sábado, 23 de junho de 2018

Santos=Dumont and his Aerial Dinner Parties

Santos=Dumont sitting at his high tables with guests

There are reports that when he lived in Paris, in the early 1910s, Santos=Dumont had tables two meters high made, accompanied by small stairs, so that the guests could climb on the high chairs, as well as, so that the waiters could serve them. He placed these tables in his apartment on the Champs Élysées and hosted some meals for very special guests.

Other reports say that only a table set with four chairs was made.

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Unfortunately, we do not have many references to how, when, and why Santos=Dumont promoted these "Dinners in the Heights", the few that come to us end up being distorted, incomplete, biased and pejorative.
Reconstitution of the dining room in the heights based on photos from the time.

But I have no doubt that they must have been very extravagant, sophisticated and therefore unforgettable events.


Santos=Dumont's appreciation of experiencing unique meals, and living a life-style worthy of what he use to read in the adventures of Jules Verne, came to be known later when he frequently stopped his dirigible#9 in the restaurant 'La Grande Cascade' , or in front of his elegant apartment in Paris, just to have a coffee with friends, and return to his flights.

But it was with the Aereial Dinner Parties (eventually called "L'incroyable diner dans le ciel" or "diner aérien" by the Parisians) that Santos=Dumont won the heart of the elegant dandies of his time.

Among the best articles that I’ve found about these and other dinners parties promoted by him, I begin by quoting Jorge Henrique Dodsworth, Santos=Dumont’s nephew: "Head in the heights, dinner in the heights. He had dinner tables and special chairs arranged in order to give to the aristocratic guests the feeling of being in the air. "

Yolanda Penteado describes her "Tio Alberto, ("Uncle Alberto, in Portuguese" as she affectionately called him) and little bit about who these guests might be: "Santos-Dumont was extremely elegant and refined. Impeccable, he was a fashion influencer of his time: Santos-Dumont collar, Santos-Dumont hats, ... eccentric and vain. Because he was small in size, he wore elevated boots. Or as they will be called later, platform shoes (...) in the early years of the twentieth century, Santos-Dumont was, indeed, the number one figure of Paris. He was, sort to speak, star in time when fabulous people like, Marcel Proust, Guy de Moupassant, Toulouse-Lautrec, glowed on boulevards, cafes and halls. (...) The famous caricaturist SEM registered him in a cafe next to Lautrec ".


Yolanda also talks about other eccentricities and sophistications of Dumont in relation to the meals he was serving, "Once [Santos-Dumont] invited us to go to Petrópolis ... we were invited to lunch, and it was, not to my astonishment, when we saw the table lined with folded violets of Parma, very pretty Royal Dalton pottery, in red. A huge black guy brought a tray with a huge turkey. The black guy was so big that almost did not fit into the room (A Encantada - the Enchanted in Portuguese, was house of Santos=Dumont in Petrópolis, with very small dimensions) it was really a scene, when he tried to cut the turkey. Mr Alberto served only champagne. There was also a violet inside the champagne glasses.

As for the aviator's life in Paris, and the privacy of him in his apartment, we have the reference of the New York Mail and Express reporter, who had once been sent to Paris to describe his personality. It is important to note that this descriptions may be somewhat biased, since Santos=Dumont was a close friend of James Gordon Bennett, a celebrity and millionaire living in Paris, owner of the competing newspaper, The New York Herald.

Paul Hoffman in his book, Wings of Madness, painstakingly describes the decoration of Santos=Dumont's apartment, described by a reporter: “in a profusion of pastel, blue and white, pink, golden, silk-lined walls, large bowls. He also says that it was Dumont himself who knit, he was very knowledgeable in the art of tapestry, and he had embroidered his own towels and napkins”.

It is also possible that Dumont made his own tablecloth, since the embroiderers of the Dumont family in northwestern Minas Gerais (Estate located in southeast region of Brazil) have tradition in this sort of art, making Irish lace towels, lace sheets, cross stitch pillowcases, using centuries old techniques, among many others in Brazil.

The knitting, crocheting and embroidering are part of the feminine tradition in Brazil, nevertheless it is known that the mathematics skills and the art behind such task, was learned in family, very often by men who, of course, did not publish that sort of feat, to avoid prejudice among male community, and it is currently practiced by many men and women now days in order to develop mental abilities, control stress and obviously, for its beauty.


