Bartolomeu de Gusmão

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Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, painted by Benedito Calixto (1853–1927)
The Passarola, contemporary representation
Model in scale 1:10 of Passarola the Museo Nacional del Espacio y The Aeronautical in Chile .

Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão (* around December 17, baptized December 19, 1685 in Santos , Brazil ; † November 18, 1724 in Toledo , Spain ), also known as Gusman or Guzman, was a Jesuit priest , scientist and inventor from what was then Portuguese Colony of Brazil, who developed the prototype of an airship in 1709 and, as Padre Voador (Portuguese “flying priest”), is one of the pioneers of aviation. King John V granted Lourenço de Gusmão the first verifiable airship patent.

biography

Early years

Gusmão was born as the fourth of twelve children of the chief prison doctor ( chirurgien en chef des prisons ), Francisco Lourenco Rodrigues in Santos, a port city on the Brazilian Atlantic coast; Bartolomeu, like his younger brother Alexandre, was named after his godfather, the Jesuit, school principal and scientist Alexandre Gusmão (1629-1724). Almost all of the brothers and sisters entered the service of the Church (including the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Carmelite orders). Gusmão began his training at the nearby Colegio São Miguel in São Vicente; then he attended the Jesuit seminary in Belém, Cachoeira district, until 1699, where he caused a sensation for the college and his good memory by inventing a water pipe (probably a water ram ). In Salvador da Bahia , the then capital of Brazil, he entered the Jesuit order, but left the country in 1701 with the goal of Lisbon , where he worked in the house of the influential courtier and patron of the sciences, Rodrigo Anes de Sá Almeida e Menezes, Marques de Fontes (1676–1733), who - like King John V - valued his spiritual gifts and encouraged him during his subsequent stays.

In 1705, with the support of his godfather, he was the first Brazilian to apply for a patent for his invention of the water pipe, which he was granted in 1707. In 1708 he traveled again to Portugal to continue his studies at the University of Coimbra with a focus on languages ​​and mathematics; he did not graduate until 1720 as a doctor of canon law. At the age of 21 he is said to have already mastered Italian, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew and to have been one of the best preachers in Lisbon.

Gusmãos flying machine, the flight experiments of 1709

In 1709 he received a patent for a "machine that can be used to drive through the air", a kind of balloon or rather airship, called "Passarola" (Portuguese: large bird ) whose demonstrations in Lisbon - if one may believe later reports - popular riots and caused a sensation in other European countries due to the sometimes fantastically decorated images. For fear of plagiarism and damage, only the Marquis's first-born son, 14-year-old Joaqim Francisco, was given access to the aircraft; The sketches, some of which are allegedly deliberately misleading, also come from him.

It is ultimately unclear whether the underlying principle was the buoyancy of warm air, which, as with the invention of the Montgolfier brothers 80 years later, was achieved by a fire. The details of the function and exact appearance of the aircraft are still controversial or unknown to this day; According to the descriptions and records available, the projected balloon is said to have been designed like a ship that resembles a bird. The illustration above shows him, which comes from his patent application from 1709; the spheres visible there ( arcanum attractionis continentes , ie "containing the secret of attraction") are said to have contained magnets ( magnetes sunt inclusi ), the smaller spheres, amber ( succinorum repleta ) , according to Gusmão . Of course, they are reminiscent of the large, air-thinned hollow spheres brought into play by the Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi around 1670, which were supposed to make it possible to climb into the air. The flight instrument shown, described in the patent application, should carry 10-11 people; Of course, there never was a manned flight.

