Expérience du ballon dirigeable de M. Santos-Dumont: I. Sortie du ballon

A dirigible balloon emerges from its hangar.

It's a rather creepy picture, because the inflated dirigible is rather phallic-looking. Still, it's a nice reminder that manned, powered flight did not begin at Kitty Hawk with the Wright brothers, nor even in France. An early pioneer in flight, was Alberto Santos-Dumont, the heir to a Brazilian coffee fortune, who led aeronautics for a while. In 1901, he flew his #6 dirigible around the Eiffel Tour. Then he moved on to heavier-than-air flight, and became a national hero in Brazil, who took great pride in his achievements. He died in 1932 at the age of 59.