SANTOS-DUMONT, ALBERTO

born July 20, 1873, Cabangu, near Palmyra [now Santos-Dumont], Minas Gerais, Braz. died July 23, 1932, Guaruj, So Paulo Brazilian aviation pioneer who in 1909 produced his famous Demoiselle or Grasshopper monoplanes, the forerunners of the modern light plane. Santos-Dumont airship, about 1900. Santos-Dumont was educated in France, where he spent most of his life. Becoming interested in aerial flight, he made a balloon ascent in 1898 and then began to construct dirigible airships. After many failures he built one that in 1901 won the Deutsch Prize and a prize from the Brazilian government for the first flight in a given time from Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and return. Shortly after the Wright brothers' flights in 1903, Santos-Dumont turned his attention to heavier-than-air machines. After experimenting with a vertical-propeller model, in 1906 he built a machine, the 14-bis, on the principle of the box kite, and in October he won the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize for the first officially observed powered flight in Europe; in November he flew 220 metres in 21 seconds. He returned in 1928 to Brazil, where, within a few years, having become depressed over the use of aircraft in war, he committed suicide.