Airship - hangar of the former Bartolomeu de Gusmão airport in Rio de Janeiro

In the course of August 1709, in the presence of the court, Gusmão organized five flight attempts, some of which were successful, with the launch, flight and landing of smaller balloons; On October 3, a large aircraft took off in front of several witnesses in the Casa da Índia . It was able to take off, fly and land in an uncontrolled manner, but was also unable to carry a person. These attempts were not convincing, however, since the flying machines were viewed as gimmicks - after all, they could not be controlled - and they were even considered dangerous, as they could easily cause fires. Gusmão therefore decided to build a larger model, this time with a crew. To finance the necessary funds, he traveled to Northern Europe between 1713 and 1716; in Holland he registered a ship's pump in 1713; in Paris he was helped by his younger brother Alexandre, who had accompanied him to Portugal in 1715 and was meanwhile in Paris as secretary of the Portuguese ambassador.

Further career, persecution and death

Back in Portugal, Gusmão was ordained a priest; Although he was appointed courtier, royal chaplain and member of the academy, he faced a lawsuit by the Inquisition , which accused him of sympathy for the so-called New Christians (Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity), so that in 1724 he fled to Spain saw one of his brothers accompanying him. The charge of secretly favoring Jews, indeed the suspicion of having become a Jew himself, was made against him in Spain too; He was also accused of mysticism , messianic sense of mission and megalomania. Seriously ill in Toledo, Gusmão died on November 18, 1724 at the age of 38 in misery in the Hospital de Misericórdia. His body was buried in the church of San Roman; the remains were transferred to Brazil in 1856, where they have been in the Cathedral of São Paulo since 2004 .

Afterlife, effect

  • Gusmão's experiments belong in the context of the “projects” that were flourishing at the time, but they are an important link in the chain of innovations that continue to have an effect today; his successful flight attempts affected the imagination of contemporaries and make him a pioneer in aviation to this day.
  • Between 1931 and 1937, Deutsche Lufthansa (Lufthansa after 1933) regularly flew airships between Germany and Brazil. The airport, built for the rigid airships LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin and LZ 129 Hindenburg , was named Gusmão from 1936 to 1941. Today it is the Santa Cruz base of the Brazilian Air Force.
  • In Lisbon, the street that leads down from the fort into the city is named after him; in his birthplace, Santos, a section of the beach promenade.

Bartolomeu de Gusmão as a fictional character

  • In the 1982 novel Memorial do Convento (Eng. The Memorial, 1986) by José Saramago , Bartolomeu de Gusmão plays a central role.
  • In the romantic-comedy-like verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac (French. 1897) by Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), the motif of the moon ship echoes .
  • In the 2006 novel Passarola Rising by Azhar Abidi , Gusmão is the main character.

Fonts

  • Varios modos de esgotar sem gente as naus que fazem agua . Lisbon 1710. - On lat. And port.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bartolomeu de Gusmão  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gusmão, reproduction Facsimilé, p.7
  2. ↑ Gusmão, Réproduction facsimilé, p. 14
  3. ↑ http://www.jadu.de/luftfahrt/luftballons.html  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.jadu.de  
  4. ↑ Even in the standard work on Portuguese history it is wrongly read that Gusmão flew through the air from the roof of the ballroom of the royal palace; Oliveira Marques , Geschichte, p. 315, just as wrong in older reference works as the Enc.Univ.Ilustr. and the Grande Enc.
  5. ↑ The 10 years younger brother Alexandre Gusmão (1695–1753) actually worked as Prime Minister from 1730–1750 and negotiated the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, in which Spain and Portugal defined their interests in Brazil; Oliveira Marques, story p. 310, and Alexandre de Gusmão . About this brother and a Portuguese middleman, José de Barros, Gusmão's papers, et al. a. his hydraulic pump came into the hands of the Montgolfier brothers, who further developed his two inventions as a hot air balloon and a so-called “ram”; http://briefeankonrad.tripod.com/Lebenssinn/index.blog?entry_id=1536114 .
personal data
SURNAME Gusmão, Bartolomeu de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gusmão, Bartholomeu Lourenço de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese Jesuit priest
DATE OF BIRTH baptized December 19, 1685
PLACE OF BIRTH Santos , Brazil
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1724
Place of death Toledo , Spain