The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  Title Page

  The Man with His Head in the Clouds

  James Sadler: The First Englishman to Fly

  Richard O. Smith

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2014 by

  Signal Books Limited

  36 Minster Road

  Oxford OX4 1LY

  www.signalbooks.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  © Richard O. Smith, 2014

  The right of Richard O. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.

  Cover Design: Baseline Arts, Oxford

  Cover Images: Baseline Arts, Oxford; Wikimedia Commons

  Prologue: The End?

  They say being on death row clarifies the mind. They also say that the footsteps of a dead man walking emit no sound - although that could be because they’ve just had death row carpeted.

  60 seconds and counting...

  I am facing death in public and no one is offering me a blindfold, cigarette or last meal. Usually when a firing squad ties you to a pole, it is probably a good time to start thinking about life insurance. I haven’t got life insurance. Maybe I should ring a call centre and spend my last few seconds on earth listening to someone with a Geordie accent read through the small print of an insurance policy that I - or rather my widow - will be able to claim on within sixty seconds of taking out the cover.

  50 seconds...

  This is the most terrifying thing I have ever encountered. Forget screeching dentists’ drills, imagined monsters stalking my childhood bedroom or that occasion when I was slightly too slow in reassuring my wife that she is still just as beautiful now as when we married.

  40 seconds...

  I am a cliché whirling into life. My whole existence is flashing before me. I never thought this literally happens when you are about to die. Yet there I am, the only cinema-goer in a big screen multiplex watching an edited compilation package of my own, admittedly rather average it transpires, life. That time I wet myself at Amanda Jones’ fifth birthday party. (Why did that scene make the cut? Who edited this?) I can see myself, asking my mother for a pound in order to buy her a birthday present - and then spending it on an action man accessory. There is a parade of characters and suddenly recalled experiences competing for airtime. All represent the cluttered colours of my life.

  30 seconds...

  Hang on, my life has actually been alright, pretty good even, on this quickly flicked highlights package. What an inconvenient time to make that discovery, when I’m just about to die pointlessly in an Oxfordshire field. The worst possible time to make that breakthrough, I can tell you - as it’s all too late now.

  20 seconds...

  Admittedly, I may have worried about a lot of stuff that never happened, carried the imagined weight of irrelevant burdens. Why did I worry so much? Waste such precious time-on-earth anxious about petty imagined dangers, ruminated fears, when I could have saved it up for this? A situation that really needs worrying about.

  15 seconds...

  Look, I know I have been quite rude about the world in the past. But I’ve just discovered that I really, really do want to live now. Please can I live? I promise to be good.

  10 seconds...

  Hi God. Yes, I’m aware it’s been several decades since we last spoke. I have been busy though - well, you’d probably know that, what with the omnipotence. No, don’t make that face. Anyway, in the statistically unlikely occurrence that a supernatural deity exists outside human comprehension, rather than an inevitable artificial construct of a guilt-induced afterlife expectation to offset nihilism, please save me from my upcoming certain death. Amen. Cheers.

  9 seconds...

  It was worth praying. After all, that’s the potent appeal of religion. Join most organisations or societies and they’ll present you with an introductory free pen, windscreen de-icer or Amazon gift voucher. Join a religion and you’re offered everlasting eternal life. That’s a hard sell to compete with.

  8 seconds...

  Just in case you didn’t catch that last sentiment, God: I REALLY WANT TO LIVE NOW, OK?

  7 seconds...

  Memories. There’s space on my hard drive to download a lot more from life. So stop the countdown. Please stop. It seems to have stopped. Flooded with relief, I feel like a soldier surviving a war. They’ll be no more...

  6 seconds...

  Oh B*^&*%$*&! How could I think that? The countdown is appearing slower as an illusion. Like a car crash, everything appears to slow down before the moment of impact.

  5 seconds...

  Of course there were girls I kissed whom I shouldn’t have, and girls I didn’t kiss whom I definitely should have. Emotion rises within, swelling up like the hot air inflating a balloon, causing a geezer burst of tears. I try and shape words out of these emotions, wanting to reveal my love for my partner. Without a blindfold I am able to see my wife is playing with her phone, smirking at a text message from a friend. I call out my wife’s name with honest affection. “Er... can it wait a minute... texting,” she replies. Insensitively.

  4 seconds...

  Time for some profound words. Final words, simply by an accident of time, can become gilded with an undeserved poignancy. Rendered significant merely by being the last words you ever drew breath to orate. There is also that tense expectancy to make one’s final words profound. And then, once you’ve uttered them, you are forced to remain silent. There’s no point in superseding profound grandiloquence as your chosen final utterance, only to remark ten minutes later: “Could I have another glass of water?”

  3 seconds...