In the book "La Demoiselle et la Mort", Michel Bénichou describes the inventor, and his life in his apartment, practicing this art: "In the white room, where the setting sun shines in golden reflexions, Alberto Santos-Dumont turns his back on the window. Standing in a golden armchair in front of a pink curtain under an embroidered veil, he faces his world, a bundle of trinkets over some collection of little ‘guéridon’ tables, he is gazing into nothingness. From his little hieratic body, only the hands are shaken in a regular fashion. He is knitting. The ticking of their needles competes with the faint ticking of a clock. When the time comes, he looks at it, counts the meshes with the tip of his thumb, folds and arranges them, rises and walks with sudden vivacity up to the room"*.

I also know that many readers of our culture tend to have such ‘macho impulses’ with regard to his abilities with needles, and with respect to his sexuality, which is caused by pure ignorance, but in France this ability is well known and respected. In this sense, I strive to address such subject, in a spirit of journalistic investigation and free of prejudice.

Being invited to such an event, having a meal at the home of one of the greatest personalities of the early twentieth century, promoted by the genius of the air, the Brazilian father of aviation, and still experience his unique gastronomic experiences on the heights, in such luxurious and exotic atmosphere, happened more than a hundred years ago, and nothing to this day could match it - if you, who are reading this blog wants to invest in such format of restaurants, you should count on me to be your business partner :).

* original article in French - « Dans le salon blanc, où le soleil couchant fait étinceler les dorures, Alberto Santos-Dumont tourne le dos à la fenêtre. Immobile, assis bien droit sur une fine chaise dorée, devant un voile de guipure drapé et son rideau de soi rose, il fait face à son monde, théorie de bibelots sur collection de guéridons, les yeux fixés sur le néant. De son petit corps hiératique, seules les mains sont agitées de saccades régulières. Il tricote. Ses aiguilles opposent un tic-tic affaire au langoureux tic-tic d’une pendule. Quand sonne l’heure, il abaisse le regard vers elles, compte les mailles du bout du pouce, replie l ouvrage, le range, se lève et marche avec une vivacité soudaine vers la chambre ».


sábado, 16 de junho de 2018

Gago Coutinho & Sacadura Cabral

Portuguese Pioneers of Aviation Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral
The town of Sagres, located on a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, Cape St. Vincent; it’s the southwesternmost tip of Portugal and the whole European continent. It’s an incredibly special place, with 250-foot cliffs that plunge down into the sea, and for a long time people believed it was the end of the world.

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A Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator (Infante Dom Henrique in Portuguese), had a school there; you can still visit the ruins. He had the latest nautical charts, celestial maps and navigation equipment. It’s where explorers would meet and share knowledge and information before setting sail across the ocean.

Being there made me think about Columbus, Magellan and Vasco da Gama, brave men who took great leaps into the unknown to discover new worlds. Sagres was the Johnson Space Centre of its day.

As all real discovery begins with romantic daydreams, the Portuguese were the first to put their dreams into practice - legend has it that Portuguese aviation history may start to be told with the "deeds of João Torto",

João Torto jumps from the tower of the cathedral in São Mateus square
Using two pairs of calico cloth-covered wings attached to his arms and an eagle-shaped helmet, Torto jumped from the cathedral tower in St. Mateus square on June 20, 1540 at 5 p.m. in front of a large crowd, and fell a short distance to a nearby chapel.

Unfortunately, when he landed, his helmet slipped over his face and obscured his view. He fell to the ground, fatally wounding himself.

Torto a true Renaissance man, was a person of many trades: He was a nurse, a barber, a certified bleeder and healer, an astrologer and a teacher. - he certainly inspired the next aviation pioneers to come.

Another great pioneer of aeronautics was a Jesuit monk, Bartolomeu de Gusmão, who interrupted his studies at Coimbra University to develop his flying machines. On 5th and 8th August, 1709, the monk demonstrated the principle of lighter-than-air balloon to the King John V of Portugal and his court, and also to the Papal Representative Conti, later to become Pope Inocencius XIII.

Bartolomeu de Gusmão and his Passarola

Gusmão demonstrated indoors and outdoors his “hot air balloon” that in one case reached a height of 4.5 meters, carrying the “Passarola” an oneiric bird-like flying ship.

