ISBN: 9780786885718

Santos-Dumont as the man who had conquered the air. He played to the crowds by barhopping in a little dirigible that he tied to lampposts. In Paris and London, his dapper countenance star… Mehr…

Santos-Dumont as the man who had conquered the air. He played to the crowds by barhopping in a little dirigible that he tied to lampposts. In Paris and London, his dapper countenance stared out from cigar boxes, matchbooks and dinner plates, and fashion designers did a brisk business with replicas of his trademark panama hat and stiff, turned-up ???Santos-Dumont??? collars. New York and London tabloids sent correspondents to Paris to file daily reports on his every move. Why, they wondered, wasn???t he comfortable with women? Just what was his relationship with George Goursat, the famous French caricaturist known as SEM, who sketched Santos-Dumont for the walls of numerous bistros? The last twenty-five years of Santos-Dumont??'s life were marked by melancholy and madness.& nbsp; A committed pacifist, when he learned that zeppelins and airplanes were dropping bombs in World War I, he blamed himself for inventing such crafts. Throughout the 1920s, he checked himself in and out of sanitariums in Switzerland and France. He returned to his native Brazil in 1928, and was greeted by twelve of the country??'s top scientists boarded a hydroplane and flew out to greet him. As the vessel dipped to bombard him with balloons and confetti, it suddenly plunged and exploded in midair, killing everyone on board. Needless to say, this event set back Santos-Dumont??'s recovery (and Brazilian science itself). When civil war broke out in 1932, he took his own life by hanging himself with a necktie. When word of his death reached his fellow countrymen, they called a three-day truce in the war. Media > Book, [PU: Hyperion]<

ISBN: 9780786885718

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ISBN: 9780786885718

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