In 1926, the famous aviator Alberto Santos Dumont gave an acquaintance his photograph and an ironic dedication?
- Old photograph of the famous aviator Alberto Santos Dumont previously pasted onto a card bearing the following dedication.
- In Portuguese.
- Background card: 37 cm x 24 cm.
- Photograph: 17 cm x 23.5 cm.
- Valmont sur Territtet, Switzerland.
- 1926.
- Average state of conservation.
- Unique piece.
Val Mont sur Territtet (Suisse)
1926
Mrs. J. Quadro Ges.,
the boy Paulo de Quadros
and your teacher in com
company of the great
Santos Dumont
From 1910 onwards, Alberto Santos Dumont (1873 - 1932), at the age of 37, saw his health deteriorate drastically due to the combination of overwork and a nervous breakdown, caused after realizing that aviation was becoming a common means of of transportation and that the era of the pioneers was coming to an end. Furthermore, he had to admit that the Wright brothers were probably the first in the world to fly, especially as they came to France to do exhibitions.
From one day to the next, Santos Dumont announced that he was abandoning aviation, closed his "airport" and fired all his staff. From that moment on, despite several new inventions, such as the helicopter, the seaplane or the cable car, they did not have the expected success. His life was nothing more than a long physical and intellectual decline that took him, after remissions and stays in sanatoriums in France and Switzerland, until his suicide in São Paulo, 22 years later, in 1932, at the beginning of his sixtieth year.
According to Douglas Cavallari, specialist and biographer of Alberto de Santos Dumont:
First of all, thank you very much for contacting us and congratulations on acquiring the photo, it is very rare. I have a photographic reproduction of a copy of this photo, which I found in the Dumont Museum, in a city in the interior of São Paulo. But I had never seen an original.
The story behind this photo is as follows: in the last years of his life (mainly between 1922 and 1932), Santos-Dumont was admitted several times to so-called “rehabilitation clinics”, which were nothing more than mental institutions for rich people. One of these clinics (which still exists today) is the Clinique Valmont, in Switzerland. The clinic is actually in Glion, Territet (with only one “t”) is a neighboring village.
Regarding the dedication, it is probably a souvenir given to Brazilians that Santos Dumont must have met in the city during his stay at the clinic. Could the "great" used by Santos Dumont be irony or the ego of the depressed aviator?
