Sadler also invented mobile steam engines. Perhaps even before James Watt - although this is too clouded by controversy to ever permit a clear image of what happened. Only one patent was filed by Sadler due to Watt’s somewhat more litigious approach. Yet Sadler was unquestionably the very first Englishman in history to literally soar above his homeland and look down at his country from the skies above. He also started a carbonated water business, crucially using a balloon motif on the label - an early celebrity endorsement of a drinks product. There Sadler designed and built a steam engine to use at the bottling factory.
But above all, he did something no Englishman had ever done before: fly. And he did everything himself, designing and building his own balloon and basket, manufacturing his hydrogen and piloting his own creation.
Undoubtedly Sadler was an old-fashioned daredevil too - to an extent this man of science also doubled as the eighteenth century’s Evel Knievel. Taking off in gales, crashing into hills, plopping into the Irish Sea and Bristol Channel, Sadler lived like a prototype version of Jackass the Movie. He once ascended in a severe gale. Aiming for Birmingham, he landed at Boston, Lincolnshire. This probably constitutes close enough for most budget airlines (after all, Sadler’s home town now genuinely boasts an airport officially named “London Oxford”).
Yet perhaps Sadler’s greatest achievement was in possessing the necessary scientific wisdom to survive, in an era when most of his fellow pioneering aeronauts perished. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier may have been the first person in human history to fly - ascending in the Montgolfiers’ famous balloon in France in 1783 - yet by June 1785 he had also become the first person to die in an aviation accident when his balloon exploded into a fireball.
Pilâtre de Rozier, first to fly and first to die (Library of Congress, Washington DC)
***
The Man with his Head in the Clouds is James Sadler. He is also me. I am attempting to overcome a life-long aversion to heights in order to replicate Sadler’s first flight. I am terrified of heights, really terrified. Actually, best make that really, really, really (...one more “really” should suffice) terrified. I cannot imagine anyone braver than Sadler.
Hence, I have to conquer my deepest - or, more accurately, highest - fears in order to tell Sadler’s story. Inspired by Sadler’s determination to be the first Englishman to see his own nation from above, I wanted to replicate his experience. Like Sadler, I am used to living in Oxford beneath the shadows cast by the University’s Dreaming Spires.
Somehow he attained these achievements with little if no formal education. Mirroring Sadler, I have virtually no academic qualifications either. Like Sadler, I’m from Oxford’s Town not Gown. Like Sadler, after feeling that Oxford has spent a long time looking down on me, I crave my turn to look down at Oxford. Unlike Sadler, I am an idiot.
Not least because I booked a balloon flight despite my acute acrophobia. And here’s a tip for you: should you want to acquire more respect for an irrational fear, make sure you medicalise the condition and refer to the phobia’s correct clinical name. Announcing “I’ve led a life-long struggle with astihophobia” guarantees more immediate respect than “I’m scared of rubber bands.”
My fear of heights is extreme. Acute acrophobia forbids me from standing on a stool, yet alone dangling at 3,000 feet from the strings of an oversized party balloon.
The first piece of info for any potential nervous aeronauts is that balloons never land - technically they only ever crash. This is because balloons do not contain an engine, or steering mechanism.
Hence I needed to recruit some pre-flight counselling quickly. Plus discover what Oxford University psychiatry experts can tell me about their latest research into phobias. After all, it transpires I have harboured not one, but two phobias for most of my life. This revelation occurs during my first visit to a counselling practice. Here I discover that I am not only acrophobic but also suffer from bathmophobia. I complain that their counselling practice is like the MRSA equivalent for phobias. I entered their consulting room as a patient requiring treatment for one phobia, where I picked up a second phobia during my stay.
No, bathmophobia is not the fear of baths - a condition more commonly known, as “being French”. Nor is bathmophobia an irrational fear of quaint Georgian towns selling over-priced Jane Austen tea towels.
