by Guy Warner
Ascent of a Montgolfier balloon at Versailles in 1783.
On 19 September 1783 a sheep, a cockerel and a duck became the first living creatures to make an ascent in a hot-air balloon constructed by Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier at Versailles, travelling 2 miles (3.2km).
This was followed, on 15 October 1783, by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier becoming the first man to ascend in a captive hot-air balloon, the outer envelope of which was made from light linen coated with alum, to a height of 82ft (25m) from the gardens owned by M Reveillon in the Faubourg St Antoine, Paris. Four days later his companion, Guillaume Grioud de Villette, remarked that a fairly inexpensive device of this nature would be very useful to an army intent on discovering, ‘the enemy’s position, manoeuvres, movement and supplies, and for reporting them by signals.’1
On 21 November 1783, de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis de Arlandes, made the first flight in a free hot-air balloon of twenty-five minutes, ascending from the grounds of the Château de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne.
It was thought at first that the hot-air balloon rose upwards because of ‘Montgolfier’s gas’, which was created by the burning of wool and straw. It was not until a few years later that the physicist, de Saussure, correctly ascribed the ascensive power of the balloon to its true cause, the rarefaction of heated air.2
On 1 December 1783, Professor Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles and Marie-Noel Robert made the first flight in a hydrogen-filled balloon, with a rubberised silk envelope, of 27 miles (43km). This was something of an improvement on hot-air ballooning as they did not have to keep stoking the fire to stay aloft. The next day Charles flew alone to 9000 feet (2740 metres) and never flew again. It set the standard for all subsequent balloons – a net to surround the bag, wicker basket, safety valve and ballast.
The first manned balloon flight in Ireland, as recorded in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, was on 15 April 1784 from a field at Navan in Co Meath by M Rosseau, accompanied by a small drummer boy. It would appear that they landed about an hour and a half later some miles away to the south, at Ratoath, in the same county.
Ascent of Charles & Robert from the Tuileries in 1783.
On 25 April and 12 June 1784, Guyton de Morveau the Abbé Bertrand and M de Virly, at Dijon, carried out the first experiments in steering a balloon by means of oars, a rudder and ‘a streamlined device’ in front, which had the effect of turning the balloon a little. Over the next few years, sails, paddles and oars were all used by the early balloonists, but to little effect. The Archimedean concept of a screw propeller offered promise, but needed a practical power source. Dirigibility – altering the direction of the balloon in flight – would also be affected by changing the shape of the envelope from sphere to elongated shape, with the longer axis horizontal and in the direction of movement, so as to reduce air resistance.
The first manned flight in Great Britain was made by James Tytler (1745–1804), the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from Comely Gardens in Edinburgh on 27 August 1784. This was followed on 15 September by the first manned ascent in England by Vincento Lunardi (1759–1806) in London.
The first English aeronaut was James Sadler (1753–1828) at Oxford on 4 October 1784, in a home-made hot-air balloon.
The ascent of Vincento Lunardi in London.
On 16 October 1784, the first use of a rotating apparatus for propulsion, a hand-turned, six-bladed propeller fitted to the basket, was made by Jean-Pierre Blanchard in London. (Blanchard (1753–1809), who was born at Les Andelys in France, continued to make balloon ascents, making the first balloon flight in the USA on 9 January 1793. His last ascent, his sixtieth, was in February 1808. He was essentially a showman by nature and, though he became a skilled balloonist, helping to popularise the possibilities of flight, he added little to the science of the subject. He died in Paris on 7 March 1809.)
Two contemporary views may be cited, firstly from Dr Samuel Johnson:
‘Happy you are that have ease and leisure to want intelligence of air-balloons. Their existence is, I believe, indubitable, but I know not that they can possibly be of any use. The vehicles, sir, can serve no use until we can guide them. I had rather now find a medicine that can cure an asthma.’3
Secondly, from Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as the US envoy to France:
‘Since man may be supported in the air, nothing is wanting but some light and handy instrument to give and direct motion.’