It is impossible for me not to mention in this blog Santos=Dumont, and his Portuguese maternal side of the family, that he valued so much, using both his Portuguese name "Santos" and also his French "Dumont" separated by a symbol of equal, depicted in his famous signature "Santos=Dumont", in which he equalized the importance of his two ancestries. But Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral were undoubtedly the most important Portuguese aeronauts to this day.

At this meeting, Dumont provided the pair of avid navigators with important navigation information regarding the use of chronometer and other crucial navigation references that made the difference in air safety for the crossing.

On march 30, in 1922, the pair of Portuguese aviators, Sacadura Cabral and Gago Coutinho, set off at the Bom Sucesso Naval Air Station in the Tagus, near the Belém Tower in Lisbon, at 16:30 on March 30, 1922, in the Portuguese Naval Aviation aircraft Lusitânia, It was the first flight across the southern Atlantic.

O Lusitânia near the Tower of Belêm

On April 17 they flew to Praia on Santiago Island, and then to the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago, already in Brazilian waters, where they arrived on the same day, after flying 1,700 kilometres (1,100 mi) over the South Atlantic. They had reached that point by relying solely on the Pattern Bubble Sextant with its artificial horizon and the route corrector, both invented by Coutinho exclusively to this travel.

However, when ditching on the rough seas near the archipelago, the Lusitânia lost one of its floats and sank. The two aviators were saved by the cruiser NRP República, which had been sent by the Portuguese Navy to support the aerial crossing. The aviators were then carried to the Brazilian Fernando de Noronha islands.

Immediately after that incident, the Portuguese government sent another Fairey III seaplane to complete the journey. The new plane, baptized Pátria (homeland in Portuguese), arrived at Fernando Noronha on May 6. After being refitted, the Pátria departed on May 11 with Coutinho and Cabral on board, departed towards the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago to resume the journey at the point where had been interrupted, but an engine problem forced them to once again make an emergency ditching in the middle of the ocean, where they drifted for nine hours until being saved by the nearby British cargo ship Paris City, which carried them back to Fernando Noronha.

Fairey III arrival in Santa Cruz Island

A third Fairey III – baptized Santa Cruz by the wife of Epitácio Pessoa, the President of Brazil – was sent out, carried by the cruiser NRP Carvalho Araújo. On June 5, the Santa Cruz was put in the waters of Fernando Noronha and Coutinho and Cabral resumed their journey, flying to Recife, then to Salvador da Bahia.

They’ve finally finished the 5,100-mile voyage at Rio de Janeiro on June 17, after a total of 62 hours flying, (important to say that British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown, made the first non-stop transatlantic flight in June 1919, and arrived in St. John's, Newfoundland, in Candada).

 Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant

Normally used to measure the angle between two objects at a distance, the sextant was the basic tool used by marine navigators, but it was not possible to use it when on board an aircraft, considering the water line and sea level as fundamental points of reference.

It was then that Gago Coutinho invented the Artificial Horizon Sextant or the Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant and the Path Corrector.

Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant 

The Sextant used an ampoule containing an air bubble as a substitute for the water line, following the tradition of experienced Portuguese navigators, the idea to conceive this special sextant was elegant and simple – let’s suppose that a navigator is approaching to the coast of Lisbon, and at a certain distance, he wants to measure the angle between the top of the tower of Belem in comparison with the line of the horizon (water line), win order to stipulate the angle and trigonometrically obtain the distance to the tower:

1 - At first it starts from scratch on the movable arm and the micrometric barrel, then looking through the telescope, it fits the water line in the small mirror;

How does the Coutinho's Sextant work?

2 - Once well framed, the navigator tightens the clip and loosens the movable arm, turning the micrometric drum until the top of the tower aligns with the water line - at this point he reads the scale of graduate arc.
Artificial Horizon Sextant, invented by Gago Coutinho

In the case of the Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant, invented by Gago Coutinho, an artificial horizon (9) was added, a device with an air bubble inside a water vial, which was reflected by an auxiliary mirror, thus replacing the window of the water level. This device made it possible to define a horizontal plane without the need for the visible sea horizon for those naturally positioned at sea level.

In collaboration with Sacadura Cabral, he designed and built another instrument which they called the “Plaqué de abatimento” or “route corrector”, which made it possible to graphically calculate the angle between the longitudinal angle of the aircraft and the route to be followed, taking the intensity and direction of the wind into account.