  I wish I hadn’t got so attached to the world as I’m not ready to leave it yet. The world is like a pet that dies too young. Oh God, I’m actually leaving the world. So long, world - thanks for the good times, and frankly your bad times weren’t that bad. I know that now. It’s my sort of world, the earth, and I’m sure I can be happy here. If I’m given another chance, I promise to be reformed, better with my time. I won’t leave toilet rolls unchanged or expect someone else to clear up the crumbs near the toaster. I won’t stare at my wife’s younger sister anymore, even if we go on holiday again and she insists on wearing that tiny bikini (which, you have to admit, was odd for a Helsinki city break). I’ll get a direct debit done for Oxfam. No, I will.

  2 seconds...

  Allow me to share, as my final words, a thought on humanity. My observation is a positive one. Being this close to death has provided me with some good news to share: the compulsion to tell someone in your final moments that you love them is far stronger than the instinct to tell someone you hate them. That’s why passengers on doomed hijacked planes leave messages of love on answer phones. No one rings up that bloke they work with in HR called Dave to inform him: “I just called to say I always thought you were a twat.”

  1 second...

  Trying to compose myself now in order to step out of the world and disappear for ever. We’re
all admitted into the world with that same pre-determined plot ending hanging over us. The agreement is, that by accepting life you simultaneously hereby accept to one day leave it, to disappear for ever, as the waters close quickly about you. Well, I never signed anything agreeing to that.

  0 seconds... Countdown completed. We have lift-off.

  I hear a terrifying loud noise.

  BANG!

  And with that sound, my soul starts to drift upwards to heaven.

  “Basket-case!” says my wife. And then everyone’s faces fold into laughter.

  You see, that’s funny. Perhaps cruel, but undeniably funny, because I’m standing in a basket. And having a breakdown - a breakdown that is entirely justified in my view.

  We have lift-off. I am taking my first ever balloon flight and suffer from crippling acrophobia - that’s a fear of heights to you and me. I’ve never seen, nor imagined, anything this terrifying before.

  And yet I am trusting my continued existence to a fifty-foot plastic inverted teardrop. As we inch above the ground I am in a full-on state of fight or flight emotional arousal - my brain ordering my heart to palpitate like someone’s kicking a bass drum pedal inside my chest cavity. My palms trickle sweat. Fear fibrillates throughout my body

  I want one of the last things I see to be my wife’s face. She’s smiling. An image I frame in my memory. She’s come to watch me take-off with Sofia - a friend’s five-year-old daughter, not the capital of Bulgaria. I feel a sense of handing over to the younger generation. Her smile is to be the last thing I ever see, like those heart-scarring final messages left on answer phones from doomed victims. Then, although you never really want an enjoyable book or movie to end any more than you wish a fulfilling life to end, at least that would make a satisfactory final scene: my wife’s smile before the final fade to permanent terminal blackness.

  Also I want her to be happy and meet someone else. Judging by her reactions to the texts, she probably already has.

  Right, I’m off to die now. And it only cost me £125.

  Introduction: Sadler And Me

  James Sadler was born in Oxford some time in February 1753. It was a dark (obviously) though not necessarily stormy night. And they say historical biographies never start with opening lines like that anymore.

  This attempt at historical biography does not escape convention as it tells Sadler’s story via a chronological narrative. Also, like all historical biographies, the subject dies at the end - I know, spoiler alert! Why do all historical biographies insist on the same sad ending? This conventional narrative approach to structuring a life is perhaps particularly necessary in the case of the category-defying, amorphous and highly unconventional existence that James Sadler lived.

  Sadler has become undeservedly forgotten. This was not someone joyriding on the back of the age’s discovered advancements, then merely popularising them. Sadler’s legacy is that he showed scientific progress could be hacked for the masses. Throughout his lifetime, Britain was the opposite of a meritocracy; he was often dismissed in accounts of the period as “that pastry cook from Oxford”. His name became extinguished, uncommemorated by history, perhaps because he was outcast by both the military (Royal Navy) and the establishment (Oxford University). No one else got to write the history at the time.

  My achievements compared to Sadler are on a 1:100,000 scale. But I am determined to give back to Sadler the reputation that somehow went missing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gleaming and polished for the twenty-first century. Frankly, no definitive list of Great Britons is complete without James Sadler’s name. Moreover, that immodest “Great” prefix in Britain’s name would hardly have been justified without practical visionaries like Sadler - although countries that insist on having an adjective in their nation’s name are usually deluded (see anywhere misleadingly clinging to the word “Democratic”).

  The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography issues a clear warning to anyone contemplating writing a biography of James Sadler; here’s how his entry ends: “Sadler’s life was of deeds, not words, and left great problems for any biographer.” In other words: “Expect to encounter huge problems due to lack of research sources.” Or to précis that sentiment down to one word: “Don’t!”

  Perhaps Sadler’s is a life destined to be captured in silhouette rather than a full-on portrait. Some of the unvarnished truths of this life are hard to discover - newspaper articles of the age provide most of the testimony that establishes his achievements, but these are from unchecked sources, and they always ensure he is the hero of any reported adventures. Bordering on hagiography, reports of the time ensured Sadler’s name always appeared attached to superlatives.