In a letter of 16 January 1784 to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, he wrote that he, ‘believed that there was the possibility for the future that an army could use balloons for elevating an engineer to a view of an enemy’s army, works, etc, conveying intelligence into or out of a besieged town, giving signals to distant places, or the like. Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford to cover his country with troops for its defense, as that “Ten Thousand Men descending from the Clouds” might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?’4
On 7 January 1785, Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries made the first international and cross-water flight from Dover to Foret de Felmores, Guines, taking two and a half hours in a hydrogen balloon. It cost Jeffries £800. A letter was carried from Ben Franklin’s son to his father.
Irishman Richard Crosbie, who was a cousin of Arthur Wellesley, from Co Wicklow, ascended in a hydrogen balloon from Ranelagh Gardens in Dublin on 19 January 1785, watched by over 30,000 people and landing at Clontarf rather than attempt a crossing of the Irish Sea as planned. On 10 May, he was going to try again, but as the balloon would barely lift off he substituted a much lighter weight student from Trinity College by the name of Richard McGwire. The novice aeronaut had a fortunate escape, landing in the sea about nine miles (14 kilometres) out, but being rescued by a fishing boat. Crosbie tried again in July and made it halfway across before he too was forced to descend and be picked up by a barge.
The first British military personnel to make a balloon flight were Major John Money and George Blake of the Royal Navy, who ascended with the owner, Jonathan Lockwood, from Tottenham Court Road, London, on 3 June 1785. Money made several ascents in free balloons and narrowly escaped death in a balloon misadventure off the east coast, near Yarmouth, later that year.5
Blanchard and Jeffries cross the English Channel on 7 January 1785.
It was the 15 June 1785 that brought the first fatalities – de Rozier and Pierre Romain in a hybrid gas and hot-air balloon, which would seem to have been a rather dangerous idea.
On 2 April 1794, the world’s first military aviation unit was established by the French Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety and, specifically, Jean Louis Guyton de Morveau. The first military use of a captive hydrogen balloon was l’Entreprenant of the Première Compagnie d’Aérostiers Militaires, which was sent up for observation at the Siege of Maubeuge on 2 June. Captain Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle was the aeronaut, accompanied by Brigade Adjutant General Étienne Radet. It was then used for observation and for dropping notes of orders from Major General Antoine Morlot at the Battle of Fleurus on 26 June, being airborne for some ten hours. The Austrians attempted in vain to shoot it down with cannon fire. Coutelle later said:
‘I shan’t say that the balloon won the Battle of Fleurus. What I can say is that, being trained to use my glasses, in spite of the oscillation and swaying due to the wind, I was able to distinguish infantry, cavalry and artillery, their movement and, in general, their numbers.’6
General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan was taken aloft on 5 July at the Battle of Sombreffe. The Aérostiers were given a uniform similar to that worn by the artillery. Further use of the balloons Martial, Céleste, Intrépide and Hercule was made at engagements and sieges in the German states and Italy. Napoleon Bonaparte intended to make use of balloons during his Egyptian campaign; unfortunately, most of the materials and equipment were lost when Le Pat
riote ran into rocks and sank off Alexandria on 4 July 1798. Further material may have been on board L’Orient, one of the French line-of-battle ships sunk by Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay on 1 August 1798. The balloon school at Meudon closed in 1802.
A contemporary illustration celebrating French military ballooning.
