Santos-Dumont fits it into his new aerodynamic torpedo shaped dirigible.  He flies a thousand feet high on a bicycle seat 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, he is told that he’s flying over “restricted ground.”  Unimpressed, he says, “The ground may be restricted, but the air is free.”

Then he finds his personal “Holy Grail.” Henry Deutsche, the balding, bearded and wealthy president of the Aéro Club offers 100,000 francs, a huge prize, to anyone who can fly from St.-Cloud — a hill overlooking Paris — to the world’s tallest building, the Eiffel Tower.  But Santos-Dumont doesn’t want Deutsche’s prize money.  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 is a group of boys flying kites.  In a moment of divine inspiration, Santos-Dumont tosses the rope to the boys underneath him and yells, “Quick.  Pull it.  Run with it.”  

They race against the wind.Suddenly the falling balloon becomes a kite, then soars again, and finally settles to the ground with only a gentle thump.

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

  So he tries again.  He rises high above the city and turns the Eiffel Tower.  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 to pieces.  Santos-Dumont stops the motor.

He has three choices: deflate now and fall to the city, try to maneuver into the Seine River and perhaps drown, or drop all his ballast and be blown 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, and the needle-nose steeples of Paris and knows he’s going to crash.  Santos-Dumont hears screams from every housetop as he gets lower.

Then the city seems to rush at him.  Atop the Eiffel Tower, the judges see the ship disappear over the jagged skyline, then hear the loud, hollow roar of an 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, with Santos-Dumont hanging 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.

Santos-Dumont is now the toast of Paris.  Women snatch at his clothing, and Deutsche offers him the prize even if he doesn’t fly.  He wins France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, and like Charles Lindbergh 26 years later, becomes the world’s most famous aviator.  Congratulations pour in from famous inventors like Edison and Marconi.  Everyone who sees him fly wants to be like him.  His style — floppy hat, baggy pegged-leg trousers and spats — is adopted by all the bon vivants in Paris. And he is only 28.

But Santos-Dumont can’t quit.  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!’”

Santos-Dumont 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 his personality; he has a conscience.  He never takes a patent on any of his inventions, arguing that they should be free to all.  He is horrified by misery and war, and hates to see suffering.  More importantly, he never wants to see airships used to kill people, or subject them to tyranny.

“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.  He’s in for a rude awakening.  He hears stories about Americans who have surpassed him, and are flying with wings.  Does this new invention really exist?

Not yet, but two competitors are vying to be first.  Samuel Langley, a famous astronomer and head of the prestigious Smithsonian Institute, has all the resources of its full-time staff, plus a huge government grant.  Langley taught at Harvard and the Naval Academy, and the most powerful men in government and business are friends, including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell.  Langley has already launched model airplanes from the tower of the Smithsonian, and has a houseboat with a catapult near Quantico, Virginia, ready for a full-size model.  He has an expert pilot, the lightest and most powerful engine in the world, and a novel design.  If one set of wings works, why not two?

His competition is the unknown Wright Brothers, who experiment in the wilds of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, with nothing except a shack and the parts they built at their Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop. 

By the fall of 1903, the Wrights are out of luck.  Battered by storms, their engine doesn’t work.  The propellers jerk loose and damage the shafts, and Orville must take them back to Dayton for repair.  Winter closes in and the ponds around them freeze.  The drive chains — the same ones you see on bicycles — are loose and their hands are so cold they can’t fix them.  And just when they think they have a good day, a 25-mile-per-hour wind hits them from the north, and sends them huddling back around the stove.

  As Orville heads back to Dayton, Langley’s airplane is ready to fly.  He’s spent 17 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars, but now becomes secretive.  Langley shuts out the press, and just before sunset at 4:45 p.m. on December 8, 1903, the catapult on his houseboat hurls the double-winged airplane into the air.  The Wright Brothers are about to become a footnote to history. 

But someone forgets to tighten the bolts on the guide railing.  His plane shoots upward before it even reaches the end of the track.  The nose points straight up, but everything aft of the spinning propellers falls apart.  The back wings crumple upward like hands clasped in prayer.  The plane does a half loop and falls into the river backwards. 

 To make matters worse, the Washington press corps finds out and watches from rowboats in nearby marshes.  They ride Langley into the ground for his failure, and call his plane the “mud duck.”  “It went down like a sack full of concrete,” writes one.

The New York Times uses the occasion to make one of its inane predictions.  The world’s most famous newspaper editorializes: “The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved in from one to 10 million years.”   Orville Wright is on his way back to Kitty Hawk when he reads this.  He smiles to himself.  Within 10 days, he will prove them wrong.  

On Dec. 17, the day after a coastal storm, it’s cold and windy on Kill Devil Hill, and the puddles are iced over.  The Wrights invite witnesses from the nearby Coast Guard lifesaving station, but why risk frostbite for two crack-brained inventors?  Only five show up.  Wilbur hands a lifesaver named John Daniels a camera, and tells him to snap a picture, and the rest is history.  But the brothers don’t brag about it.  They decide to be so good at flying that no one will catch up.

The scene shifts to Germany, where maverick Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin irritates Kaiser Wilhelm II, is fired from the army, and plans to build a big dirigible.  Instead of one balloon, Von Zeppelin’s will have many, enclosed in a rigid aerodynamic framework.  The newspapers nickname him “The Crazy Count.”  “I am considered little better than a lunatic,” he tells his family.

Von Zeppelin returns to his Bavarian hometown of Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance and builds his first dirigible in 1900.  This 416-feet-long airship is so underpowered that its two engines combined are only as powerful as a Volkswagen Beetle.  The rudder ropes tangle and the airship comes down in the lake.

Now the Count is broke, and neither the army nor the government helps him out.  “An airshipman without an airship,” he says, “is like a cavalry officer without a horse.”  But his engineer comes up with a new design, and Von Zeppelin, ever hopeful, sells his horses and carriages to raise money, sends away his servants, and tries again.  He’s 70 years old, but he won’t quit.

Von Zeppelin begs the German people to help him with his crazy idea.  They hold a national lottery to raise money, and “The Crazy Count” builds a second Zeppelin in 1908.  As he flies it down the Rhine River, the engine quits; someone accidentally put water in the gas tank.  He lands and anchors near the town of Echterdingen.

That afternoon a savage storm rolls across the lake and hits the Count’s dirigible the way a bat hits a ball. It tears loose from its moorings and skitters over the forest like a wayward balloon.  Inside, the chief mechanic rushes along the catwalk, trying to deflate the hydrogen and bring the airship down before it destroys itself.  

But the dirigible grazes a high tree, and all hell breaks loose.  “Within the airship there was a suspiciously bright light which seemed to grow closer and closer.  And suddenly I knew.  FIRE!”  This is the first time anyone sees a hydrogen dirigible on fire.  

            “I had only one thought,” says the chief mechanic.  “Jump!”  But he’s still too high.  The balloons between the ribs go off like cannon shots, the whole ship glows in vivid red, and the flames eat through to the gasoline tanks.  He falls from the flaming wreckage, and then sees it settle down on top of him.  He covers his head as it caves in, pushes it up with superhuman strength, and slips out of the wreckage like an eel.  Then he stumbles to his feet, and says to himself, “Now, run like hell!”  

The next day, his face blistered, he goes back to Friedrichshafen.  When he sees the flags flying at half-mast, he thinks it’s all been for naught.  But Von Zeppelin is smiling; he must really be crazy.  The Count takes his mechanic into the office, and there on his desk, is what has become known in German history as “The Miracle of Echterdingen.”  A huge pile of money.  Hearing about the Count’s misfortune, the German people rallied to his side.