The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  By 2pm “everything having been adjusted, Colonel Richard Fitzpatrick and Sadler seated themselves in the car, only for the balloon to be found incapable of ascent.” According to a contemporary press report, it appears no one was able to inform the Colonel that his large girth was rendering flight unlikely: “The Colonel being resolved not to quit his feat, a due proportion of ballast was added”. Again they tried to launch from the college gardens, but the weight was still too much. What happened next appears strange bordering upon imprudent, even by Sadler’s standards of demonstrative recklessness.

  Already the balloon’s inflation process had taken nearly two hours longer than expected, and still it stubbornly refused to leave the ground. One by one, Sadler had to persuade the promised passengers to step out of the basket, until only Colonel Fitzpatrick remained. Sadler had taken the surprising decision to vacate the basket himself and allow the Colonel to pilot the balloon with “an unpremeditated solo flight which was managed with admirable judgement, though with no more than a few brief verbal instructions given by Sadler”.

  Perhaps Sadler proposed to show that ballooning was for all men, not just an isolated few daredevil pilots. Maybe he became so annoyed with the Colonel that he was prepared to let him ascend solo to prove a point - the point that he was unlikely to return uninjured. Sadler merely handed Fitzpatrick “his flag” and stepped out of the balloon, leaving the intrepid Colonel to ascend on his own after a brief oral tutorial from England’s foremost aerial voyager. The Times describes what happened next: “The colonel manifested a cool intrepidity both before and after the balloon had been launched and continued waving the flag as long as he could possibly retain sight of the spectators below. After 47 minutes he sank gently into the horizon,” a detail that suggests both a lack of wind and Fitzpatrick’s sudden aeronautical skills.

  Three days later, Fitzpatrick wrote to Windham:

  Grosvenor Place, London

  June 27, 1785

  I have gratified my curiosity in a flight from Oxford; where your protege Sadler (who, by the by, I consider as a Phenomenon) behaved very handsomely, and finding his process not answer his expectations and the balloon only capable of carrying up one person, very obligingly gave me up his place, and after receiving some hasty instructions, I ascended by myself, in view of all the University, as well I believe as of the whole county...

  I had told Sadler that I would not take his balloon very far, and my intention was to have flown about two hours, but as I wished to ascend as high as possible without danger to the balloon; after having first try’d the valve to see if I was master of the use of it, I continued rising for three quarters of an hour, when I suddenly perceived from my flag, that I was descending. I discharged gradually five of my bags of ballast, throwing out papers between each, without finding that I appeared to diminish the velocity of my descent, till the 5th, when the paper I threw out floated instead of rising, to my great satisfaction, since I perceived something had happened of which I was ignorant. I then determined to reserve my two last bags till I was certain of being very near the earth, and fixed one of them to the anchor in order to drop it and break the fall of the machine. When I saw the shadow of the balloon increasing very fast, and could plainly distinguish objects, so small as horses in waggons and in the fields, I threw out my sixth bag, but unluckily when I was preparing the seventh upon the anchor, it slipp’d off, and fell without it. Within a very few seconds I came to the ground on the side of a steep hill, in a corn field. The shock was trifling, but the unevenness of the ground overset the Car, and rolled me gently out. Disentangling myself from the cords, I held fast the side of the car, and with some difficulty held the balloon till some country people came to my assistance. I then perceived a large rent in the lower part of it, which accounted for my descent, and which, I suppose, by a more judicious use of the valve I should have prevented. The curiosity and astonishment of the country who flocked in by shoals were prodigious. I got Sadler’s balloon, however, safe in a stable, and waited at a little publick house two hours for his arrival.

  Adieu, Dear Windham.

  Sadler, who had given pursuit in a horse-drawn carriage from Oxford, quickly appeared at the pub and retrieved both balloon and unplanned pilot, and travelled back to Wantage in Oxfordshire. Relief, as well as the balloon, must have been in the air for a long time that day, as it was midnight before Sadler, realising it was too late to reach Oxford, opted to stay in Wantage for the night, missing the planned celebrations of the flight’s success in Oxford.