In 1803, Rear Admiral Charles Henry Knowles submitted a plan to the Admiralty for sending a balloon aloft from a ship to reconnoitre French invasion preparations at Brest, and in the same year, Major General John Money (1752–1817), the aeronaut of 1785, wrote a Short Treatise on the use of balloons and Field Observators in Military Operations, which concluded with the following accurate prediction as to the likely level of official interest and support:
‘I would not consult old generals whether balloons of field observators could be of any use to the army, for I know what the answer would be, “that as we have hitherto done very well without them, then we may still do without them,” and so we did without light artillery, riflemen and telegraphs, etc., and not till we had ocular demonstrations of their use were they adopted.’7
A short time later, in 1805–1806, one of the most skilled and inventive seamen of his generation, Captain Lord Cochrane, was the first British officer to use aerial devices in the furtherance of military objectives. He designed a kite to be flown from his ship, the thirty-eight gun frigate, HMS Pallas. Its first experimental use was as a means of giving the ship additional speed by sending a large spread of canvas soaring above the mastheads. It was not a success, as in Cochrane’s own words:
‘Possibly I might not have been sufficiently experienced in the mysteries of wings and tail, for though the kite pulled with a will, it made such occasional lurches as gave reason to fear for the too sudden expenditure of His Majesty’s stores.’8
His next idea was to drop propaganda leaflets along the French coast by attaching them to small kites with yarn to which a length of slow burning match had been fixed. When it burnt through, the leaflets fell off inside enemy territory, ‘much to the annoyance of the French Government.’9
Then in 1809, Captain T.H. Cooper, of the 56th Foot in The Military Cabinet – directed at the education of young officers – noted that balloons might be useful for exploration, reconnaissance and communication by signal. For the next fifty years there was little military interest in ballooning.10
Indeed, the traditional Anglo-French distrust and rivalry did not take long to surface in the new field of aviation, as exemplified in a doggerel rhyme of the period:
Les Anglais, nation trop fière,
S’arrogent l’empire des mers;
Les Français, nation légère,
S’emparent de celui des airs.11
On 3–4 October 1803, Jacques Garnerin (1770–1825) made the first longdistance balloon flight from Moscow to Polova of 200 miles (322km).
The first successful crossing of the Irish Sea by a balloon was made by Windham Sadler on 22 July 1817, flying from Portobello Barracks in Dublin at 1.20 pm and alighting near Holyhead at 6.45 pm. His father James (1751–1828) had failed in trying to accomplish the same feat on 1 October 1812, departing from the lawn of Belvedere House in Dublin and getting as far as the Isle of Man.
On 19 July 1821, Charles Green (1785–1870) of London made the first ascent in a balloon filled with coal-gas. It was heavier than hydrogen, but was comparatively economical to produce and more readily obtainable, having been in use for the street lighting of London since 1807. As his fame increased, the Gas-Light Company of London frequently provided supplies of the gas free of charge. It is believed that the first aeronaut to accomplish 100 balloon flights was Green, who achieved this on 14 May 1832 in a flight from the Mermaid Tavern, Hackney. He also developed the idea of the guide rope suspended from the basket, which could trail along the ground at heights of up to 1000 feet (304 metres), relieving the balloon of a fraction of its load and causing it to adjust to a more or less constant altitude.12
A long-distance feat of note was achieved on 7–8 November 1836 when the hydrogen-filled The Royal Vauxhall Balloon, with a crew of three, Green, Robert Holland, MP, and Monck Mason, travelled from London to Weilberg in the Duchy of Nassau, some 486 miles (772 kilometres).
James Sadler’s ascent from Dublin on 1 October 1812.
On 7 October 1849, M Farber made the first balloon flight over the Alps.
The most significant British aeronaut after Green was Henry Coxwell (1819–1900), whose ascents with James Glaisher (1908–1903) during 1862–1865 were undertaken for the purposes of scientific research, making meteorological and atmospheric observations, as well as experimenting with aerial photography.
Appendix II
Airship Terms
Airship designers needed to balance size, strength, engine power and lifting capacity against the weight of the structure, its payload and its drag – the greater the volume of gas, the greater the payload that could be carried – engines, fuel, passengers, freight and structural weight. The crew was carried in a cabin, box, or metal framework ‘car’ suspended from the envelope. For efficiency of movement an airship also had to be streamlined and firm in order to cut its way through the air.
