The Count, with his white mustache and white yachting cap, is a national hero.  Pastry chefs bake tiny sugar Zeppelins.  Stores offer Zeppelin coats to be worn in the air.  Von Zeppelin receives $2.5 million, and builds the most famous airship in the world.  

And what about the airplane?  The Wright Brothers are so quiet that no one hears of their success.  When asked why he keeps silent, Wilbur says, “The only bird that talks is the parrot, and it can’t fly very high.”

Europeans have eclipsed Santos-Dumont with bigger airships.  So when the new president of the Aéro Club offers a prize for the first heavier-than-air flying machine, Santos-Dumont gives up on dirigibles.  He hires Gabriel Voisin — soon to be famous in his own right — to build a model of 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 Santos-Dumont would even dream of flying it.  

And it stinks, literally.  Santos-Dumont uses castor oil to lubricate the engine, so it gives off clouds of smelly smoke.  It flies about as well as a grasshopper, but it does make a hop longer than the Wright Brothers’s first flight.  Santos-Dumont becomes the first person to fly an airplane outside America and, because he’s unaware of the Wright Brothers, thinks he is the first person to fly.  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 has flown publicly, he smokes out the Wright Brothers.  No one believes the brothers can really fly.  The French newspapers ridicule them.  “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.  

French fliers educated at his feet now take to the air.  So do Americans.  Santos-Dumont pushed them to do their best, but now they outdistance him: Voisin, Louis Bleriot, the first to cross the English Channel in an airplane, and airplane racer Henri Farnam.

Records are broken so fast that by 1910 it seems every man is up in the air.  Now it’s time for a woman.  But not just any woman.  She is Harriet Quimby, the drama critic for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.  In the era of Nellie Bly, journalism is the one profession where a woman can find success.  But Quimby is about to blaze a trail in another.

Quimby is already one of the first women to drive, to use a typewriter, and to take her own pictures.  And she has written seven film scripts that are made into movies by the famous D.W. Griffith, making her America’s first female screenwriter.

But when she goes to the Belmont International Aviation Tournament in October 1910 and meets aviator and daredevil John Moisant, she begins a new chapter of her life.  Fascinated by the way he cracks up his own plane, borrows another, and then wins the race around the Statue of Liberty, Quimby asks him to take her on as a student.  “Flying looks quite easy,” she says.  “I believe I could do it myself, and I will.”  The next year she attends Moisant’s flight school on Long Island, but Moisant is not there.  He has crashed and died at an air meet in New Orleans.  

 “After the flight,” she recalls, “I walked over to one of the officials, looked him in the eye and said, `Well, I guess I get my license.’”  

She is the first American woman to get a pilot’s license, the first to fly a monoplane, and she sets an altitude record for a student.  “Easier than voting,” she describes it.  Her goal is practical: to show, through her own achievements, that women can do almost anything men can.  “Flying could be the perfect sport for a woman,” she says.  Only a month after getting her license, she makes the first night flight by a woman.

She sees the future of aviation: multi-passenger planes, air mail and aerial photography.  But above all, she sees the beauty.  “When I’m flying, I do not feel like ever coming to earth again.”

     Quimby creates a whole new fashion style.  An open cockpit — with nothing underneath — is like flying a cobweb, and requires a change in women’s attire.  Initially women tied their skirts to their ankles so as not to bellow.  Now ladies fly with berets, divided skirts, and some even without corsets.  

     Quimby goes one better.  She creates a one-piece suit of purple satin with knee-length pants and a satin hood, flying goggles, elbow-length gloves, and high-laced black kid boots.  Admirers call her “the Dresden China Aviatrix.”  “Harriet was the prettiest girl I have ever seen,” says a friend.  “She had the most beautiful blue eyes, and when she wore that long cape over her satin, plum-colored flying suit, she was a real head-turner.”  

In November 1911, just three months after getting her pilot’s license, Quimby orders a new plane.  She wants to be the first woman to fly across the English Channel.  From the start there’s a universal assumption that she’ll fail.  By the time she gets to England its winter storms keep her landlocked.  Her plane arrives late and she doesn’t even get to make a practice flight.

