Fuel of the first Brazilian aircraft: coffee

Leonardo Lênin*

São Paulo – Birds from Paris were already getting use to dividing the air they used to be exclusively to themselves with balloons and dirigibles, but that Bird of Pray was too much. The citizens of Paris were probably already fairly confused by November 12, 1906. They may not have believed in the success of the flight of that Bird, which was 10 metres long and had a wingspan of 12 metres. The wings were made of cells, like boxes, fixed to pinewood structures, tied with piano strings, powered by a 24 HP engine.

When faced with that contraption, the only credit they gave its inventor was the invention of the Bird. He was a small man who looked like a jockey, thin and not even 1.60 metre tall, but he was one of the most famous and cherished people in Europe in the early years of the last century.

The inventor was Alberto Santos Dumont, the Brazilian who would fly his 14 Bis aircraft over a distance of 220 metres for 21,2 seconds. The design of the new machine developed by the Brazilian gave the impression that it would fly backwards. Its wings were up front and its engine at the back. The press said it looked like a bird with a box head and nicknamed it: Bird of Pray.

The 14 Bis was the first aircraft to fly in Europe and also the first heavier-than-air machine to fly on the continent. Dumont had become famous for his balloons, as it was he who made it possible for them to be controlled. Before the Brazilian, hot air balloons flew according to the wind, and this only gave the ballooner the option of knowing where he would take off. The landing site was always a doubt. It could be up a tree, on the roof of a palace, or in the garden of someone who was not greatly interested in winning the skies.

Experiences with heavier-than-air machines were a novelty in Europe, and an even greater one for Dumont: the 14 Bis was his first aircraft project. For the Brazilian to be one of the most popular men in Europe, much money had to be invested. And it was Brazilian coffee money that supplied the balloons and aircraft.

Santos Dumont’s father, Henrique Dumont, was the engineer responsible, during the reign of emperor Dom Pedro II, for part of the Central Brazil railway grid that the emperor was extending from Rio de Janeiro to Minas Gerais. This job brought great prestige to the patriarch of the Dumont family, and, aligned with the inheritance that his wife, Francisca de Paula Santos, had received from her father, brought him the title of “king of coffee”.
 
With the end of the works of the highway, Henrique purchased Arindeuva farm, 20 kilometres away from the city of Rio Preto, in the interior of the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo. The beginning was not easy, despite having bought land in one of the best regions for cultivation of the grain. The land had to be cleaned and ploughed, a total of 500,000 coffee trees were planted, (some biographers consider the total 5 million) and the whole structure of the farm was built, from warehouses to store and dry the grain to housing for the workers. To have an idea of the size of the property, Henrique built a 96-kilometre railway to transport crops around the farm, using small locomotives.

Machine: for coffee processing

It was with machinery for production of coffee that Santos Dumont’s intimacy with machinery began. At the age of seven, he operated the locomotives, steam engines that transported the crop on the main railway. At the age of 12, he showed his ability with words, later used to convince balloon builders who did not appreciate his ideas. Santos Dumont convinced a machinist to let him operate one of the most important locomotives in the country at the time, a Baldwin, transporting a load of coffee to a processing mill.

It is true that when he started his experiences in the sky, his family no longer had the farm. At the age of 60, Henrique had cerebral concussion and became hemiplegic, and his family sold the farm. Santos Dumont was then aged 18. The family inheritance of the coffee king’s money is what covered most of Santos Dumont’s expenses throughout his life, as he rarely kept the prize money he won with his ballooning victories. Dumont usually donated the prizes to the poor.

In book of memories “My Airships”, Dumont shows the technology that was applied to coffee farming – his father’s farm was considered the most developed in South America. According to him, the machinery developed for the production of the commodity was the closest there was at the time to the universe described in the Jules Verne’s fiction.

“Europeans imagine Brazilian coffee plantations as picturesque primitive colonies, lost in the amplitude of the country. To them the farmers don’t know about trucks or trolleys or electricity and telephone. In truth there are places like that in the interior of the country, but not the coffee farms of São Paulo. It is hard to imagine a more suggestive environment to the imagination of a child who dreamed of mechanical inventions,” he wrote.

He also mentioned the “industrial” processing of coffee that he observed during his childhood and adolescence in his memoirs. As the coffee beans were cleaned, dried, pealed and bagged, using machinery, balances, conveyor belts, and elevators, the whole process was registered in the mind of the future aviator.

As he did not get a university degree that helped in his inventions – something that later caused him attacks by aviation scientists -, it was the environment of coffee machinery that provided him with the engineering basis he used in his inventions. His observations of the machinery on his family farm, which frequently broke, later helped him opt for rotating engines for his inventions.

“Moving sieves (used in the coffee drying process), especially, run the risk of suffering damage all the time. Their great speed and their horizontal bobbing consumed great amounts of energy. It was constantly necessary to repair the pulleys. I can well remember the efforts we had to make to repair the defects of the system. It surprised me that of all the machines at the mill, only these complicated mobile sieves were not rotating. And they gave constant trouble! I believe that it was this small fact that, from an early date, made me against machinery that worked through vibration, making me choose a rotating movement, easier to operate and more practical.”

Paul Hoffman, a North American historian who wrote Dumont’s biography “Wings of Madness”, says that this preference for rotating engines helped in the construction of flying machines when he became an inventor.

Flight with coffee

As an adult, recognized for his elegance and vanity, Santos-Dumont always carried with him a coffee thermos. In 1897 he made his first balloon flight as an experiment for observation and to start building his own. The flight was in a small rented balloon. He made a point of taking a basket with food, as he did not want to end his paid flight so early. In the basket, his meal included Brazilian coffee.

At the time, the coffee most consumed in Europe was Santos coffee. The name came from Santos, from where the coffee was exported. Some historians, however, say that the name was that of the brand produced on the family farm.

In October 1901, Dumont won prize Deutsch, for circling the Eiffel Tower in the number 6 dirigible, a cigar-shaped balloon. This was the peak of his popularity in Europe. When he landed, hundreds of spectators threw flower petals at him. Countesses and the wife of John D. Rockefeller were among the crowd, yelling enthusiastically

When he came out of the balloon basket, Alberto Santos-Dumont received from one of the spectators a hot cup of coffee so that he may celebrate the feat that proved man could control flying machines. It would not be too far fetched to speculate that the coffee he drank came from the farm that started him on the world of machines.

*Translated by Mark Ament