Non-rigid – a gasbag or envelope with internal ballonets of air – limited in size of envelope due to the fact that the structure had no rigidity. This type is often known as a blimp.
Semi-rigid – the gasbag was the envelope of the non-rigid, but it also had a keel giving greater strength to the structure. Owing to the increased weight of structure, more lifting capacity had to be given over to lifting the weight of the airship rather than payload.
Rigid – had a strong but light metal (or wooden) framework with a doped fabric cover. Inside were suspended gasbags. This type could be built much larger, but with the penalty of a further increase in weight.
Envelopes were made of two thicknesses of rubberised fabric with rubber between and on the inside surface. They were doped (weatherproofed) on the outside. An old-fashioned Macintosh would be a reasonably near equivalent. Messrs Vickers formed a subsidiary company, the Ioco Rubber & Waterproofing Co, which cornered a large share of the market. Some early airships had envelopes made from goldbeater’s skin: the outer membrane of part of the large intestine of the ox. Thousands of these were cleaned and dried then glued to a fine cloth backing and varnished. The result was light, gas-tight and flexible, but was also expensive and became brittle within three years. It had first been used by the Royal Engineers in the 1880s for balloon envelopes, the manufacturing process of which was a jealously guarded secret of the Weinling family of East London.1
Ballonets – bags smaller than the main gasbag and slung inside it. In flight air is pumped in or discharged as required, so maintaining the internal pressure and shape of the envelope as well as the trim of the airship.
Duralumin – the name given to a family of aluminium alloys containing small and varying amounts of copper, as well as iron, magnesium, manganese and silicon. It was found to be light, strong, very ductile, easily machined and pressed, with mechanical properties similar to those of mild steel. It has roughly the same tensile strength as mild steel, but with one third of its weight. Alfred Wilm patented the formula for the alloy in 1909, and granted an exclusive license for its manufacture to the company Dürener Metallwerke. The Duralumin name was derived from Dürener Metallwerke, and aluminium.
Hydrogen – the lightest gas known – colourless, odourless and tasteless. At major British airship stations it was produced in an on-site manufacturing plant, stored in gas-holders and piped underground to the airships’ hangars. Gas cylinders were used for storage at out-stations. It was generally extracted using the Silicol Process which was by chemical reaction when powdered ferrosilicon was stirred with water and gradually admitted to a chamber containing a hot, strong solution of caustic soda. This resulted in 99.9% pure hydrogen within an hour. A large plant could produce 1,000,000 cubic feet (28,300 cubic metres) of hydrogen per day.
Eta patches – these were developed in 1913 for the final British Army airship, Eta. The rigging cables supporting the car beneath the envelope were subdivided into thirty-six attachment points, joined to the envelope by kidneyshaped adhesive patches which were also stitched in place. The load was by this means spread evenly without the need for the cumbersome netting and bridles used previously. The patches were essential to the development of the SS Class airship.
Steering is by means of control surfaces at the rear of the envelope – rudder for movement to left and right, and elevators to point the nose upwards or downwards – or by swivelling the engines or propellers.
Static Lift – by displacement of air as a balloon. If the total weight of the balloon or airship is slightly less than the weight of displaced air then it will rise. Hydrogen is the lightest of all gases, but has the disadvantages of being inflammable when pure and explosive when mixed with air. Helium is much rarer, is less buoyant than hydrogen, but does not burn. Air weighs about 75lbs (34kg) for 1000 cubic feet (28 cubic metres), while the same amount of hydrogen weighs only 5lbs (2kg), so giving 70lbs (32kg) of lift. The same volume of helium weighs 10lbs (4kg) and so gives 65lbs (30kg) of lift. Therefore for each 32,000lbs (907 cubic metres) of hydrogen contained in an airship’s envelope there would be about one ton of gross lift. With a helium-filled envelope some 34,000lbs (977 cubic metres) would be needed for the same effect.