The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  Once my over-active, hyper-chatty amygdala finally shuts up, I almost begin to enjoy the voyage. A passive acceptance replaces my fears, as if saying “OK demons, you had a chance to do your worst. And you haven’t destroyed me yet.” After a few more minutes I become even calmer. Then a brand new feeling starts to form. At first it’s too far away to identify, like a song in the distance, then I make sense of the new feeling. I am actively determined to appreciate the rareness of the experience. Once relinquished responsibility has been accepted by my rational brain, my irrational brain has gone off shift. For the first time, my brain is soothing me, saying “this is actually going to be OK. Now start to appreciate it before it’s over.” Then the pilot announces it is time to land. Like a lovely deep sleep that finally arrives at the end of a restless night, where the pillow has never felt softer, the bed never warmer, then the alarm clock rudely goes off. We are about to land, just as I have started to appreciate it.

  ***

  Like Sadler coming into land, we vent our balloon too. Unlike Sadler, we have to avoid countless overhead - or, rather, “underhead” obstacles given our current view - such as power lines and a busy M40. Therefore a modern balloon pilot has to choose his or her landing spot with even more precision than in Sadler’s day, mainly because our environment is either built upon or crisscrossed by high-voltage power wires. From the air it is still possible to appreciate the fine job our countryside is doing in its struggle to keep towns and villages apart. Inevitably, though, this overcrowded isle will eventually merge into one unending giant metropolis called London.

  Not that landing is an exact science. In fact, purists would argue that balloons never land, only crash. Again, a detail conspicuously absent in most balloon businesses’ brochures.

  Gently, we drift down to earth. To achieve what aeronauts term “neutral buoyancy” the pilot must ensure the air is only slightly hotter inside than outside the globe. This skilfully achieved, the balloon appears to hover as it commences its gentle touchdown

  When our balloon comes into land, we adopt our briefed landing positions - like the emergency landing brace stance demonstrated by stewardesses on planes. (You know the position? You do listen to them, don’t you? Tut.) Although forewarned that the basket will probably topple over onto its side when landing, our pilot provides the softest of touchdowns - like cotton wool falling onto a haystack.

  But there is still much work to be done as soon as we are back on the ground. There are 20-25 tonnes of hot air remaining inside the envelope providing a potentially huge inertia drag factor. This is why you really don’t want to be ballooning in windy conditions because a gust of wind now could easily re-launch the envelope like a giant kite, and drag an upturned basket away with it.

  This violent lurch can potentially throw the pilot out of the basket, and leave a hapless bunch of passengers without a crew sailing upwards again. This certainly happened several times to Sadler, and at least once to his unfortunate passenger in the flatlands of Lincolnshire between Heckington and Sleaford. That day Sadler was upturned out of the basket only to see his fellow passenger - a man without any aeronautical experience - re-launched by a strong gust. So children, do not attempt to fly a balloon during strong winds. Sadler would almost certainly agree with you, and he did not reach that conclusion by taking the route marked “the easy way”.

  The air needs to be squeezed out of the balloon as quickly as possible once it is on the deck. Surprisingly, this is accomplished by using a rolling pin, a human rolling pin. Three girls gamely volunteer to act as the required rolling pins and rotate themselves along the balloon surface, compressing air out of the end. One of the rolling pins is a model from the photo-shoot who is wearing a short white summer dress that frequently treats the men present to numerous knickers flashes - probably not the most practical outfit for this job. Though, to be fair, it was hard to predict at the start of the evening the dress requirement to be a human rolling pin. Like Sadler, she is accomplished at both disciplines: ballooning and rolling pastry.

  The girls complete the rolling pin job so well that they should definitely move on to pastry next. Once the envelope is flatter than a pancake in Holland, everyone present rolls the balloon into a cylindrical tube shape, and then we pick it up like a giant anaconda. Balloons appear vast when they are laid out on the ground, their sense of proportion distorted when usually viewed in the sky at distance. They really are massive. Next everyone helps funnel the now tubular balloon back into the trailer.

  But we’re not finished with the basket yet. Unusually, we are told to get back into the wicket basket and re-assume our former flying positions. This is not an easy task, because the balloon basket is now on the back of a trailer. But it’s to save us a lengthy walk back to the farmhouse and civilisation - or at least the nearest point that our awaiting minibus can reach on navigable roads.

  The farmer whose field we have landed on is given a bottle of champagne - a traditional, and it has to be said, a highly successful, way of ensuring instant friendliness. Some balloon operators I had interviewed told me of bad experiences when encountering the “get orf my land” brigade of old-school load-the-shotgun-first farmers’ greetings. Some professional balloon trippers showed me compiled colour-coded maps, marking the friendly, indifferent and troublesome farmers. Knowing where to land without attracting encircling pitch-fork brandishers, and which fields - so that crops aren’t damned, livestock enraged or bulls annoyed - is clearly advantageous.

  Here our intrepid pilot continues to multi-task, this time pouring champagne for all. “Does anyone want orange juice instead of champagne?” His question creates the silence it deserves.

  ***

  Champagne is a traditional conclusion to balloon flights. Anything that includes a free glass of champagne usually enables the function and provider to appear (a) automatically classier than it actual is (b) probably overpriced. Drinking is a long standing ballooning tradition. Sadler never flew without a bottle of brandy on board, sometimes several bottles.

