I first heard about him from Chico Science's album "Afrociberdelia" which had a song called O encontro de Isaac Asimov com Santos Dumont no céu (The meeting of Isaac Asimov and Santos Dumont in heaven). "Damn, that's a cool-sounding title," I thought. Later I read that here on earth Dumont actually did meet with Jules Verne, who partly inspired his interest in aviation with his fiction.
Arash
Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=3962990& section=news
...As Paul Hoffman recounts in his Santos-Dumont biography "Wings of Madness," the eccentric Brazilian was the first and only person to own a personal flying machine that could take him just about anywhere he wanted to go.
"He would keep his dirigible tied to a gas lamp post in front of his Paris apartment at the Champs-Elysees and every night he would fly to Maxim's for dinner. During the day he'd fly to go shopping, he'd fly to visit friends," Hoffman told Reuters.
To Brazil, Orville and Wilbur Were Fly-by-Nights http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/13/international/americas/13BRAZ.html
...Not least, Brazilians admire Santos-Dumont for his idealism and indifference to profit. To draw a modern parallel, he was Linux to the Wright Brothers' Microsoft, refusing to patent his inventions and allowing the specifications of the Demoiselle to be published in Popular Mechanics so that other dreamers could make the craft themselves.
http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1516810.html (photos of his air-ships) ...A romantic and idealist at heart, Santos-Dumont wasn't looking to make money and wanted everyone on earth to have their own personal flying machine, says Hoffman. Santos-Dumont was also distressed by the use of aircraft for military purposes in World War I. These feelings contributed to his increasing difficulties with mental illness.
Throughout the 1920s, the inventor battled mental illness, voluntarily checking into several sanitoriums. He committed suicide in 1932. There was a huge outpouring of emotion, and at the moment he was interred, thousands of pilots around the world tipped the wings of their planes in a final gesture of respect.