  Fitzpatrick’s family were hardly danger-rejecting risk-assessment carry-outers. His brother John Fitzpatrick, the 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, was an Irish peer. Elected as an MP for Bedfordshire for nearly thirty years, he also spent forty years as the appointed Lord Lieutenant serving the monarch in the county. He also spent an equal amount of years womanising, culminating in a high-profile affair with none other than the Prime Minister’s wife Anne Fitzroy. This affair produced an illegitimate child, and the mother’s eventual scandalous divorce. A special Act of Parliament was required for granting her the divorce in 1767 from Prime Minster Augustus Fitzroy. Not that the PM’s bed sheets were whiter than white, as he reacted to the divorce by marrying within eight weeks his lover Elizabeth Wrottesley. A vicar’s daughter, Elizabeth produced no fewer than nine surviving children. Hence Sadler probably knew that recklessness was in the Colonel’s genes, before allowing him the unique distinction of going up in his balloon without knowing how to use either ballast or vent.

  But however much of a bumpy ride he received figuratively from Oxford University, this was nothing compared to the literal bumpy ride Sadler encountered on his final flight prior to his self-called 25-year time-out from aeronautics. On 10 September 1785, after taking off from Worcester, he only just survived a terrifying ordeal.

  25 AUGUST 1785: WORCESTER

  Sadler was big in Worcester. Yet a Worcester flight caused Sadler such a jolting shock to his flying confidence that he curtailed all ballooning for over a quarter of a century. But that was still to come.

  In August 1785 Sadler travelled to Worcester for his seventh manned flight. With the second Manchester flight nearly killing him, and the Corpus Christi flight not at all going to plan, coupled with news reaching the UK from France of the deaths of prominent fellow aeronauts, even a daredevil stuntman like Sadler must have been hosting some anxieties as to his choice of future career.

  Taking off in the private grounds of a Worcester estate, “on Thursday afternoon about half after one, Mr Sadler ascended with his balloon amidst the acclamations of a large crowd.” On a cloudy day, Sadler was reported as making little progress until he threw out three large bags of ballast, at which point he suddenly soared upwards. Ever the combined gentleman and crowd pleaser, he courteously saluted the crowd with his hat and disappeared into the grey cloud blanket. Unlike the Colonel, he knew what to do: vent the globe continuously to neutralise the hydrogen pull causing the alarmingly steep ascent.

  However, 37 minutes into the flight, Sadler was low enough “to converse with field workers who told him that he was over Burford, near Tenbury, 21 miles from Worcester.” After re-ascending by tipping overboard the last of his sandbags, a few miles later he drifted low over the estate of Gilbert Nicholetts known as The Broomtrees. Indeed, he was so low as to receive a shouted invitation to dinner. Sadler, careful to doff his hat, politely declined and continued for another three miles until he threw out his anchor over the village of Stretton Gransome. Unfortunately, the next part of the story does not reflect well on the agricultural workers of this Herefordshire hamlet.

  Upon seeing the shadow of Sadler’s balloon appearing on the field, “forty people were working at the harvest there but they fled with the upmost precipitation.” Only an old lady remained, and Sadler persuaded her to grab hold of his mooring rope and help steady the balloon. Eventually, deciding the balloon was not a ferocious dragon des
patched by the devil, the farm labourers gingerly returned and aided the old lady with docking the balloon. Wisely forsaking the superstitious dragon fearers as dining companions, Sadler walked the three miles back to The Bromtrees and dined with the Nicholetts. The Times reports that when Sadler arrived, the entire family were all “fitting”. Hopefully, this is a simple case of the eighteenth-century letter “f” being interchangeable with the letter “s”, rather than Sadler demonstrating an early attempt to invent strobe lighting.

  The next day, Friday, both Sadler and balloon were returned to Worcester by the afternoon, launching some considerable weekend-greeting festivities. As he reached the outskirts “the populace took the horses from his carriage and drew him about the streets in triumph.”

