My First Balloon Ascent
by Alberto Santos-Dumont
At the height of his career, the pioneering aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont
believed that flight could be a pathway to world peace, enabling people to
reflect on the all-too-human world below and inspiring them to lead more just and
moral lives. But when he first took to the skies at the age of 24, flight for
Santos was foremost an act of adventure and joy. In the following excerpt from
his memoir My Airships, Santos reminisces about the virgin voyage he
took in 1897.
A magical stillness
I
have kept the clearest remembrance of the delightful sensations I experienced
in ... my first trial in the air. I arrived early at the Parc d'Aerostation of
Vaugirard so as to lose nothing of the preparations. The balloon, of a capacity
of 750 cubic meters [26,000 cubic feet], was lying a flat mass on the grass. At
a signal from M. Lachambre [the constructor and owner of the balloon] the
workmen turned on the gas, and soon the formless thing rounded up into a great
sphere and rose into the air.
At 11 a.m. all was ready. The basket rocked prettily beneath the balloon, which
a mild, fresh breeze was caressing. Impatient to be off, I stood in my corner
of the narrow wicker basket with a bag of ballast in my hand. In the other
corner M. Machuron [an experienced balloonist and Santos's guide] gave the
word: "Let go all!"
Suddenly the wind ceased. The air seemed motionless around us. We were off,
going at the speed of the air current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed,
for us, there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of all
spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt movement forward and
upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves but
the Earth that sinks down and away.
At the bottom of the abyss, which already opened 1,500 yards below us, the
Earth, instead of appearing round like a ball, shows concave like a bowl by a
peculiar phenomenon of refraction whose effect is to lift up constantly to the
aeronaut's eyes the circle of the horizon.
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 on 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.
The
lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward and pierced the clouds like a
cannonball.
While my gaze was still held fascinated on the scene, a cloud passed before the
sun. Its shadow cooled the gas in the balloon, which wrinkled and began
descending, gently at first, and then with accelerated speed, against which we
strove by throwing out ballast. This is the second great fact of spherical
ballooning: we are masters of our altitude by the possession of a few pounds of
sand!
Regaining our equilibrium above a plateau of clouds at about 3,000 yards, we
enjoyed a wonderful sight. The sun cast the shadow of the balloon on this
screen of dazzling whiteness, while our own profiles, magnified to giant size,
appeared in the center of a triple rainbow! As we could no longer see the
Earth, all sensation of movement ceased. We might be going at storm speed and
not know it. We could not even know the direction we were taking save by
descending below the clouds to regain our bearings.
An aerial picnic
A joyous peal of bells mounted up to us. It was the noonday Angelus [a Roman
Catholic call to prayer] ringing from some village belfry. I had brought up
with us a substantial lunch of hard-boiled eggs, cold roast beef and chicken,
cheese, ice-cream, fruits and cakes, champagne, coffee and Chartreuse. Nothing
is more delicious than lunching like this above the clouds in a spherical
balloon. No dining room can be so marvelous in its decoration. The sun sets the
clouds in ebullition, making them throw up rainbow jets of frozen vapor like
great sheaves of fireworks all around the table. Lovely white spangles of the
most delicate ice formation scatter here and there by magic; white flakes of
snow form, moment by moment, out of nothingness, beneath our very eyes, and in
our very drinking glasses.
I was finishing my little glass of liqueur when the curtain suddenly fell on
this wonderful stage setting of sunlight, cloud billows, and azure. The
barometer rose rapidly ... showing a sudden rapture of equilibrium and a swift
descent. Probably the balloon had become loaded down with several pounds of
snow, and it was falling into a cloud.
We passed into the half darkness of the fog. We could still see our basket, our
instruments, and the parts of the rigging nearest us, but the netting that held
us to the balloon was visible only to a certain height, and the balloon itself
had completely disappeared. So we had for a moment the strange and delightful
sensation of hanging in the void without support, of having lost our last ounce
of weight in a limbo of nothingness, somber and portentous.
After a few minutes of fall, slackened by throwing out more ballast, we found
ourselves under the clouds at a distance of about 300 yards from the ground. A
village fled away from us below. We took our bearings with the compass and
compared our route map with the immense natural map that unfolded below. Soon
we could identify roads, railways, villages, and forests, all hastening toward
us from the horizon with the swiftness of the wind itself.
