Santos-Dumont fits it into his new torpedo-shaped dirigible. He flies a thousand feet high in a laundry basket held to a balloon by piano wire. It’s so light that he can hover above his apartment, and let his butler take the drag rope and pull him down.

His initial adventures are pranks. When the Congress of Aeronautics meets at the Universal Exposition in 1900, to debate whether man can fly, Santos-Dumont flies overhead. When he circles the racetrack at Longchamps faster than the horses, causing all sorts of havoc, he is told that he’s flying over “restricted ground.” Unimpressed, he says, “The ground may be restricted, but the air is free

Then Alberto finally finds his personal “Holy Grail.” Henry Deutsche, the balding, bearded and wealthy president of the Aéro Club offers 100,000 francs, a huge prize at that time, to anyone who can fly from St.-Cloud, a hill overlooking Paris, to the world’s tallest building, the Eiffel Tower.

Santos-Dumont doesn’t want Deutsche’s prize money. Instead, this little man wants the bigger glory of measuring himself against the world’s tallest structure.

On his first try, the balloon crumples up like a jackknife above him, and he falls. But he has a 200-foot guide rope to keep the balloon elevated. Below him he eyes a group of boys flying kites. In a moment of desperate inspiration, Alberto tosses the rope to the boys and yells, “Quick. Pull it. Run with it.” They race against the wind. Suddenly the falling balloon becomes a kite and soars again, only to settle to the ground with a gentle thump.

“Did he ever feel fear”? asks a friend. “Yes,” he answers. “I feign courage before those watching me and face the danger. But even so I am still afraid.”

His next dirigible flight lands him in a tree. Reporters rush to the scene, only to find him sitting on a limb. Does he want last rites? No, he wants a glass of beer.

So Santos-Dumont tries again. He rises high above the city and turns around the Eiffel Tower. But as he starts back, his balloon starts to deflate. It flutters and flops. Then a suspension wire overhead gets caught in the propeller, and the dirigible starts eating itself into pieces. He stops the motor and begins to drift.

Alberto has three choices: deflate now and fall into the city, try to maneuver into the Seine River and perhaps drown, or drop all his ballast and be slammed back into the sharp-sided tower. None of them are good. He looks down on the saw-tooth chimney tops, the sharp-sided red-tile roofs, the needle-nose steeples, and the bullet-headed towers. Santos-Dumont knows he’s going to crash. He hears the screams from every housetop as he gets lower.

Then the city seems to rush at him. He isn’t going to make the river. Atop the Eiffel Tower, the judges see the ship disappear over the jagged skyline, then hear the loud, hollow roar of the explosion. Deutsche bursts into tears.

But Santos-Dumont doesn’t die. The dirigible crashes into the Trocadéro hotel across the river from the Tower. The keel catches between the hotel and the roof of a building across the street. Then the keel starts to tip over. Alberto hangs from the basket, 100 feet up. With incredible, cat-quick reflexes, he jumps from the dirigible to a tiny, barred sixth-story window, and hangs there until the firemen arrive to pull him up to the roof.

But Santos-Dumont can’t quit. He has to win. On Oct. 19, 1901, he tries again. This time he rounds the Eiffel Tower and comes back almost effortlessly. “I cried to the crowd of spectators, `Have I won?’” he wrote later. “And the crowd cried back: `Yes!’”

Alberto doesn’t keep the money. He gives away the entire prize to the “deserving poor.” He goes to the Parisian pawnshops, ransoms all the workers’ tools and all the musicians’ instruments, and gives them back. This highlights another side of Santos-Dumont; he has a powerful social conscience. He never takes a patent on any of his inventions, arguing that they should be free to all. He is horrified by war and misery, and never wants to see anyone suffer. But more importantly, he never wants to see airships used to kill people, or subject them to tyranny.

Now Alberto takes an extended vacation. He builds a dirigible and tries to fly across the Mediterranean; naturally he gets wet. He builds a little airship to fly through the streets of Paris. He floats past ladies’ bedroom windows, and they wave to him or throw him their undergarments. He comes down at will, hovers above a café while sipping an aperitif, and glides off again into the night sky.

“I attach little importance to crashes,” he says. “I believe in my lucky star.” Santos-Dumont is now too sure of himself, and like Icarus, too arrogant. But he’s in for a rude awakening. He hears stories about Americans who surpass him, and fly with wings. What about this new invention? Does it really exist?

