Page:The bipolarity of Alberto Santos-Dumont.pdf/2

64Cheniaux E INTRODUCTION

Alberto Santos-Dumont (ASD) is one of the great national heroes of Brazil. In this country, he is considered the inventor of the airplane, a merit that, however, in the rest of the world, is attributed to the Wright brothers, from the United States. The history of ASD’s mental illness is little known, and much information about it, deliberately or not, has been distorted. For example, when he killed himself, a fake was mounted, and the coroner, on the death certificate, fraudulently, pointed out “cardiac collapse” as the cause of death. In addition, ASD’s behavioral changes were attributed exclusively to a neurological disease, multiple sclerosis, and his depression was seen as a mere emotional reaction to the use of the airplane as a weapon in the First World War and the Constitutionalist Revolution of the Brazil.

METHODS

A narrative review was carried out on the psychopathological manifestations that ASD presented. The objective was to discuss whether he actually suffered from a mental disorder and what his psychiatric diagnosis would be. No scientific article on the topic was found in the researched databases: PubMed, Web of Science, SciELO and PsycINFO. Thus, the sources of the information obtained were some of the main ASD biographies.

RESULTS

Origins

The chronology of the ASD clinical case is summarized in table 1.

ASD was born on July 20, 1873, in Minas Gerais, in the city of Cabangu, which would later be called “Santos Dumont”. He was the sixth child in an offspring of eight and the youngest of the three boys. The family had moved there because his father, engineer Henrique Dumont, had been hired to work on the construction of an extension of the Pedro II railway in the region. When ASD was six years old, his father buys a farm in São Paulo, where he begins to grow coffee. He mechanizes the entire production and, in a short time, he becomes rich, being nicknamed by the press “king of the coffee”.

ASD, still a child, is interested in mechanics and learns to repair agricultural machinery. At the age of seven, he drives steam engines on wheels to transport coffee. At twelve, he guides the locomotive of a train used for the distribution of grain. At eighteen, he brings to Brazil a Peugeot car, bought in Paris, and becomes the first person to drive a car in South America.

A reader of Jules Verne, from a young age ASD was fascinated by science fiction and believed that one day man could fly. At the age of ten, he made paper balloons, which he filled with hot air from the stove.

In 1892, when ASD was 19 years old, his father suffered a fall from a horse, hit his head and became irreversibly hemiplegic. Disabled for work, he sells his farm and donates his inheritance to his children in life. ASD receives the equivalent of half a million dollars and is sent to Paris, where he should study mechanics, without worrying about guaranteeing his own livelihood.

Exploits, celebrity and forgetting

In Paris, in 1898, at the age of 24, ASD builds his first balloon, to which he gives the name of Brazil. That same year, he began to create airships, which were hydrogen balloons attached to an engine. In October 1901, with his airship number 6, he won the Deutsch prize, fulfilling the requirement to fly the balloon for eleven kilometers, get around the Eiffel tower and return to the starting point in thirty minutes. In 1903, he built the number 9 airship, called Baladeuse, considered the first aerial car in the world. ASD uses it daily to visit friends, go to restaurants and shop.

His greatest invention, without a doubt, was the 14-Bis, an aircraft, which, in 1906, travels a distance of 220 meters, at a height of six meters, for 21.02 seconds. This flight represents the first of a heavier-than-air machine in a public display. The 14-Bis gives ASD, at the age of 33, the award of the French

J Bras Psiquiatr. 2022;71(1):63-8