The storm that had sent us downward marked a change of weather. Now little
gusts began to push the balloon from right to left, up and down. From time to
time the guide rope—a great rope dangling 100 yards below our
basket—would touch Earth, and soon the basket also began to graze the
tops of trees.
What is called "guide-roping" thus began for me under conditions peculiarly
instructive. We had a sack of ballast at hand, and when some special obstacle
rose in our path, like a tree or a house, we threw out a few handfuls of sand
to leap up and pass over it. More than 50 yards of the guide rope dragged
behind us on the ground, and this was more than enough to keep our equilibrium
under the altitude of 100 yards, above which we decided not to rise for the
rest of the trip.
Learning the ropes
This first ascent allowed me to appreciate fully the utility of this simple
part of the spherical balloon's rigging, without which its landing would
usually present grave difficulties. When, for one reason or
another—humidity gathering on the surface of the balloon, a downward
stroke of wind, accidental loss of gas, or, more frequently, the passing of a
cloud before the face of the sun—the balloon came back to Earth with
disquieting speed, the guide rope would come to rest in part on the ground, and
so, unballasting the whole system by so much of its weight, stopped, or at
least eased, the fall. Under contrary conditions, any too rapid upward tendency
of the balloon was counterbalanced by the lifting of the guide rope off the
ground, so that a little more of its weight became added to the weight of the
floating system of the moment before.
It was losing the remains of its gas in convulsive agitations,
like a great bird that dies in beating its wings.
Like all human devices, however, the guide rope, along with its advantages, has
its inconveniences. Its rubbing along the uneven surfaces of the
ground—over fields and meadows, hills and valleys, roads and houses,
hedges and telegraph wires—gives violent shocks to the balloon. Or it may
happen that the guide rope, rapidly unraveling the snarl in which it has
twisted itself, catches hold of some asperity of the surface or winds itself
around the trunk or branches of a tree....
As we passed a little group of trees, a shock stronger than any hitherto felt
threw us backward in the basket. The balloon had stopped short and was swaying
in the wind gusts at the end of its guide rope, which had curled itself around
the head of an oak. For a quarter of an hour it kept shaking like a salad
basket, and it was only by throwing out a quantity of ballast that we finally
got ourselves loose. The lightened balloon made a tremendous leap upward and
pierced the clouds like a cannonball. Indeed, it threatened to reach dangerous
heights, considering the little ballast we had remaining in store for use in
descending. It was time to have recourse to effective means, to open the
maneuver valve and let out a portion of our gas.
It ... [took only] a moment. The balloon began descending to Earth again, and
soon the guide rope again rested on the ground. There was nothing to do but to
bring the trip to an end, because only a few handfuls of sand remained to
us.
A smooth landing
He who wishes to navigate an airship should first practice a good many landings
in a spherical balloon—that is, if he wishes to land without breaking
balloon, keel, motor, rudder, propeller, water-ballast cylinders, and fuel
holders. The wind being rather strong, it was necessary to seek shelter for
this last maneuver. At the end of the plain ... the forest of Fontainebleau was
hurrying toward us. In a few moments we had turned [toward] the extremity of
the wood, sacrificing our last handful of ballast. The trees now protected us
from the violence of the wind, and we cast anchor, at the same time opening
wide the emergency valve for the wholesale escape of the gas.
The twofold maneuver landed us without the least dragging. We set foot on solid
ground and stood there watching the balloon die. Stretched out in the field, it
was losing the remains of its gas in convulsive agitations, like a great bird
that dies in beating its wings.
After taking a dozen instantaneous photographs of the dying balloon, we folded
it and packed it in the basket with its netting folded alongside. The little
chosen corner in which we had landed formed part of the grounds of the Chateau
de la Ferrière, belonging to M. Alphonse de Rothschild. Laborers from a
neighboring field were sent for a conveyance to the village of La
Ferrière itself, and half an hour later a brake [a farming vehicle]
came. Putting everything into it, we set off to the railway station, which was
some two miles distant. There we had some work to lift the basket with its
contents to the ground, as it weighed 200 kilograms [440 pounds]. At 6:30 p.m.
we were back in Paris, after a journey of 100 kilometers [62 miles] and nearly
two hours passed in the air.
I liked ballooning so much that, coming back from my first trip with M.
Machuron, I told him that I wanted a balloon built for myself.
