Sunk hapless Icarus on unfaithful wings!66
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Hitherto, ballooning in England had been largely dominated by foreigners, French and Italians. This was partly due to the lack of encouragement from the Royal Society, despite the best efforts of Dr Sheldon and Dr Jeffries. But it was also due to the general feeling that ballooning was not a serious scientific pursuit, and was best left to commercial showmen or wealthy private eccentrics. The death of Pilâtre de Rozier in 1785, and Lunardi’s accident at Newcastle in August 1786, which resulted in the death of young Ralph Heron, also discredited ballooning with the British public for a generation. From 1790 virtually any balloon sighted in English skies would be assumed to be French and hostile. The aeronaut would find the ground even more dangerous than the skies.
The much-feared aerial invasion by Napoleon’s army never materialised. Nonetheless, the French Revolutionary army experimented with a gas observation balloon at the battle of Fleurus against Austria in 1794, and the first Corps d’Aerostation and balloon school was formed at Meudon. Lavoisier came up with a cheap method of producing hydrogen for the military, by passing water over red-hot iron, and two young scientists, Charles Coutelle and Nicolas Conte, were appointed to lead the balloon teams and the school. Gaston Tissandier, in his Histoire des Ballons et Aeronauts Célèbres (1890), recounts that the young military balloonists took local girls up with them for joyrides and thrilling aerial love-making over the side of the basket, so the first Mile High Club was also formed.
The Corps d’Aerostation eventually fielded four balloons, complete with special hangar tents, winches, gas-generating vessels and observation equipment. Napoleon took the Corps with him to Egypt in 1798, but their equipment was destroyed by Nelson at the battle of Aboukir Bay in July of the following year. Napoleon disbanded the Corps and school at Meudon in 1799, and the rumours of a French airborne army invading Britain remained confined to the realms of fantasy and propaganda. Military balloons were not used again in any conflict until the American Civil War.
In 1810 James Sadler (as inexplicable as ever to his wife) returned to more carefully planned and extended balloon flights, in a series of ascents from Oxford and Bristol. He planned to use his theory of ‘oceanic air currents’ to navigate across the Irish Sea, a much longer and greater challenge than the English Channel crossing.67 He believed that these fixed currents existed at various altitudes, flowing steadily in different directions, and could be mapped and used for navigated flight by altering the height of the balloon and so changing direction. On 24 September Sadler made a preliminary ascent over the Bristol Channel, but was baffled by rising and contrary winds, and forced to ditch in a rough sea just off Combe Martin cliffs, when blown perilously towards them without sufficient height to clear them.68 He said that the worst thing about the entire flight was that he threw overboard Dr Johnson’s barometer, in a last futile attempt to lighten the balloon and clear the cliffs. However, the experience he gained of ditching in the sea may subsequently have saved his life.
In July 1811 Sadler continued his experiments by making an ascent from Trinity College Great Court, Cambridge, and landed in a gale near the little village of Stansted. Another, calmer, ascent, from Hackney on 12 August, was made with a scientific observer on board, Henry Beaufoy. Beaufoy kept a minute-by-minute log of the flight, using an array of instruments and carefully noting his physical sensations and impressions. This ascent was also recorded in a beautiful engraving.69
Sadler attempted a crossing from Dublin to Liverpool on 1 October 1812, a distance of over a hundred miles, by far the longest balloon flight yet attempted in the British Isles. After a 200-mile dogleg which took him off course north-easterly almost to the Isle of Man, he was swept back safely southwards over Anglesey, where he could have landed. However, he determined to find the direct easterly current to carry him all the way to Liverpool, threw out ballast and climbed again.
