num_pages: 40
description: Ready? Set. Fly!At the turn of the twentieth century no aviation prize was more coveted in Europe than the Deutsch Prize. To win it a pilot would have to fly a balloon from Paris's Aero Club around the Eiffel Tower and back in thirty minutes or less. Who would be the first to succeed?Alberto Santos-Dumont thought he could. His latest design Airship No. 6 was perfected from the countless lessons he learned during previous crashes. On the morning of October 19 1901 Santos was making good time in the race when disaster struck--his motor had sputtered to a stop mid-air! Would Santos make it to the finish line in time--let alone survive?Debut nonfiction duo Rob and Jef Polivka offer a madcap adventure in this dynamic biography of Alberto Santos-Dumont an inventor who risked everything for his dream of commercial flight. And sure enough his successes and failures brought the world's people closer together.
language: English
title: A Dream of Flight: Alberto Santos-Dumont's Race Around the Eiffel Tower
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)