The 1900 Paris Exhibition attracted the world’s best aeronauts and inventors, including Alberto Santos-Dumont, a wealthy Brazilian aviation pioneer who built the world’s first motorized aircraft. With members of the International Congress of Aeronauts of watching and filming him, Santos-Dumont demonstrated that his airship can fly into the wind, even with a broken rudder. Some even credit Santos-Dumont with the first airplane that could take off on its own, but the Wright Brothers beat him to it by a few years by using a launch system.