Bathmophobia is a condition I have genuinely been diagnosed with by a mental health practitioner. It is an irrational fear of stairs. That’s right. I am a functioning adult man who is terrified of heights and stairs. I appear to be suffering from the complete set of height anxieties - a full house (or full bungalow, as I prefer) of height phobias.
This explains why I have never been a high-octave high-flyer, high-achiever or high anything. I don’t even like legal highs, especially ladders. My life has mainly been conducted on the ground floor, both literally and metaphorically.
I may not have a head for heights, but I do have a body for falling.
Prodding memories best left marooned in the past, I confront a past entirely spent travelling on the bottom deck of buses and living on the ground floor - by deciding to seek professional counselling. Here I am diagnosed by mental health practitioners as doubly phobic. Here I also discover that most acrophobics have actively done something about their condition: they’ve stubbornly ignored it.
And yet everyone I meet without exception who suffers from height anxiety is adamant that they suffer from vertigo. In fact, I am about to make a startlingly discovery about vertigo, once I embark on a programme to educate myself about the condition - a breakthrough that immediately changes my outlook on life.
Hence this book is about the twin dreamt ambitions of one man’s journey to become the first to fly above the earth, and another man’s decision to finally go upstairs.
You see, I am rarely comfortable on stairs. Occasionally I am forced to concede why I am behaving irrationally, suspiciously even, on a staircase. If stairs are steep and what I call “unfinished” (i.e. the designers have not added a back to each step), I like to negotiate them slowly. Not necessarily holding the handrail, but within sufficiently close proximity should I need to clutch it to feel less anxious. After explaining my predicament, people nod and say “that’s OK” - even though it clearly isn’t OK. Although I will avoid admitting my predicament whenever possible I will occasionally have to concede that I am frightened of heights, and yes, this single-flight staircase does constitute a height. And that I am uncomfortable being here. For this immense bravery, I receive looks of pitying bewilderment.
Normally I am more likely to tell a woman of my shameful predicament and hide it from men, fearing such an admission would erode masculinity - although to be fair, men have often been as empathetic as women.
With a significant birthday approaching (no, not the Big Six-O, thanks for asking) I decide a change has to occur. At this point I need to admit to my phobias, especially if I harbour any truthful ambitions of overcoming them. It’s time to address this thing, and get it sorted. Starting with addressing vertigo. Which turns out to be completely the wrong place to start.
At Dawn’s First Flight: James Sadler and Oxford
James Sadler was born in Oxford and baptised there soon afterwards on 27 February 1753 at St. Peter-in-the-East Church in Queen’s Lane. Thereafter we know almost nothing about him until some thirty years later. In fact, there is frustratingly little known about Sadler’s formative years. Apart from popping up in the parish register for a baptism and a marriage, we don’t hear from him again until his proclivity for flying test balloons makes the news in 1784. In the interim Sadler worked at his father’s business the Lemon Hall Refreshment House in Oxford’s High Street, while his older brother John was employed at the café’s second branch located in St. Clement’s.
Notably, Sadler’s story will become hazy again when he curtails his aeronautical activities in 1785 - dis
appearing into the clouds like one of his ill-advised ascents in an overcast sky. Brief glimpses through the mist during these so-called “Missing Years” show his polymath’s diversity before he returns to ballooning in July 1810. Sadler accomplishes an array of different achievements across different disciplines during this period. We know the headlines, if not always the complete story.
In 1784, when Sadler’s story comes into view, he was working in the kitchen at the back of the Lemon Hall Refreshment House, which he inherited from his father. Rowlandson’s Oxford, a compendium of Oxford life produced by the eponymous Georgian satirist and cartoonist notes, “I dined in the High Street at Sadler’s”, thus indicating that the café was more readily known by its owner’s name. Located where the Examination Schools now stand in Oxford’s High Street, Sadler’s refreshment rooms were demolished for the University’s expansion. The Schools were finished in 1882 by Thomas Jackson, the architect who also designed Oxford’s most photographed icon, the Bridge of Sighs, and who spent his entire honeymoon period in Italy visiting quarries to source marble for the building that replaced Sadler’s café. Presumably he read in the evenings by the light of his new wife’s fury.
