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Balloon Men

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 122; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2014.0097

1934-421X

W. G. Stone,

History and Developments in Astronomy

Balloon Men Wilfred Stone (bio) Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Pantheon Books, 2013. 416 pages. Illustrated. $35. Richard Holmes in his latest book, Falling Upwards, delivers a page-turning account of the evolution of balloons and ballooning from the first flights of the Montgolfiers in 1783 to the ill-fated polar expedition of Salomon Andrée and company in 1896–97. This book follows Holmes’s The Age of Wonder: [End Page 684] How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) and is in every sense a sequel. The “cloud in a paper bag” of Joseph Montgolfier became understood more scientifically in the next century, but Holmes never lets us forget the “terror and beauty” that accompanied those early experiments in leaving the earth and, at last, successfully defying the hubris of Icarus. Some wondered with Monck Mason, a midcentury balloonist turned historian, “To what extent is the upper sky, where Prussian blue deepens into black … a scientific zone or a celestial one, or both?” Countering such metaphysical wonderings was science’s awesome counterintuitive discovery that air actually had weight—and that man could devise lighter-than-air vehicles to rise in it. Among the many pioneering balloonists (nearly all French or British), whose exploits Holmes brings to life, are Sophie Blanchard, Charles Green, Felix Nadar, James Glaisher, Thaddeus Lowe, Gaston Tissandier, and such lesser lights as Dr. Alexander Charles, who, in December 1783, made the first-ever hydrogen balloon flight (as opposed to hot air or coal gas) and successfully flew from the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris to a small village twenty miles away. Among the crowd watching the lift-off was Benjamin Franklin, who, when asked “What’s the use of a balloon?” replied, “What’s the use of a newborn baby?” But the prescient old polymath saw less benign uses as well—namely military. In the next century balloons were used in many experimental ways—as mail-carriers, as carnival attractions, as vehicles for geographical or scientific investigation or (sometimes accidentally) as instruments for setting distance or altitude records. The great shortcoming of balloons is, of course, that they lack rudders, so they must go where the wind takes them. In spite of this handicap, many aeronauts sought distance as well as altitude records. In 1804 the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac established an altitude record that held for fifty years when he, alone in the basket, ascended to 22,912 feet—and had the remarkable scientific discipline while up there to take instrument readings and to calmly record his pulse, respiration, breathlessness, and other symptoms of high altitude until he concluded that he was “very close to the limit of the breathable atmosphere.” It was an incredibly brave act, for on a previous flight to that atmospheric frontier, his companion (the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Biot) had passed out during the descent. (This flight gave rise to the idea that unmanned balloons might be used for weather observation.) Vertical flight was, of course, more controllable than horizontal, since gas could be valved for descent (if the rip-cord worked) and ballast dropped for ascent; but there were notable attempts at directional flight as well. Holmes gives many pages to Charles Green (1785–1870), who, by 1835, had become England’s most celebrated balloonist, having made more than five-hundred successful flights. His name looms large in the accounts of mid-century ballooning by John Poole (1838), Albert Smith (1847), and Henry Mayhew (1852). Green had for years been a prime attraction at the Vauxhall Pleasure [End Page 685] Gardens in London, mainly by offering tethered balloon rides. But in 1836 he came up with his greatest attraction: a huge 85-foot high, 75,000-cubic-foot coal-gas balloon, built to his own specifications, that he called, with a bow to Queen Victoria, “The Royal Vauxhall”—and cost the tidy sum of £2,000, partly paid by the Garden proprietors. Then Green, a most practical and levelheaded man, hatched a most adventurous and crowd-pleasing project: he would take the Royal Vauxhall on an overnight flight to the Continent! He took off from the Gardens at 1...