Sadler was now steadily swept back out to sea on a northerly airstream, which would eventually have taken him to the Scottish coast or the Isle of Skye — or even to the North Pole. As dusk was coming on, he decided to ‘valve’ and ditch in the sea, so he could be picked up by a passing boat. But once he was down in the water, the boat refused to approach him. ‘I observed that the sailors seemed fearful of coming too near, lest the Balloon should get entangled in their rigging.’70
Undismayed, Sadler performed the extraordinary feat of relaunching from the sea by dropping emergency ballast. He flew on northwards till he found a second boat, and ditched for a second time, now almost in the dark. The ship’s captain saved him by cleverly running his bowsprit through the balloon’s rigging before it sank. Sadler’s extraordinary skill and sangfroid in ditching and relaunching from the sea, and then ditching a second time virtually in the dark, demonstrated his exceptional gifts as a natural aeronaut. But he had not achieved the historic Irish crossing, and the challenge was eventually to be passed to his son Windham. James Sadler published a vivid account of his attempt, ending with an appeal for greater public support of scientific ballooning: Aerostation is too intimately connected with the entire range of Science, its exhibitions are too brilliant and interesting, not to deserve the patronage which a liberal public always confers on desert … It is so well calculated to throw light on the obscure science of Meteorology, to develop many interesting facts in Magnetism, and to assist the progress of Chemistry and Electricity, that its success must be regarded as interesting to Philosophy [science] in general.’71
One Oxford student who responded was Percy Shelley, now aged twenty, who continued to follow Sadler’s career and to pursue his fascination with balloons as symbols of liberty. In the winter of 1812 he sent up a series of silk-covered fire balloons, sewn by his teenage wife Harriet, from the beach at Lynmouth, Devon. Each carried copies of his revolutionary pamphlet ‘A Declaration of Rights’. He also composed a rather good sonnet on the subject:
Bright ball of flame that thro the gloom of even
Silently takes thine ethereal way
And with surpassing glory dimmst each ray
Twinkling amid the dark blue depth of Heaven;
Unlike the Fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou
Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,
Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow
A watch-light by the patriot’s lonely tomb,
A ray of courage to the opprest and poor…72
James Sadler’s son Windham made his first solo flight from Cheltenham in 1813, aged only seventeen. He too revealed himself as a natural aeronaut, and four years later, in 1817, he attempted the first Irish crossing that had eluded his father. The flight was again made from Dublin, but this time was better prepared, with careful meteorological planning and the launching of small pathfinder balloons. Windham made the sixty-mile crossing to Wales on a direct easterly course, a journey of five hours. Having learned from his father’s experience, the moment he reached land Windham valved the balloon and came down just south of Holyhead.73
Like his father, Windham Sadler championed the scientific value of ballooning, and decried its shameful neglect by English backers in the years that followed: ‘Strange as it may appear, England, the seat of Science and Literature, has remained satisfied with gazing on the casual experiments of Foreign Aeronauts … although Cavendish first discovered and Priestley first suggested the application of that powerful agent, Hydrogen Gas, to the purposes of Aerostation!’74
But in 1824, at the age of twenty-seven, Windham had a terrible accident when his balloon grapple-line tangled in a chimney during a high-wind landing in the Pennines. He was thrown out of the basket, and hung suspended upside-down by his legs for several minutes, until he finally fell to his death. Devastated, his father James never set foot in a balloon basket again.
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The early heroic period of ballooning, between 1783 and 1800, appeared to come to a dead end. Individual balloonists went on flying, but not for long. Dr Jeffries returne
d to Boston in 1789. Lunardi died poverty-stricken in Lisbon in July 1806. Blanchard collapsed with a heart attack after a forced landing in Holland in 1809, and died a few weeks later while apparently attempting to parachute from his new balloon. A few celebratory ascents continued in Paris, notably by the showman Jacques Garnerin and by Blanchard’s eccentric young wife Sophia, who specialised in aerial firework displays. But she too was killed in 1819, when her balloon was ignited by fireworks. It must have looked as if ballooning was, scientifically speaking, a cul de sac.
Though the hydrogen balloon or Charlier triumphed (temporarily) over the hot-air balloon or Montgolfier, the inability to navigate either form of aerostat appeared to destroy all hopes of finding any immediate technological applications. Balloons simply remained beautiful, expensive and dangerous toys, although the high ascents achieved by the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac and others did promise hoped-for advances in meteorology. Gay-Lussac ascended to 23,000 feet above Paris in 1804, establishing the limit at which human beings can breathe. The mysteries of barometric pressure, the function of clouds, the generation of winds and weather systems, were increasingly fascinating.
Interest in meteorology, a nascent science, grew and produced the beautiful cloud classifications of Luke Howard and the valuable wind-scale system of Francis Beaufort. Howard (1772-1864), a Quaker and the first professional meteorologist, published his great study and classification of atmospheric phenomena, On the Modification of Clouds, in 1804. He first proposed the four basic cloud-types, using Latin terms in imitation of Linnaean cataloguing. These were cumulus (heaped cloud), stratus (layer cloud), cirrus (long-hair or high mare’s-tail cloud) and nimbus (raincloud), with various combinations such as cumulo-nimbus (the classic heaped-up rain-carrying clouds of an English summer). All are still in use, with additional combinations such as cirro-stratus (high, thin, fine-weather clouds). Howard was elected to the Royal Society in 1821, but did not achieve a consistent theory of atmospheric pressures and gradients (high- and low-pressure systems), upon which all weather forecasting would ultimately be based, although he outlined this in his last work, Barometrographia (1847). But he called new attention to the formation and transformation of clouds, their seasonal varieties and characteristics, and above all perhaps to their astonishing beauty.75
Ballooning added to this new awareness of the complexity and subtlety of clouds, a growing Romantic preoccupation which can be followed in the paintings of Turner and Constable, the notebooks of Coleridge and the poetry of Shelley. When Shelley refers to ‘the locks of the approaching storm’ in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819), he is using Howard’s definition cirrus. ‘The Cloud’ (1820) demonstrates a remarkably accurate and scientific understanding of cloud formation and the convection cycle.76 Goethe wrote a number of essays on clouds, atmospheric pressures and weather, and translated passages of Howard, asking him to compose and send his Autobiography to Germany, and describing him as ‘the first to define conceptually the airy and ever-changing forms of clouds, thus delimiting and fixing what had always been ephemeral and intangible, by accurate observation and naming’.♣
Clouds became fascinating both as scientific phenomena — the generators of electricity, the mysterious indicators of winds and changing air pressure — and as aesthetic phenomena: the ‘moods’ of the sky reflecting those of the observer, alterations of light over landscape, symbols of change, destruction, regeneration. It could be argued that the Romantics actually invented the idea of ‘the weather’ itself, as it now preoccupies us; as well, of course, as ‘inner weather’.
