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There are 5 quotes matching Alberto Santos-Dumont in the collection:
To propel a dirigible balloon through the air is like pushing a candle through a brick wall.
Alberto Santos-Dumont
Regarding Zepplin's Airship.
I remember how my comrades used to tease me at our game of ‘Pigeon flies!' All the children gather round a table and the leader calls out: 'Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!' and so on; and at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes, however, he would call out: ‘Dog flies! Fox flies!' or some other like impossibility, to catch us. If any one raised a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called: ‘Man flies!' for at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was.
Alberto Santos-Dumont
How I Became an Aeronaut and My Experience with Air-ships, McClure's Magazine, August 1902. Later the same telling of the story became part of his 1904 book My Air-Ships.
Suddenly the wind ceased. The air seemed motionless around us. We were off, going at the speed of the air-current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed, for us there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt motion forward and upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves, but the earth that sinks down and away…
Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings.
Alberto Santos-Dumont
My Air-Ships, 1904.
The balloon seems to stand still in the air while the earth flies past underneath.
Alberto Santos-Dumont
My Air-Ships, 1904.
I cannot describe the delight, the wonder and intoxication, of this free diagonal movement onward and upward, or onward and downward….The birds have this sensation when they spread their wings and go tobogganing in curves and spirals through the sky.
Alberto Santos-Dumont
The Sensations and Emotions of Aerial Navigation, The Pall Mall Magazine, Janurary 1904.
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