invention

Mention blimps or dirigibles to people and you'll normally get a bemused reaction: Oh, what an oddball topic! They rarely react as if airships or airship technology exists outside the distant past or whimsical present. But a new class of modern airships -- part plane, part dirigible -- might change that.

In the 1930s and 40s, passengers routinely flew via airship from Berlin to Rio De Janiero, crossing the span in just under three days. But following the spectacular Hindenburg disaster (a disaster some believe was the result of sabotage), and with the advent of jet engine technology, the popularity of airship travel plummeted.

Last week on the Colbert Report, a guy named Dean Kamen demonstrated a water purifying machine that promises, he says, to provide clean, drinkable water, at low cost, and from virtually any liquid source.

"Puddles!" he said; "The ocean!" he said.

"Doritos!" exclaimed Colbert, before dumping some extreme-flavored Doritos into the machine. The segment didn't last long enough to find out if the chips would indeed yield clean drinkable water.

Now and again throughout history, people possessed of the right mysterious combination of creativity, focus, determination, luck, and charisma have been thrust -- or thrust themselves, by sheer dint of personal force -- onto the world's fickle stage.

Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazilian-born conqueror of the air and dreaming misfit par excellence, was just such a person. His early experiments into the then-novel realm of both lighter-than-air (airship/dirigible) and heavier-than-air (winged) flight made him a world-class celebrity by 1901, when he successfully piloted his dirigible Number 6 from the Park St. Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in less than 30 minutes, thereby winning the esteemed Deutsche de la Muerthe prize. (Santos-Dumont, who came from a wealthy Brazilian family, gave half of the 100,000-franc prize money to the poor of Paris; the other half was given to his workman.)