Book Review: Wings of Madness

SPOILER ALERT

Wings of Madness

Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight

By Paul Hoffman

Where to even start? Wow! What a great read! I had never heard of Santos-Dumont before reading this book. He is, for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people, a lost hero of early aviation.

Paul Hoffman takes us on a fascinating ride through aviation history and into the life of Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont. The book covers his formative years on his father’s very successful coffee plantation, to his arrival in Paris, the city he fell in love with and came to call home for many years, and his eventual move back home to Brazil. Along the way we are given insight into the prevalent thinking of the Industrial Age and what drove inventors to create.

It was on his father’s coffee plantation that his love of engineering came to the fore and through reading his father’s engineering textbooks, he discovered hot air balloons. At the age of 10 he was able to duplicate Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier’s hot air balloon invention in miniature, without ever having seen a hot air balloon in real life. The writings of Jules Verne further piqued his interest in flying machines and he became an ardent student of all things aviation.  

In 1891, when Santos-Dumont was 18 years old, his family sold the coffee plantation and relocated to Paris to find expert medical care for his father, who had fallen from his horse and suffered from a severe concussion and partial paralysis. Alberto immediately fell in love with the city. Being the engineering geek that he was, he spent several hours on his first day in Paris just riding the elevators up and down the then two year-old Eiffel Tower and admiring the engineering genius of Gustave Eiffel.

He later created a one-man dirigible which he flew around Paris, over the crowds and rooftops, and occasionally crashed into roofs and other things, such as a tree on the Rothschild’s property. Never one for letting failure keep him down longer than it took him to heal from an injury, he dusted himself off and continued his quest to create the world’s first practical flying machine, dreaming that one day everyone might have their own personal flying machine. He was a man on top of the world and living his dream, and soon flying machines were a reality.

Although considered eccentric by many, he became well-known, loved and respected for his advancements in aviation. He became friends with the Rothschild’s, the Cartier’s, and many other influential families.

The events of World War I and seeing the flying machines’ capacity for destruction began to haunt him and made him question his dreams. He appealed to the military powers-that-be to cease using them for destructive purposes, but we all know how that turned out.

Parts of this book were very hard to read. A man’s genius and dreams being twisted for purposes of war and destruction is hard to accept even as a reader. You can imagine what it did to him and what it does to geniuses of today who face the same reality. Even so, this book is definitely worth the read. There is so much good in it, so much fascinating history, and so much to learn from it.

Note: I am not being compensated for this review.