November 13, 1899
In a widely publicized flight, Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932) piloted an airship in the skies above Paris. He had been born in southeastern Brazil’s municipality of Palmira, which was eventually renamed after him, and ended up spending most of his adult life in France to more fully pursue his strong aeronautical interests.
Santos-Dumont’s November 13 flight on board a cigar-shaped aircraft (known as Airship No. 3) that he built began at 3:30 p.m. (The accompanying photo depicts this takeoff.) A key challenge for Santos-Dumont in flying over France’s capital city that Monday afternoon involved proving that he could be the first person to maneuver a gas-powered aircraft in the direction he chose rather than merely depend on which way the winds blew.
New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. (1841-1918), who had been living in Paris since 1877, wrote an account of Santos-Dumont’s flight. Bennett cabled this account to both his own newspaper in New York City and the San Francisco Call. “M. Santos-Dumont, member of the Automobile and Aero clubs, seems to have solved the problems of steering balloons,” reported Bennett. “He made an ascent on Monday that convinced the most skeptical spectators.”
Bennett then described the route taken by Santos-Dumont on this flight. Bennett stated, “He went up at [Vaugirard Aerostation Park] and first directed his course toward the Eiffel Tower, which he encircled, then turned off west, though a southwest wind was blowing at the time, and finally came down near Moulin at [the park of] of Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne.”
That airborne journey, along with being the first one successfully achieved with a combustion engine, considerably bolstered Santos-Dumont’s resolve to continue building means of transportation for human flight.
“From that day on, I no longer had the slightest doubt about the success of my invention,” Santos-Dumont later asserted. “I recognized that I would, for life, be dedicated to aircraft construction.” He ultimately gained the distinction of being one of a handful of individuals who made significant contributions to creating both lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air aircraft.
Photo Credit: https://archive.org/details/myairships00santrich/page/n7/mode/2up — licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
For more information on Alberto Santos-Dumont, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont
Transportation History 
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