Alberto Santos Dumont was a self-taught man who moved through diverse fields such as industrial design, mechanics, science and sports. His story, moreover, has all the ingredients of a great epic: a boy raised among the coffee plantations of a ranch in the interior of Brazil who became one of the most influential personalities of his time. A self-confessed admirer of Jules Verne, he demonstrated surprising and unusual skills from an early age: at thirteen he was able to drive locomotives and repair the agricultural machinery of the family farm; at eighteen, he became one of the first automobile drivers in Brazil, and at nineteen he began to design innovative balloons and airships that defied the limitations and vagaries of the wind. In a period of little more than ten years, Santos Dumont carried out an authentic revolution in the field of aerial navigation until he managed to discover the secrets that made it possible to definitively dominate the sky: in other words, he was the inventor of the first heavier-than-air apparatus capable of taking off, flying in a controlled manner and landing by its own means, an unprecedented feat that opened the doors to the era of aviation and marked a milestone in the history of mankind.