While running on the treadmill at the gym yesterday I had the pleasure of watching much of the NOVA television program on Alberto Santos-Dumont called Wings of Madness. Santos-Dumont was a Brazillian expatriot living in Paris near the end of the 19th century and was a great pioneer of aviation, inventing the dirigible and arguably the aeroplane.

Briefly mentioned was his noteriety for giving Aerial Dinner Parties, where guests sat in tall chairs 2-3 meters tall around equally tall tables all which were reached by ladder. The reason given was to give his guests the feeling of being aloft in a flying machine. From the book Wings of Madness,

When Santos-Dumont’s butler ushered the guests into the dining room, they were amused to find that they had to climb a step ladder so that they could sit on high chairs positioned around a table taller than they were. But they were not surprised. Since the late 1890s Santos-Dumont had been giving “aerial dinner parties.” The first ones were held at an ordinary table and chairs suspended by wire from the ceiling. This worked when the hundred-pound Santos-Dumont dined alone, but when a group assembled, the ceiling gave way under their collective weight. Santos-Dumont was a skilled craftsman, who had learned wood-working from the men on his father’s coffee plantation, so he built the long-legged tables and chairs that had become a fixture of his apartment ever since. At the first elevated soirees, his guests, between sips of milky green absinthe, invariably asked what the point of the high table was. And their shy host, who preferred to let others do the talking, would run his bejeweled fingers through his jet-black hair, which was parted in the middle, in a style seen almost exclusively on women, and impishly explain that they were dining aloft so that they could imagine what life was like in a flying machine. The guests laughed. Flying machines did not exist in the 1890s, and received scientific wisdom said that they never would. Santos-Dumont ignored the snickering and insisted that they would soon be commonplace.

Written by admin (contact).

It was written on October 9th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Filed in the Category orphan