  This sort of admiration must have been hard for Sadler to give up, but within a few weeks, he had done just that - for nearly 25 years. A correspondent writing to a newspaper gushes praise upon Sadler’s exploits in Worcester, clearly star-struck by seeing his balloon. But the report ends with the descriptive detail: “Though the day was remarkably cloudy at his ascent, as soon as Mr Sadler got above the clouds the sun shone with great force.” This description surely works, too, as a load-bearing metaphor for Sadler’s career and life: escape from the greyness of his kitchen worker environment, soaring above the dreamless drudgery into the sunlight, basking in the warmth of the public’s adulation.

  10 SEPTEMBER 1785: WORCESTER

  When Sadler took off “in his beautiful new balloon amidst the acclamations and applause of thousands of spectators” there was an early omen that this flight would prove troublesome. Back in Worcester, his ascent was immediately hindered by a pear tree, and it took several minutes to untangle the balloon from its branches. After that initial setback upon take-off, Sadler soon soared over a cooing crowd, his supporters turning out in incredible numbers again to witness first-hand an acknowledged hero of the age.

  Then things started to go wrong, badly wrong. Firstly, he was forced to keep the value open throughout, and then “meeting with a very cold assemblage of vapours, hastened his descent much more quickly that he would have wished”.

  Nine miles from Lichfield in Staffordshire, Sadler realised he would have to land. But there was a problem. His entanglement with the pear tree had meant his grappling iron, a makeshift anchor he favoured as his primitive landing gear, had been damaged, and rendered ineffective after losing several prongs on the pear tree. Sadler “was dragged nearly five miles over a rough and extensive heath, and at length thrown out of his car. By this unfortunate accident his balloon escaped him.” Moreover the balloon was never to be seen again, and the expense of manufacturing one balloon per journey was clearly impractical - something that was evidently dawning upon Sadler by this stage. This was another likely cause of his future sudden decision to prematurely curtail his aeronautical activities.

  Lord Uxbridge, dwelling nearby, immediately despatched his carriage to the crash scene to rescue Sadler. Lord Uxbridge’s son subsequently became famous at the Battle of Waterloo when a French cannon ball removed his leg in 1815, causing him to exclaim, “By God, Sir, I have lost my leg,” to which the Duke of Wellington supposedly replied “By God, Sir, so you have.” That exchange probably passed for psychotherapy in those days. Having suffered a 25% reduction in the limb department, the ever-stoical Lord only uttered one cry during the subsequent primitive surgical procedure, observing during the anaesthetic-free operation: “the knives appear somewhat blunt”. Afterwards, the Lord sprang - or, more accurately, hopped - into action and exploited the commercial opportunities of his leglessness.

  A cottage nearby was turned into a leg shrine, where visitors could pay to join a tour that first displayed the blood-speckled chair where the amputation occurred, and culminated with the grave where the leg was buried. Visitors flocked to this macabre attraction, although one decidedly less impressed tourist decorated the grave with the graffiti message, “here lies the Lord’s limb; the Devil will claim the rest of him.” Bizarrely, Lord Uxbridge’s family were notorious for losing limbs, and especially hands, all over the battlefield of Europe - even his wife succeeding in losing more hands than an inexpert bridge player.

  Thankfully, Lord Uxbridge was around to provide Sadler with a hand that day. Sadler lost no limbs in the accident, otherwise escaping with severe bruising to his body and confidence. But his risk taking was bordering on the pathological.

  ***

  Why did he stop flying? It could have been a combination of this near-death experience, the risky financial model of expensive silk balloons and their destruction, and, most likely, a realisation on Sadler’s part that this was an inappropriate profession for someone with a shop, wife and children to support. And very much factored into these plans for all three was his continued survival.

  Though if Mrs. Sadler hoped this abstention from balloon activities would help her children, then fate was to intervene later - cruelly. It would be fascinating to know Mrs. Sadler’s opinion of her husband: proud supporter, or mystified at his recklessness? His first wife was to die in 1790. But there were still further tragedies ahead for the Sadler family.