Oxford University, as is its aggressive wont, has long since colonised most of central Oxford, and Sadler’s historic pastry shop was simply another building whose destiny was an inevitable, incontrovertible property transfer from Town to Gown.
Sadler had started to construct airworthy balloons by February 1784, even exhibiting at Oxford Town Hall in St. Aldates a sizeable 63-foot diameter hot air balloon constructed “with great labour and expense”. This was a marketing exercise, used to garner publicity and gather admission fees as vital funds were raised this way in order to build a new vessel that he christened “a large Aerial Machine”.
19 FEBRUARY 1784: THE FIRST UNMANNED FLIGHT
In common with human gestation periods, James Sadler took nine months from conceiving his unmanned test flight to launching himself skywards and becoming the first Englishman to fly.
He tested both hot air and hydrogen balloons on an unsuspecting nation. Quite how unsuspecting a nation Britain was as regards balloons in 1784 was proved a few months after Sadler’s debut historic manned ascent, when Scottish scientist James Dinwiddle launched an unmanned test balloon from Bath. Recorded in his journal, the hemisphere measured 27 feet in diameter. Its landing in Dorset five miles south of Shaftesbury in the hamlet of Farrington prompted considerable trouble.
A farmer summoned a posse of labourers and entered the field where the fallen balloon wobbled in the breeze like an oversized green jelly. Stalking their prey like primitive Neanderthal hunters, they cautiously approached it downwind with pikes primed, and then charged, hacking the balloon into silken strips. To their relieved surprise, the balloon offered little resistance. The farmer was steadfast in his conviction that it could only be one thing: an alien monster originating from overseas intent on abducting his cows.
Wisely, Sadler decided to steer clear of Dorset, and had earlier launched a test flight from Oxford. He launched his relatively small test balloon, constructed from silk, from a field situated just to the west of where The Plain intersection at St. Clement’s currently lies permanently surrounded by the constant deep roar of traffic. The field was then managed by John Sibthorp of Lincoln College. Sibthorp, who had studied medicine in Edinburgh and France, had been appointed the University’s Professor of Botany in 1784 and so would have been a useful and influential ally for Sadler when attempting to cross the high-fenced Town and Gown division.
Although Oxford University seemingly helped fund Sadler’s pioneering aerostation work, and Sibthorp supported his endeavours, it appears that the Sherardian Professor of Botany may not have witnessed Sadler’s later manned flights as he was away in the Far East plant collecting. He was certainly better in this post than his nepotistic appointment would imply, since his predecessor was his father Dr. Humphry Sibthorp of Magdalen College, who “gave not very successful lectures and every scientific object slept during the 40 years he held the post,” according to John Pointer writing in Oxoniensis Academia in 1749.
It was probably during Sibthorp’s protracted absences that one of the first balloon ascents in England was made, launching from near the Botanic Garden, then known as the Physic Garden in Oxford, though the actual spot is more likely to have been where St. Hilda’s College has stood since 1893 as this was the field then under the control of Sibthorp. It is equally likely that Sadler returned to this location in the autumn of the same year for his first manned flight.
It is clear from the larger scales of successfully unmanned test flights that Sadler was envisaging a more spacious design eventually carrying him into the skies. His balloons, or “envelopes” in technical aeronautical language, were increasing incrementally with each unmanned flight. For the details of Sadler’s early experiments, we are indebted to an anonymous letter writer.
On 25 February 1784 the Daily Chronicle newspaper received a letter dated 21 February. This was the primary news source for newspapers of the age, since communication networks were barely in their infancy. The paper’s correspondent had been walking through a field in Wrotham, Kent, when he discovered “a large Air Balloon, which from the label prefixed to it, appears to have been made by Mr Sadler of Oxford”.
