santos-Dumont's flight did meet the criteria, which in essence meant he took off unassisted, publicly flew a predetermined length in front of experts and then landed safely.
"If we understand what the criteria was at the end of the 19th century, the Wright brothers simply do not fill any of the prerequisites," says Lins de Barros.
And that's that. The link will give you full detail.
And you'll also find this: Santos-Dumont was probably the first male civilian to use a watch after asking his friend Louis Cartier to make him a timepiece he could use while flying. Previously, only royalty and soldiers had used watches. To this day, you can still buy the Santos-model Cartier watch for only a couple thousand dollars.
Posted by Alan at 10:20 PST
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Updated: Tuesday, 9 December 2003 13:35 PST
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