Sunday, February 15, 2015

Trains and the formative years of Alberto Santos Dumont

Last weekend Debra and I watched the above PBS Nova episode about the life and work of arguably the greatest aviator of the 20th century, Alberto Santos Dumont. The show is excellent with lots of photos and film footage I hadn’t seen before. One point that was left out, but was noted in Nancy Winter’s biography of Dumont, Man Flies, was that he honed his formidable engineering skills by helping to run and maintain the railroad that ran on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil. Winter's noted that it had 60 miles of track and included this picture.

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