The first mapping overview of the earth, with drawings made from the balloon basket, revealed the patterns of towns and countryside, the growth of roads, the meandering of rivers, in a new way. Although maps were also the result of trade, exploration, military campaigning and turnpike-building, the creation of the British Ordnance Survey — the first state mapping programme in the world — was partly inspired by balloons.
Ballooning produced a new, and wholly unexpected, vision of the earth. It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above, but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature. For the first time the impact of man on nature was clearly revealed: the ever-expanding relationship of towns to countryside, roads to rivers, cultivated fields to forests, and the development of industry. It was comparable to the first views of the earth from space by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s, producing a new concept of a ‘single blue planet’ with its delicate membrane of atmosphere. The famous photograph ‘Earthrise’ was taken from lunar orbit in December 1968.
Ballooning proved to have extraordinary theatrical power to attract crowds, embody longing, and mix terror and the sublime with farce. It became showmanship, carnival, pure euphoria. A successful balloon launch, in the hands of one of the early masters like Pilâtre, Lunardi or Blanchard, became a communal expression of hope and wonder, of courage and comedy. The balloon crowd (especially in Paris) foreshadowed another kind of crowd — the revolutionary crowd. It contained elements of prophecy, both political and scientific. It was like a collective gasp of hope and longing.
Curiously, it was not the men of science, so much as the poets and writers, who continued to see ballooning as a symbol of hope and liberation. Erasmus Darwin celebrated the daring of the first balloonists, and the new vision of the world their intrepid flights opened up in the 1780s:
The calm Philosopher in ether sails,
Views broader stars and breathes in purer gales;
Sees like a map in many a waving line,
Round earth’s blue plains her lucid waters shine;
Sees at his feet the forky lightning glow
And hears innocuous thunder roar below.77
Coleridge wrote in his notebooks of the balloon as an image of powerful but mysterious flight. He compared the appearance of a balloon in the sky to that of a flock of starlings climbing and spinning upon itself. It was ultimately an image of human longing and inspiration, both uplifting and terrifying.78
Wordsworth began his poem Peter Bell (1798) with a playful image of flying in a sort of dirigible airship, or balloon boat.
There’s something in a flying Horse,
There’s something in a huge Balloon:
But through the Clouds I’ll never float
Until I have a little Boat
Shaped like the crescent-Moon …
Away we go! — and what care we
For treason, tumults, and for wars?
We are as calm in our Delight
As is the crescent-Moon so bright
Among the scattered Stars.79
Perhaps Shelley put it best, when he was a young undergraduate at Oxford in 1811, and had just witnessed another of Sadler’s balloon ascents one sparkling summer morning from Christchurch Meadows: ‘The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable; the art of navigating the air is in its first and most helpless infancy; the aerial mariner still swims on bladders, and has not yet mounted the rude raft … It would seem a mere toy, a feather, in comparison with the splendid anticipations of the philosophical chemist. Yet it ought not to be altogether condemned. It promises prodigious faculties for locomotion, and will allow us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we so ignorant of the interior of Africa? — Why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever.’80
♣ Ian McEwan, in the famous opening scene from his 1997 novel Enduring Love, describes a similar horrific balloon death.
♣ Jeffries subsequently claimed that in this manner they lightened
the balloon by ‘no less than five or six pounds’. As a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter, he seems to imply that each of them voided well over two pints of urine, which is more than twice the normal male bladder content. Moreover, cold shrinks the male bladder, and Blanchard at least was a notably small and lightly-built man. The probable solution to the surprising amount of weight released is that they defecated as well. No doubt Jeffries felt that this last detail was too much even for scientific candour.
♣ Recent studies by French aeronautical experts, based on the claim that only the top of the Charlier canopy was burnt in the immediate vicinity of the sprung venting valve, have suggested that Pilâtre’s basic double-balloon design was perfectly sound. Against all expectation, it appears that the hydrogen was not ignited by a spark from the Montgolfier brazier. The probable cause of the catastrophe was a spark caused by a build-up of static electricity, as Pilâtre pulled the valving line and it chafed against the balloon silk. Audoin Dollfus, Pilâtre de Rozier (1993, Chapter 7, ‘Les Causes du Drâme’). It would be interesting to know what Miss Susan Dyer might have thought of this ingenious explanation. Nevertheless, it is true that the first successful non-stop circumnavigation of the globe was performed by a combined helium and hot-air aerostat, with propane burners, the Breitling Orbiter 3, in March 1999.
♣ In fact Lamarck had published a paper ‘On Cloud Forms’ in Paris in 1802, but his definitions were less authoritative than Howard’s, and he used French terms — such as attroupés for cumulus – which were less easily accepted internationally at this period. If Napoleon had won the European war, weather forecasting might be more Gallic today; as it is, modern French forecasters still give barometric pressures in ‘hectopascals’, and have difficulty distinguishing between drizzle, showers and rain. See Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (2001).
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