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Alberto Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian inventor and aviation pioneer. In his early career, he designed, built, and flew hot air balloons and early dirigibles, culminating in his winning the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize on 19 October 1901 for a flight that rounded the Eiffel Tower. 
Santos-Dumont is a national hero in Brazil, where it is popularly held that he preceded the Wright brothers in demonstrating a practical airplane.
On 23 October 1906 his 14-bis made the first powered heavier-than-air flight in Europe to be certified by the Aéro-Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
On that date, he became the first person to be filmed in an airplane in flight.
Santos-Dumont's final design was the Demoiselle monoplane. The fuselage consisted of three specially reinforced bamboo booms, and the pilot sat between the main wheels of a tricycle landing gear.
In March 1910 Santos-Dumont announced that he was retiring from aviation. He secluded himself in his house and it was rumored that he was suffering from a nervous breakdown.
In 1911 he moved to the French seaside village of Bénerville, where he took up astronomy as a hobby. After the outbreak of war in 1914 his German-made telescope and unusual accent led to accusations he was a German spy tracking French naval activity.
Upset by the allegations and depressed about his illness (multiple sclerosis, from which he was later known to suffer) Santos-Dumont then burned all his papers, future designs and plans.
Seriously ill and said to be depressed both about his illness and the use of aircraft in warfare during São Paulo's Constitutionalist Revolution, he hanged himself on 23 July 1932, three days after his 59th birthday, in the city of Guarujá, Brazil.