In order to verify the effectiveness of their methods and instruments, Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral made several aerial voyages, one of which was the journey between Lisbon and Funchal in 1921, in approximately seven and a half hours. On this journey, Gago Coutinho performed 15 calculations of straight altitude lines and several observations of the strength and direction of the wind. According to his annotations, the navigation processes used “were sufficient to determine with precision any point away from the earth, as small as it might be, a resource which became essential in a projected aerial journey from Lisbon to Brazil”.

Seaplane Fairey F III-D nº 17 "Santa Cruz" (Museum of the Navy of Lisbon)

The Coutinho and Cabral's saga, the South Atlantic aerial crossing, and the invention of such innovative instruments as well, inspired numerous subsequent transatlantic pilots, such as the American Charles Lindbergh, the Brazilian João Ribeiro de Barros and the Portuguese Sarmento de Beires, all of whom crossed the Atlantic in 1927.
Letter from Gago Coutinho to Santos = Dumont
Letter from Gago Coutinho to Santos=Dumont

In an incredible document, kept in the museum of Cabangu there is a beautiful posthumous letter from Gago Coutinho addressed to Santos=Dumont, expressing admiration for the idol, describing the joy when reading about the great man's adventures in the articles of "Vie au grand-air", and affectionately referring to and Santos=Dumont as the father of aviation. Find below the full text.

"Personally, I admired Santos=Dumont before I met him in person. His aerial adventures were reported to me by the French weekly "Vie au grand-air”, when I was working in the African backlands as a geographer, half a century ago.

I noticed that he had begun his studies at first, through the spherical balloon. Then he went to the airship, only military, with electric motor. When he made the turn around the Eiffel Tower; from there he passed to the "fire engine" dirigible, which represented the danger of a "fire at the foot of the tow" event, as it was to be seen later.

And so he was taken to the airplane, already without hydrogen, almost as his vision of the "flying machine" of the future. Finally – after 52 years - Santos, had obtained material result, proving that "Man can fly", and much better than the rivals, the birds. It seems that some people were surprised that he had not made his demonstrations in his homeland, Brazil, as I many times heard 36 years ago, in Rio, causing him dislike ad indifference. But still there were not the resources for his experiences there with light engines, gasoline, in addition to qualified personnel for the construction of balloons, etc.

But there was still a lack of interest worldwide, as proved by his definitive experience in 1906 in St. Cloud. Here (in Europe) his experiences provoked a public interest in the presence of those interested in the problem, such as Blérriot and others, who saw materially the future that S. Dumont had publicly revealed. And so, his experience soon provoked other Air pilots, who after a few months already knew how to fly, with resources derived from those revealed by the "Father of Aviation", our S. Dumont. So, if others had flown better than their two heliometers - flight that I would like to see repeated every year by this time the concrete fact is that it was their experiences of 1906 the capital step that brought about such a development, as that of Company "Panair do Brasil" demonstrates with its giant airplanes, that ships 70 passengers, every week!

That's not all. In 1922, S. Dumont offered me, as his fellow experimenter, those two instruments, with which he sought to demonstrate practically the power of Airplane guidance in the Air - similar to that which - centuries later - the "Portuguese Pilots" revealed to the World, at sea. His Chronometer here, and his sextant, which also served to his studies of navigation, I have already offered to the Museum of São Paulo, studies which preceded ours.

Arrangement of the letter originally written in three pages
And so to speak, in reply, came the occasion when I gave him spiritual pleasure: On the afternoon of June 4, 1931, S. Dumont sailed aboard the ‘paquete’ Lutetia, thus taking him, on his last voyage to Brazil, the Air Pioneer, Santos Dumont; through the ‘paquete’, the giant Airplane D.O.X., flying a hundred meters across the sea, only six meters from the water level. We were racing safely at a hundred knots, and giving him the satisfaction of palpably checking the reach of his initial creation - flying with that machine a hundred times heavier than his "Demoiselle" of Paris. We were flying confident with those instruments, as those he had used, the chronometer and the sextant. This aerial event showed that he had foreseen everything, better than others would have done, without witnesses.

That's what I noticed, only 25 years after his public flight, definitive. "

Lisbon, 1958 - Oct. 17 Gago Coutinho