Unknown space pioneer full#

Having mastered lighter-than-air vehicles, Santos-Dumont later turned his attention toward building airplanes. His craft were so reliable that he was even known to tie one up outside his Paris apartment and use it to cruise to nearby restaurants and shops. He won an aviation prize for successfully piloting an airship around the Eiffel Tower in 1901, and later used his technical brilliance to create more than a dozen different airship designs.

The flamboyant, impeccably dressed Brazilian used money from his family’s coffee planting fortune to fly hot air balloons and build groundbreaking motor-powered dirigibles. While living in Paris in the early 20th century, Alberto Santos-Dumont cemented a reputation as the world’s first gentleman aviator. The fearless aviator died the following day, supposedly after uttering the now-legendary words, “Sacrifices must be made.” During a flight on August 9, 1896, he stalled his glider and plummeted 50 feet to the ground, fracturing his spine.

Unknown space pioneer full#

Unfortunately, Lilienthal didn’t live to see the full impact of his work. Photos of the “Glider King” circulated around the globe, inspiring a whole generation of aviators. “No one equaled him in power to draw new recruits to the cause,” Wilbur Wright once said. His well-documented flights-some of which saw him soar as far as 800 feet-helped legitimize the quest for aviation during a time when many still considered it a fool’s errand.

Lilienthal’s craft were typically crude monoplanes that resembled hang gliders, but he was also a tireless experimenter who compiled reams of data on bird flight, aerodynamics and airfoil design. Between 18, he constructed 16 different glider designs and made some 2,000 successful flights, most of them from an artificial hill outside Berlin. But to fly is everything.” It was a motto the German aviator lived by. “To invent an airplane is nothing,” Otto Lilienthal once said.