  Yet Sadler, son of another Oxford pastry cook also confusingly called James Sadler (1718-1791), achieved undeniable greatness. And it is possible to call character witnesses from the age who are prepared to testify as much. John Southern confirms in his Treatise upon Aerostatic Globes, published in 1785, that Sadler invented the gas cistern, preferring to use his own reciprocals instead of casks. In his (also) 1785 book The History and Practice of Aerostation, written within a year of Sadler’s first historical flight, author Tiberius Cavallo credits Sadler as “the sole projector, architect, workman and chemist in this experiment”.

  Sadler was the first Englishman to do what I am attempting to do: fly in a balloon. In fact, he was the first Englishman to fly by any method (falling doesn’t count). Thus it is difficult to comprehend why a once ubiquitous household name such as his should become so little known today - given that his accomplishments still resonate with a contemporary interest in aviation. Even the brightest stars one day collapse, and Sadler’s name emits virtually no light today.

  Balloon enthusiast and publicity addict Richard Branson authored a surprisingly readable 350-page love letter to the pioneers of flight, Reach for the Skies. A quick index consultation will confirm that James Sadler, who invented the whole concept in Branson’s home nation, gains exactly zero mentions. Author Richard Holmes’ fine and mighty bookshelf-buckling 2013 tome Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, specifically about eighteenth-century aeronauts, does not include a single reference in the index to James Sadler on any of its fact-filled 416 pages. This is akin to writing a book about the Second World War without mentioning Germany.

  ***

  I have a particular reason why I want to tell James Sadler’s story. In an age when celebrity status is awarded to people who enter televised talent contests or reality shows, it can be reassuring to retreat to an era when people had to accomplish something worthwhile to be garlanded with such status. Socrates defined celebrity as “the perfume of heroic deeds”, which is worth remembering, the next time someone from a scripted reality TV show achieves vast media coverage by strategically offering waiting photographers a willing knickers-flash when getting out of a car. Much of our modern media’s attention is focused on the famous, with especial relish reserved for those broken by fame.

  And yet Sadler earned his celebrity status at a time when society rewarded individuals with its attention for genuine acts of derring-do. Not many people would be known by their face in the late eighteenth century, except perhaps the King. Yet engravings of Sadler were big-selling, mass-produced items. Even rarer for a celebrity of the age were his origins. To become a household name without education or breeding was exceptionally uncommon, and undeniably added to his appeal with the masses. The “it could be you too” appeal is a probable explanation for the otherwise mystifying obsession with today’s sad parade of celebrated vacuous non-entities. Sadler’s origins were humble, but his achievements were the opposite.

  He soared upwards into what were then wholly mysterious and uncharted skies, rumoured to be inhabited by roaming sky dragons. Try persuading a hot air balloon pilot today to take off in a gale and then reach 13,000 feet. Yet that is something Sadler fearlessly accomplished by himself. John Hodg
son observed in his 1924 book History of Aeronautics in Great Britain: “It may in justice be added that Sadler’s many severe experiences in landing were due in some measure to his courage in ascending in high winds.” He was a risk taker of pathological proportions, yet also a man with an honest affection for science and a desire to expand our knowledge of the skies. He was one of the first to collect air samples, as it was widely believed that “sky air” contained different properties to “earth air”. Sadler was also probably aware that the Montgolfiers’ explanation for airborne propulsion, their so called “electric smoke”, was nonsense - and that it was the properties of hot air alone, not smoke, that caused a balloon to rise.

  Often, when someone leads a life of fragmented disciplines, tangled interests, cross-discipline accomplishments and competing enthusiasms, we are encouraged to sneer - selecting pejorative phrases such as “jack of all trades” ahead of “polymath”. Indeed, “polymath” is a modern word - well, for us English-speakers, who have yet to completely clean it of its stained disapproval, but Greeks have been using both the word and concept happily for just a few thousand years now. Still, it took us Britons two thousand years to accept olive oil, so maybe there is hope ahead.

  Sadler achieved such a ridiculous amount of cross-discipline successes that it is hard to place them into any meaningful compartmentalised categorisation. One eminent engineer in 1928 accused his colleague J.E. Hodgson, after he had addressed an engineering society with a well-researched paper on Sadler’s life, of refusing to acknowledge that there were different James Sadlers sharing the same name. Such a long list of accomplishments across different disciplines could thus not possibly belong to the same person.

  In reality just the one James Sadler improved the Royal Navy’s firepower - radically redesigning both cannons and rifles - and likely affecting the outcome of the war with the French. Lord Nelson certainly thought so, and expressed such thoughts in preserved letters requesting all the inventions Sadler could design for the Navy. Nelson declared: “I would take on board the Victory as many guns as Mr Sadler could send alongside.” It was estimated, then empirically proven by Sadler, that a third of all British guns missed their target before the modifications he devised.