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Cartier Santos

Posted 15th Aug 2011

Alberto Santos-Dumont was born in 1873 to a wealthy family in Brazil. When Santos-Dumont’s father became paralysed after falling off his horse, the family sold up and moved to Paris in 1891. Here, Santos-Dumont began to explore his love of automobiles and aviation.

Very quickly, he moved on from taking hot air balloon rides as a passenger, to piloting them himself, to piloting models of his own design. The immediate flaw of the balloon was its inability to steer, being carried by the wind in whichever direction it was blowing. Santos-Dumont began to design steerable balloons, called ‘dirigibles’ and between 1898 and 1905 he designed, built and flew eleven different dirigible prototypes.

Always the showman, he would fly his dirigible through the streets of Paris, barely skimming the rooftops; he was even known to arrive at restaurants in this style, much to the surprise and excitement of the patrons. Such was his skill at piloting his craft that he successfully won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize, a 100,000 franc reward for completing a lap from Parc de Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back again in thirty minutes.

Santos-Dumont took his craft around the world, winning admiration and respect – as well as more money – for his endeavours. He even met President Roosevelt in 1904, who marvelled at his creation. His fame spread like wildfire – the rich began to mimic his style and his name was used for cities, airports and even craters on the moon.

Heavier than air flight became a new obsession for Santos-Dumont, and by 1906 he had flown his own fixed wing aircraft, ‘14-bis,’ a distance of sixty metres. He was beaten by the Wright brothers to the first powered flight by just three years. Determined to make his aircraft better, he used wheels rather than skids to aid self-powered take-off (rather than the catapult launch used by the Wright brothers) and also added moveable surfaces to the wings to stabilise flight, which lead to the development of ailerons. Santos-Dumont was so enthusiastic about his planes that he gave away the blueprints for his last, and best, aircraft for free.

What has this got to do with the Cartier? Well, as has already been mentioned, Santos-Dumont was a trend-setter, and was a key figure in developing a trend for wrist watches. When wrist watches first came onto the market they were generally favoured by women, and pocket watches by men. During his flight testing, Santos-Dumont found it difficult to time his flights using his pocket watch, so he had his friend Louis Cartier make him a large wrist watch. The watch was so admired by Santos-Dumont’s fans from its creation in 1904 that it became available to purchase.

Today, the Santos watch remains largely unchanged from its original design, with the addition of models with subtle variations of the original style, such as the Santos 100 XL. The classic appearance and fascinating history continues to make the Santos a very popular and successful watch.