Wings of Madness
Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
This ebook does not include illustrations.
From the author of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, winner of the prestigious Rhone-Poulenc science award: the history of aviation told through the extraordinary story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, the forgotten man who battled to be the first to free himself from the confines of the earth.
Ask most people who flew the first aeroplane and you'll get the same response: Orville and Wilbur Wright. But ask a Brazilian the same question and you will get a different answer: Alberto Santos-Dumont, the man they have crowned the 'father of aviation'.
Fearless Alberto Santos-Dumont was a slight and wiry man who built flying machines that could hold no one heavier than himself and required a daredevil dexterity to stay aloft. Never before or since has there been an aeroplane in which the pilot has had to stand up for the whole flight (he had to perfect the rumba in order to get his Bird of Prey into the air at all). Nor has anyone else had a personal flying machine – a small powered balloon that he kept tied to a lamp post outside his apartment when he was not bar-hopping, handing the reins of the airship to the doorman at his favourite night spot. His genius and charisma led him to be celebrated in Paris, London and New York: he dined with the Cartiers, the Rothschilds and the Roosevelts, and fast became the darling of the press.
With his blithe faith in the future of technology, Santos-Dumont did not foresee the destructive power of his beloved machines. Yet his indomitable spirit was slowly crushed as competition grew and the skies became full of hazardous aircraft. With the dawn of World War I, he saw their potential for devastation and began to blame himself for every fatality. The guilt placed too great a weight on his mind, and as he became distracted from his aeronautical dream, family and friends began to fear for his sanity. On his last attempt to fly he glued feathers to his arms and tried to launch himself through a window in a sanatorium.
Reviews
On The Man Who Loved Only Numbers:
'Paul Hoffman, in this marvellous biography, gives us a vivid and strangely moving portrait of this singular creature, one that brings out not only Erdos's genius and his oddness, but his warmth and sense of fun, the joyfulness of his strange life.'
Oliver Sacks
'Enthralling. A biography which conveys the wonder of mathematics by focusing on one of its most devoted practitioners.' Simon Singh, Observer
'Hoffman's book brilliantly reflects the man and his work: chaotic, eccentric and intriguing.' Focus
About the author
Author of the award winning biography THE MAN WHO LOVED ONLY NUMBERS, Paul Hoffman writes for Time and The New Yorker. He is the former president of Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This thoroughly entertaining history of one of the currently overlooked heroes from early 20th-century aviation equals that of Hoffman's earlier volume, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. Almost unknown today except in his native Brazil (where he is a revered figure), Alberto Santos-Dumont was known throughout the world as "a maverick among contemporary aeronauts." Obsessed with the idea of flight from an early age, Santos-Dumont (1873 1932) was an eccentric genius whose inherited wealth allowed him to live in luxury in fin-de-si cle Paris, at first working on ballooning. After designing small, cigar-shaped, engine-powered vehicles, which he used for everything from traveling around Paris to circling the Eiffel Tower, he soon became one of the best-known men in the city. Later he built "the world's first sports plane." Hoffman expertly recaptures from the historical dustbin the many facets of this unique character who befriended the Rothschilds and Cartiers, ran in the same crowd as Marcel Proust and devoted his life to a singular passion unmatched even by the obsessive Wright Brothers during the early days of aviation, "a time when the vast majority of Europeans and Americans had not yet traveled along the ground in an automobile."