It does, but its inventors, Wilbur and Orville Wright, are so quiet that no one hears of their success and Alberto knows nothing about their design. When the new president of the Aéro Club offers a prize for the first heavier-than-air machine, Santos-Dumont gives up on dirigibles. He hires Gabriel Voisin — soon to be a famous aviator in his own right — to build what he thinks an airplane should look like. He calls the gigantic box kite that is as long as a house, “Le Cigale Enrage,” the infuriated grasshopper. This strange, uncontrollable contraption has no steering, so it’s like putting a propeller on a grand piano. No one else but Alberto could even fly it.

And it stinks, literally. Alberto uses castor oil to lubricate the engine, so it gives off clouds of smelly smoke. A big touring car rides alongside, trying to track its speed, and to make sure the wheels are off the ground. It flies about as well as a grasshopper, but it does make a hop longer than the Wright Brothers’s first flight. Santos-Dumont is the first person to fly an airplane outside America and, because he’s unaware of the Wrights, Alberto thinks he’s the first person to fly an airplane. He is a hero again, and it is the crowning achievement of his life. But this time it will prove to be a cruel joke.

Since Santos-Dumont flew publicly, he smokes out the Wright Brothers. No one believes they can really fly. The French newspapers ridicule the Wrights. “Fliers or liars!” scream the headlines.

In 1907, the Wright Brothers accept the challenge and show the French — and the world — that they are far ahead of everyone else. Eclipsed, Santos-Dumont retreats into solitude, never to reemerge as an aviator. But he remains the inventor of the single most beautiful flying creation in the world, the Demoiselle — which means lovely girl or dragonfly — and is the predecessor to today’s microlite.

Alberto’s flying machines orient toward individual flight, not toward passenger vehicles. While others think, calculate, and try to make money, he simply flies. He proves the greatest minds of his generation wrong. And everyone is free to use his designs. The only time Santos-Dumont files suit is when someone asks to use his design, and then patents his design as their own.

Brilliant, innovative and ultimately unremembered, he invents the artificial horizon, which is still in use in aerial navigation today. But more importantly, he is an idealist who hates war. He says he’d rather never have lived than have his airships used for war. It is a statement that will come back to haunt him.

He stirred the beehive, and now all the bees are abuzz. French fliers educated at his feet take to the air. So do Americans. Alberto once pushed them to do their best, and now they outdistance him. Voisin the designer, Louis Bleriot, the first to cross the English Channel in an airplane, and Henri Farnam, the airplane racer.

But what of Santos-Dumont himself, the man born under a lucky star, and the first to really fly? His final days take place in gathering darkness. In March 1910, he disappears from sight, never to fly again . . . at least as a pilot. He contracts multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system, which slowly destroys his magnificent reflexes. Alberto gives up his friends, his flying machines, and his life, and returns to his native Brazil.

In 1913, he goes back to Paris to unveil a statue of Icarus, located in St.-Cloud, it commemorates his famous flight. A shadow of his former self, his voice trembles, his hands shake, and he speaks haltingly of bygone days. As war approaches, he’s afraid of what he’s created.

During World War I, he rests in a Mediterranean villa and watches the stars through a telescope. A suspicious police inspector accuses him of being a spy, and in a burst of fury, Santos-Dumont destroys all the notes and diaries about his machines and inventions. He leaves France forever, content to die unremembered.

In 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flies across the Atlantic Ocean, Alberto is in a Swiss hospital. The Aéro Club invites him to preside over the dinner to honor the young American. He weeps because he’s too ill to attend. But still he dreams . . . Of Icarus. Of man flying with just a motor on his back. He is way ahead of his time, and he lacks the ability to make it happen. A picture of Santos-Dumont, in his later years, shows a man with eyes deep set and full of pain, an air of tragedy about him. He is almost bankrupt.

Santos-Dumont did what the whole world could not do. He broke the spell binding us to earth. He broke our own chains. Someone once asked him, “What did you do?” And he said, “I did what I could.” Maybe the same will be true of us.

I would like to remember the petite Santos-Dumont with “The Balloonist’s Prayer:”

“The winds have welcomed you with softness.

The sun has blessed you with its warm hands.

You have flown so high and so well

That God has joined you in your laughter

And sent you back again into the loving arms of Mother Earth.”