  A document contained within Christ Church’s collection confirms that Sadler had developed a professional interest in designing steam engines by 1786. In 1791 he patented a mobile steam engine, designed with a reaction turbine and condenser. The subsequent patent Sadler took out was described as “tandem single acting compound atmospheric steam carriage”.

  His steam engines were used by the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, at mining pitheads and also in a mustard factory on London’s South Bank where “Sadler’s engine keeps a great number of edge stones at work grinding mustard, lint and other feeds. The sieves and other apparatus for preparing their goods together with the pressing machines for extracting the oil and making the oil cake are all worked by the engine,” noted John Rennie.

  It appears likely that Sadler limited himself to only filing one patent for a steam engine, probably because of his ongoing concerns over an increasingly litigious James Watt. Watt may have successfully garnered the main credit for inventing the mobile steam engine, but this could have been merely a PR battle. There was certainly reported antagonism between Watt and Sadler, yet typically only one side of the story - Watt’s side - appears to have been written up.

  Sadler had certainly produced a moving steam engine around the same time as Watt. He engineered a rotary engine that provided steam power to a wheeled carriage; or, to give his invented contraption a shorter name: car. Maybe Sadler invented the first car?

  Let’s pose a question. When did the first car appear on the streets of Britain? The answer is surprisingly early. It occurred in Sadler’s time. By 1 June 1803, a private steam carriage was traversing the roads of London. Presumably on 2 June 1803, the first traffic warden appeared, slapping a ticket on the bonnet.

  Surprisingly, even by the beginning of the twentieth century, steam cars were superior performers to motor vehicles; the engines were lighter, quieter and capable of travelling at greater speeds. But there was a drawback: vast amounts of water needed to be carried around to feed the insatiable boiler. The steam car’s demise was mainly caused by the mass production paradigm of Ford and Morris, rendering the combustion engine vehicle considerably cheaper than before. This was twinned with the technological breakthrough of the electronic starting mechanism. Drivers were rightly suspicious of the old hand-crank starters, which justifiably earned a reputation for unreliability. The invention of the Kettering starter, alongside the mass production pricing model, was key to replacing the steam cars. Yet before the combustion engine had evolved Sadler’s prototype design, albeit with considerable modifications, remained in use for over one hundred years.

  Throughout the non-balloon decades Sadler retained a continued presence in Oxford. In both 1789 and 1790 posters appeared throughout the city offering an interactive public lecture billed as
“Philosophical Fireworks”. Taking place in Oxford’s Town Hall in St. Aldates, these were more entertainment displays than lectures, though Sadler would have been keen to stress the chemistry involved throughout his indoor fireworks. Nevertheless, his lectures were aptly described as “more fiery than philosophical”.

  The resulting bangs and flashes were not considered to be for a genteel audience - and apparently contained some fireworks more suited for outdoors than indoors. But one converted critic, an Oxford don, described Sadler’s scientific intent: “he is a clever, practical and experimental manipulator in chemistry.” He also believed that Sadler was patronised “by a few scientific men then at the University”.

  By 1792 Sadler had planned to accompany Sir George Staunton to provide engineering assistance to the Macartney Embassy in China, though they only reached Italy. There Sadler was involved in recruiting Chinese interpreters for the mission, aimed at improving trade between Britain and China.

  Instead of continuing to the Far East he returned to Britain and, after designing a stationary steam engine put to work in the Coalbrookdale foundries in 1793, he was reunited with his former boss Thomas Beddoes from the laboratory in Oxford’s Broad Street.

  Beddoes was keen for Sadler to become chief engineer and chemist overseeing his Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. While in Bristol, Sadler remarried, wedding Martha Hancock in the Church of St. Augustine the Less, College Green, on 24 October 1795. The site of Sadler’s second wedding no longer stands as the church was damaged in a German air-raid in 1940 and eventually demolished in 1962.

  Soon afterwards Sadler relocated to Portsmouth to begin employment as a professional chemist with the Board of Naval Works. Well, cooking is essentially chemistry - so an expert pastry chef is really a talented chemist.