A pilot friend offers to wear Quimby’s famous purple flying suit, make the flight for her, and then rendezvous across the channel to switch clothes and let her take the credit.  She refuses.  “They probably thought that I’d find some excuse to back out of the flight, but it made me even more determined to succeed,” she says.

There are high winds for two weeks.  But by April 16 she can no longer risk waiting; someone else may do it first. 

The sky seems clear, but there are masses of fog over the channel, and the French coast isn’t visible.  At 5:30 a.m. she fixes her eyes on Dover Castle, flies over it, and heads across the English Channel to Calais.  

There’s no windshield.  Oil blows back in her face.  Quimby is flying a winged-skeleton with an underpowered motor and no instruments, except for a hand compass that she’s never used.

Then she hits the fog bank, and loses all sense of direction.  She flies higher and higher, to 6,000 feet, trying to escape it.  The air gets colder, but the fog remains.  She has to pull her goggles up to see.  At a mile a minute, the mist feels like tiny needles on her skin.  She knows that just the day before a pilot who tried this flight vanished over the English Channel.   “The treacherous North Sea stood ready to receive me,” she wrote.  

She decides to go down again.  As she does, the engine begins to flood and backfire.  If it fails, she won’t survive a crash-landing in the channel.  

Just then the excess gasoline burns off, and the engine starts to run again.  The plane breaks through the mist and Quimby sees the shoreline of France.  She makes a quick landing on the sandy beach after a one hour and nine minute flight as French fishermen gather around her.  She is only two miles from her destination.  

Quimby’s epic trip across the channel is unremembered.  It takes place two days after the Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic, claiming 1,573 lives.  Nobody wants to give her credit.  As a New York Times editorial stuffily puts it, “A thing done first is important.  Done for the 7^th or 8^th time, it does not prove equality.”

This is the golden era of flight and, perhaps, even the finest hour for humanity.  But “La Belle Époque,” the beautiful time, is fading with the threat of world war.  The Kaiser who ignores Von Zeppelin for years, now orders his dirigibles be armed to attack those on the ground. 

A dark vision of flight emerges.  In 1908, the ever-prescient H.G. Wells publishes War in the Air.   Everyone now realizes that to rule the air means to rule the world.  As early as 1910, airplanes carry tiny bombs and even machine guns.  

And what happened to these men and women who broke the chains binding us to earth?

After 17 years dreaming of flight, Langley gives up, and dies of a stroke in 1906.  But his friend Alexander Graham Bell blames the press.  “They broke his heart,” Bell says.

The Wright Brothers prove so successful that they become victims of their own good fortune.  Fliers like Glenn Curtiss imitate them, the brothers become involved in patent problems, and because they fly so often the inevitable happens.  

In September 1908, Orville takes a young West Point graduate, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, flying at Ft. Myer, Virginia.  From the start the chemistry is bad because Selfridge works for Curtiss, the Wright Brothers’s competitor.

Orville hears a tapping sound from the engine, then two sharp thumps.  The plane swerves to the right.  A piece of propeller breaks loose and flutters to the ground.  Orville pulls hard on the rudder, but the controls won’t work.  

The plane falls 100 feet nose first, like a bird shot dead in flight doing a complete somersault.  Just when it starts to right itself, it hits the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust.

The commander sends out the cavalry.  They find the two fliers under the crushed plane: Orville with both legs broken, Selfridge is silent.  He now has the unenviable distinction of being the first person to die in an airplane accident.

Wilbur, who’s off flying in France, blames himself for the tragedy.  “If I had been there it wouldn’t have happened,” he tells everyone.  It is the beginning of the end.  In 1912, after a bitter lawsuit, he eats contaminated shellfish, and dies of typhus.  And their father’s prediction comes true.  Without Wilbur, Orville can’t accomplish anything.

That same year, Orville wins the patent battle, but it’s a hollow victory.  When World War I starts two years later, the government frees all the airplane companies from patent restrictions.

