A Letter on Skies Sold and Skies Shared

Paris, November 1906 I have received, by means I cannot fully explain, a curious dispatch purporting to come from the year 2026 — from the distant continent of Australia, no less. It speaks of a commercial enterprise called Amazon, which appears to operate not upon the great river of Brazil but within some ethereal marketplace of subscriptions and moving pictures. The complaint, as I understand it, is that this enterprise altered the terms of its covenant with its patrons, compelling them to pay an additional fee merely to be spared the nuisance of advertisements, and denying them any recourse to recover what they had already paid. I confess I find the particulars bewildering. Yet the principle beneath them is painfully familiar to me, for it is the oldest principle in the world: that those who command a powerful instrument will, sooner or later, exact a toll from those who depend upon it. Weeks ago, at Bagatelle, my 14-bis left the ground before the assembled witnesses of the Aéro-Club de France. I felt, in that brief and trembling ascent, that the sky had opened itself to all of humanity — not to Frenchmen alone, nor to Brazilians alone, but to every soul who has ever lifted his eyes and longed. The air belongs to no one. It is the one territory that refuses frontiers. And yet a shadow already falls across my joy. I hear whispers among military men, in Paris and beyond, who see in my flying machine not liberation but dominion. They imagine bombs delivered from the clouds. They imagine the sky carved into zones of control, as the great powers have carved Africa. This fills me with a melancholy I cannot fully express to those who congratulate me. Now this dispatch suggests that even the invisible corridors through which people of the future share stories and entertainments may be enclosed and taxed by private sovereigns. That a company might change the conditions of passage and offer no remedy to the traveller already aboard. I think of Cabangu, the modest estate in Minas Gerais where I was born, and of the immense sky above it — the same sky that arches over Paris, over Australia, over every place. I built my machines so that sky might draw us together, not so that new gatekeepers might stand at its threshold. Let the regulators of Australia press their case. Wherever a commons is enclosed, someone must protest. The sky, the air, the channels of human fellowship — these must remain open, or we shall have traded one prison for another. With cordial but uneasy hope, Alberto Santos Dumont