It was indeed Sadler’s creation. This represented one of his largest balloons; its smaller-scaled predecessors would have probably been launched near the same site in Oxford. One uncollaborated report implies that Sadler’s unmanned test balloons were launched from near the Queen’s College on the High Street - the same street where Sadler’s pastry shop was located almost directly across the road at no.84. Although possible, this would imply an unproven partnership with a Mr. Rudge of Queen’s. In fact, how much the project belonged to Rudge is unclear - certainly Sadler was not a University man, and at this stage of his career would have done well to have overcome the strict Town and Gown sectarianism as a mere kitchen worker and pastry cook. His invitation to connect with the University would most likely have been provided by his later fame.
Rudge was an intriguing aeronautical pioneer in his own right, and appears to have motivated Sadler in an arms race to be the first Englishman to reach the skies. Rudge launched his own unmanned balloon from Queen’s in February 1784. A vicar visiting the Dreaming Spires from Honiton in Devon, the Rev. W. Tucker records meticulously that Rudge’s balloon was fifteen feet in diameter and made from alternative strips of red and white material. Rudge himself later confirmed that his balloon’s colour scheme was intended “to appear like meridional lines on a terrestrial globe”.
Taking-off at 1.15pm, the balloon flew until 3pm when it landed in a field just outside Wallington, midway between Sutton and Croydon in Surrey.
Although including information on the balloon’s construction, the scientific integrity of his report is boldly compromised when the Rev. Tucker includes in his same account an assured cure for the plague which involves simply mixing asses’ milk with homemade raspberry wine - a product he was hoping to sell. A visit from Trading Standards may have been imminent.
Crucially, the balloon was filled with the so called “inflammable gas”, later to be known as hydrogen. Astoundingly insensitive to the cardiac health of any modern day college Health and Safety executive, Rudge was manufacturing huge quantities of his own hydrogen inside the prestigious walls of the Queen’s College. This involved pouring buckets of neat sulphuric acid over large quantities of shaved iron or zinc filings and attempting to catch the ensuing gas in a silk duvet.
This practice inevitably risked permanently separating the Dreamers from their Spires. If this super-inflammable gas had ever caught light, the resultant bang may have been heard in Cambridge.
Perhaps surprisingly, Rudge was content to share his technology, even writing to newspapers to inform them of the process. His self-described recipe for producing t
he lifting gas: “19 pounds of iron filings and 40 pounds of the concentrated vitriolic acid and a quantity of water in proportion to the latter as five to one. Produces a sufficient quantity of gas to fill it to such a degree as to float, which it did when about two-thirds full.” Rudge also confirmed that his balloon was capable of containing upwards of 65 cubic feet of air, and added equally detailed instructions on how he manufactured his unique sealant varnish for the balloon envelope, using gum to ensure it stuck.
However, one connection that Queen’s does not seem to possess is a direct link to Sadler. That rightly prized British asset The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography appears to have miscredited a Rudge test flight at Queen’s to Sadler. Oxford historian Mark Davies was the first to discover this anomaly.
It is then announced in the press, without making any economical cuts in the fanfare department, that James Sadler is already contemplating his next bigger, bolder balloon project, and has already began construction on a balloon (with suspiciously exact measurements provided by the newspapers of the day) 54 feet in circumference, containing 22,842 gallons of “exhuberated air extracted from burnt wood, a method entirely new, and which has hitherto not been attempted in this Kingdom”. This was a brand new concept - as was the word “exhuberated”.
People were certainly keen to help Sadler, often writing him letters no more fully addressed than: “Balloon man of Oxford University”. One of the correspondents providing published testimonies in newspapers (they were nearly always nameless, anonymity hardly the best guarantee of journalistic accuracy) enticingly revealed that 20,000 spectators were present in Oxford for Sadler’s next unmanned test launch, each watching “the magnificent scene with admiration and astonishment. The air took only 20 minutes to fill, although Sadler had intended 30 minutes would be required.” This does appear to be a suspiciously short-timed estimate.
The Man With His Head in the Clouds Page 2