Orville retreats to his home in Dayton, and discovers what he and Wilbur had given up in their search for “The Winged Gospel,” the joys of hearth and home.  He reunites with his sister Katherine and her children and, for the rest of his life, builds toys for his nieces and nephews.   

As for Quimby, she’s off to another air meet in June 1912, only three months after her historical flight over the English Channel.  Promoter William Willard has offered the incredible sum of $100,000 for “the Dresden China Aviatrix” to appear at the Boston-Harvard Air Meet over Boston Harbor.

But Quimby seems a little apprehensive.  “I’m like a cat,” she says, “and I don’t like water.”  Because early planes had no brakes, six men hold her new two-seater plane while she tests the controls.  Willard and his son toss a coin to see who will go up with the world’s most famous woman flier. 

The elder Willard wins, bad news because he’s 200 pounds — too heavy for the delicate plane — and he’s the nervous type.  

Quimby takes off easily, and at 2,000 feet flies into the sun, while the huge audience below watches and squints.  Suddenly Willard stands up in the plane, apparently to speak to her, and he’s thrown out!  Neither of them is wearing seat belts because pilots frequently have to fight engine fires and make repairs in the air.  Willard falls in an arc.  

Because the passenger is behind the pilot, Quimby doesn’t even know she’s lost him.  But she does feel the tail rise sharply.  She struggles for control and pulls the nose up.  Then the tail pitches forward again, “like a bucking bronco at a rodeo,” says one witness, and Quimby catapults out of her seat.

Five thousand people watch her fall into the shallow, muddy waters of the harbor.  They are silent, stunned, as they see the splash of the two bodies.  The plane comes down, lands upright, and then, as if to show its freakishness, tips over.

The New York Sun uses the tragedy to reflect on women’s abilities.  “This sport is not one for which women are qualified.  They lack the strength and presence of mind and the courage to excel as aviators.”

Yet two women who are at the meet go on to become famous aviators.  And, just before she died, Quimby received a permit to carry airmail.  Today, 90 years later, she is remembered on a U.S. postal stamp — for airmail.

In 1917, while his beloved Zeppelins crash and burn in combat over England, the old cavalryman, is finally unhorsed forever.  When Ferdinand Von Zeppelin dies, the Kaiser gives him a huge state funeral.  All the generals who are killing millions on the Western Front dress in their Pickelauben and march through Berlin behind his casket.  But their glory is short-lived.  Germany loses the war, and destroys most of Von Zeppelin’s dirigibles so they won’t fall into enemy hands.

And what of Santos-Dumont, born under a lucky star, the first man to really fly?  His final days take place in gathering darkness.  In March 1910, he disappears, never to fly again.  He contracts multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system, which slowly destroys his magnificent reflexes.  

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.  He is nearly bankrupt.  Ultimately his curse is not that he dies too young, but that he lives too long.  Born when man cannot fly, he lives to see the day when he can fly . . . all too well.  

In 1932 the Brazilians revolt against their dictator and erect barricades in San Paolo to stop the troops and tanks.  The dictator brings in a new, fearsome weapon, the dive-bomber.  Santos-Dumont watches from his window as the airplane that he helped create rains down bombs and machine gun bullets on those below.   

             “It’s all my fault,” he says.  Then he goes into his bathroom, and hangs himself.  And with him dies the last vestige of “The Winged Gospel.”  

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

Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine how unselfish these people were.  We live in the age of overindulgence, when everyone seeks the Ten Best Ways to Get Rich.  And here I am telling you this story about heroes who lived, and died, 100 years ago, and in many instances, for their fellow man . . . and woman.

But I believe that we are all God’s creatures, and for all our faults, errors in judgment and inhumanities, we will find that heaven above us, whatever you believe that heaven to be.  And I believe that there are still heroes among us.  You may be a hero, you may give birth to a hero, or you may help a hero.  Someone who will fly against all odds, against gravity, even if the whole world stands against you.  

For all those who have come and gone, and made sacrifices so that we can fly, I would like to remember them 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.”