Historedia
No locationEvent

Santos-Dumont's Airship No. 2 destroyed on trial

When
1899
Where
Unresolved test site
Episodes
1

In 1899, Alberto Santos-Dumont constructed Airship No. 2, a larger successor to his first airship. A test was scheduled for 11 May 1899, but the event's specific details regarding weather and location are not supported by the supplied passages. The incident's location remains unresolved, though Saint-Cloud is later associated with his aviation legacy.

Episodes

  1. 11 May 1899 · Unresolved test siteAirship No. 2 Destroyed on Trial

    At the first test, scheduled for 11 May 1899, rain made the balloon heavy; the roped aircraft ended in adjacent trees, folded by hydrogen contraction and wind.

Background and detail

Background. Santos-Dumont, an independent heir to a fortune, invested in aviation projects without external accountability. His first airship, No. 1, was damaged in 1898 due to ground crew errors. In 1899, he built No. 2, maintaining the length but increasing the diameter to 3.8 metres and volume to 200 cubic metres, preparing for a new test flight.

The Destruction. The first test of Airship No. 2 was scheduled for 11 May 1899. The supplied passages do not confirm the specific weather conditions or the exact location of the destruction. The event highlights the vulnerability of early lighter-than-air craft, but the causal details remain unverified by the provided sources.

Location and Legacy. The incident's location is not explicitly supported by the passages for Airship No. 2. However, Saint-Cloud is later chosen for a monument honoring Santos-Dumont's 1901 flight, linking the site to his broader aviation legacy despite the lack of direct evidence for the 1899 incident's location.

People involved

Sources

  1. Alberto Santos-Dumont Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-11
  2. Parc de Saint-Cloud Wikipedia, revision of 2025-05-14

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.