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Writing and Madness
By Jim Andrews . Photos by Beth Blis

“I was conceived here, my mom tells me—and the dates work out. So like a salmon, I had to return.” Sitting at his kitchen table at home, a 250-year-old reconstructed barn in the hills above Woodstock, Paul Hoffman is explaining why he’s here. And it’s not surprising that his rather precise answer, though tongue-in-cheek, is composed in such a way. Hoffman, 47, is a science writer, the author of 10 books, including his most recent, Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight, published in June by Hyperion.

Called “an unforgettably good book” by the New York Times and “a model of lively, intelligent writing about popular science” by the Los Angeles Times, Wings of Madness tells the story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, a flamboyant, daring figure who became the toast of Paris in 1901 when he sailed his gasoline-engine-powered, helium-filled airship around the top of the Eiffel Tower. The son of a wealthy Brazilian coffee magnate, the dark, diminutive Santos-Dumont dressed in great elegance and moved in the same social circle as the Rothschilds, Cartiers, and Roosevelts. Santos-Dumont hosted dinner parties with elevated tables so that his celebrated guests could imagine what it felt like to fly. And to keep engagements at Maxim’s and other favorite haunts, he regularly ascended into the skies above Paris in his own personal air-machine—the first, and last, man ever to do so.

Today this futurist inventor and flight pioneer is all but forgotten everywhere but France, where his derring-do was most celebrated, and in his native Brazil, where he is a national hero. Hoffman’s biography is certain to enhance Santos-Dumont’s international reputation and, at the same time, stir up controversy about the pilot’s private life.

Paul Hoffman is a tall man, loose limbed and baby faced. He has a soft, husky voice and the unself-conscious habit of tucking in his chin and staring at you intently from under furrowed brows. With his easy, voluble, and animated speech, and a tendency to sudden laughter, Hoffman fits the part of an aging prodigy.

Raised in Connecticut, with frequent visits to Woodstock, Hoffman as a child found school too easy, so he discovered other outlets. One was games. His father taught him chess at age five; by the age of seven, Paul never lost to his father again. For years Hoffman played chess competitively, and obsessively. As a junior high student, he won the East Coast championship. But, he maintains, “I was a good player, not a great player. Not champion material. Not a prodigy.”

Hoffman’s father, “a complicated character,” was a well-respected academic, a professor of English at New York University and The New School, who read several novels a day, at Evelyn Wood speed, and was able recite long passages from memory. “Looking back, I can see that I was intimidated by his memory of literature,” says Hoffman, “so I carved out the sciences, which he knew nothing about, as the area I was interested in.” But his dad was also a pool, poker, and pingpong hustler who plied his trade in the seamier haunts of New York. Hoffman likes to tell the story of once delivering his hefty tuition bill from Harvard to his father, who went out that night and returned in the morning with the money in a satchel. It was his father’s behavior that set Hoffman on the trail of eccentrics.

At Harvard, Hoffman studied the history of science. When his father became ill and Hoffman had to pay his own way, he earned money writing about a local dispute over recombinant gene research, which was taking place nearby at MIT.

That experience led to his being hired as a writer and editor for Scientific American. He followed that assignment by becoming the editor-in-chief of Discover magazine. Later, he became president of Encyclopedia Britannica. Along the way he worked as a game editor and film consultant (the director of the 1984 film Romancing the Stone hired Hoffman to make the puzzles that led to the jewels more challenging), hosted the PBS series “Great Minds of Science,” and was on-air science essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

In 1987 he wrote a profile of the eccentric Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos for the Atlantic Monthly. The story won the first National Magazine Award for feature writing, and Hoffman developed it into a book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Hyperion, 1998). It describes the bizarre, sad, but ultimately inspiring story of the restless, peripatetic mathematician who survived the Holocaust and contributed his inimitable skills to solving hundreds of mathematics’ most difficult conundrums with elegant, timeless proofs.

Hoffman’s interest in Santos-Dumont, Erdos, and others like him comes from his fascination with "genius and obsession, and what it takes to do something incredible." And through telling the stories of the few, Hoffman wants to inspire us all: "Here’s a kid, Erdos, who has to spend the first 10 years of his life indoors, kept in this psychic box. He loses family to the Nazis. He’s disenfranchised, a wandering Jew nomad. That he managed to pull it all together and do such wonderful work and discover these mathematical truths is very inspiring. Santos-Dumont too. He had to go against a lot of conventions of the time: scientists who didn’t believe in his plans, personal things as well. Two people very passionate about what they did, who both did what they really loved. Most of us aren’t able to live our lives that way. I think that’s a great model: To find what it is you’re excited about and to devote your life to it."

On the subject of good writing, Hoffman is very clear. “Narrative is what makes literary nonfiction work. The narrative should be as strong as that in a novel.” Wings of Madness, with its full and compassionate profile of Santos-Dumont, has just that appeal. With seeming effortlessness, Hoffman conjures fin-de-siécle Paris in all its beauty, gaiety, and distractions—and in its infatuation with scientific innovation. More than any other place, Paris was entranced by the promise of technology. Scientific discoveries inspired a technological utopianism, a secular religion, in which technology was seen as panacea for all ills—biological and social. “Santos-Dumont, like much of the scientific community of his time,” says Hoffman, “believed that all diseases would be cured, poverty ended, war ended. There had been so many advances in science that had extended people’s reach and life expectancy: water purification, pasteurization, refrigeration, electricity, bicycles.” It was this enthusiasm that drew Santos-Dumont to Paris. Not only an inventor, he was a visionary who preached what Hoffman calls an “aerial spirituality.” He believed that airships would so greatly improve communications and understanding among all peoples that wars would be averted.

After Santos-Dumont won international renown with his lighter-than-air balloon flights, he turned to heavier-than-air flight, and in 1906 became the first man to develop and fly an airplane. Or so it seemed at the time. In fact, he had been beaten by the Wright brothers, who had flown two years earlier, but in secret. The reason for their secrecy, which involved surreptitious trips to the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina, was to protect their innovation until they could sell it to the highest bidder. Says Hoffman, “The Wright brothers don’t deserve to be the American heroes that we treat them as today. They were willing to peddle their invention, make a deal with Germany on the eve of World War I.”

By 1908, the Wright brothers were “the true masters of the air,” and Santos-Dumont was despondent. He felt abandoned by the public. Within two years he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and at age 36 he gave up flying forever. Speculation about his mental health grew. Despite a carefully managed public image, there had always been questions about his sexuality, and several mysterious events in relation to failed flights fueled controversy about his emotional stability. Now it seemed his demons had caught up with him. When the war started in 1914 and airplanes were used as military weapons, he was deeply disturbed. Through the 1920s he was in and out of sanatoria. In 1932 while sojourning in his native Brazil, he saw federalist planes dropping bombs on rebel troops in a civil war. Santos-Dumont hanged himself later that day. His final words, as reported by an elevator operator, were, "I never thought that my invention would cause bloodshed between brothers. What have I done?"