  “You deserve a glass of champagne,” says a friendly fellow passenger. As one of the tall slim models examines the champagne bottle’s label (probably to check how many calories it contains), I wonder if I do deserve any champagne. After all I have managed to overcome “an ordeal” that the man talking to me has just paid over £100 to experience and for which he has driven from Leicester.

  Still, phobias are odd things. I’ve certainly learnt that. And maybe if I have now proven I can overcome my biggest fear, then my other anxieties will become less pungent too. Especially now I’ve proved that I am the boss of my brain, and I’ve made a balloon flight in spite of his best efforts to stop me participating. My counselling has helped me engage with the world, yet the knowledge - trusting myself to rational scientific enlightenment - has been the welcome sunlight of a new dawn enabling me to see the route to mental improvement. Just learning about the psychology of anxieties and phobias has helped reduce their potency. I cannot stress how helpful this was as part of the process - and, albeit foolish on my part, I did not expect this to happen.

  Before I had cramped my life into the small spaces left where anxiety had not yet infiltrated, like a hoarder forced to live in one small room by the overwhelming clutter of negativity. Now I know that I have overcome my biggest phobia by taking this flight - and guess what? It was OK.

  I have ascended above the clouds and yet can now see everything much more clearly. My vision has improved. Sometimes you have to rise above things to see them in perspective, to enable them to make sense. Right, I deserve a pastry. I’m off to the High Street. Anyone recommend a good café in Oxford’s High Street?

  1 SEPTEMBER 1815: NEWCASTLE

  At the age of 62, if James Sadler’s bones were not indestructible, then his courage certainly was.

  Refusing to be put off by his lifelong catalogue of accumulated crashes, frights and bumpy landings, S
adler senior staged a flight on Tyneside in a titan monster of a balloon described on posters advertising the event as “75 feet in diameter, capable of lifting 72 people”. Quite how the last statistic had been worked out remained vague.

  The monster globe was certainly impressive. Oddly, it had been commissioned by the King of France two years beforehand. Louis XVIII had placed an order with Sadler to manufacture a huge ornate balloon for his coronation event, though the balloon never reached France. Instead Sadler removed the French symbols and repackaged it as a patriotic British balloon adorned with the Prince of Wales’ feathers.

  Sadler didn’t stop there, pimping up his balloon cart to the edge of excess by adding more stars, gold embroidery, oak wreathes, gold and purple tassels and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Oh, and a few more stars. He then added two carved eagles onto the front and back of the oval-shaped wooden cart. This somewhat meretricious creation, along with the balloon silk, was put on display to the public in the Turk’s Head pub in Bigg Market, Newcastle - for the admission charge of one shilling.

  A popular Geordie dialect song, Bob Crank’s Account of the Ascent of Mr. Sadler’s Balloon, celebrated Sadler’s ascent in the north-east. The press described the Newcastle excursion as his 47th flight. Was there still time for his increasingly brittle bones to accomplish fifty flights?

  7 NOVEMBER 1815: EDINBURGH

  That rarest of flights in the aeronautical careers of the Sadlers - i.e. one which passed without any life-threatening disasters or even mild perils - occurred when Windham staged a voyage in serenely windless conditions for once, in Norwich on 29 June 1815.

  Normal service was resumed in a few months later. Scheduled to make an ascent in the Scottish capital in November, Windham launched his balloon in extremely strong winds. Perhaps because this was insufficiently dangerous, he also conspired to accidentally leave behind his charts and navigational instruments. This prompted an unusual outbreak of common sense from one of the ballooning pioneers, and Sadler used the valve almost immediately to release gas from the globe. After travelling only three miles to the Portobello coastal resort, he landed after spending a mere eight minutes airborne.

  2 SEPTEMBER 1816: CORK

  James Sadler - most definitely father not son - was still flying aged 63, albeit briefly. Launching in what was described as the very first flight in Cork at 4.40pm one September afternoon in 1816, Sadler senior had safely returned to terra firma by 5.12pm. It is possible that this was his last flight, though that is merely assumption. Stating categorically that this was his 50th flight is where assumption meets speculation, however, as, inconveniently, we do not know where James Sadler took his 50th flight. But a letter in the possession of one the biggest celebrities of the era later confirms that Sadler did reach his half century - as we shall see later.

  What we do know is that the Sadlers were about to accomplish an historical aeronautical first in Ireland next summer.

  22 JULY 1817: DUBLIN TO HOLYHEAD: RACE TO CROSS THE IRISH SEA

  The London Chronicle had signed off its report on the Burlington House ascents by prognosticating: “Windham is James Sadler’s youngest son and seems to be the most undoubted heir to his father’s talents and we may look upon him who has commenced aerial philosophy so early for future experiments which may elicit utility as well as wonder.” Almost exactly three years later, Windham lived up to that prophecy when he succeeded in accomplishing a balloon first that had eluded all previous aeronauts including his father.

  James Sadler had agreed to loan his balloon to a Mr. Livingstone who, accompanied by the real box office star of proceedings Miss Thompson, took off from Dublin on 20 July 1817. The Literary Gazette confirmed that the pair had a safe landing: “After a short excursion they regained solid earth without accident.”

  This may have provided some income for the Sadlers, as Miss Thompson’s latest short fight was the support act to the main event two days later, where Windham Sadler intended his next flight to be both solo and record breaking.

  Windham succeeded where Sadler senior had so spectacularly failed five years earlier, and claimed the trophy of being the first person ever to fly across the Irish Sea.

  Electing to take the route travelling east - favoured by all previous flyers because of the prevailing wind direction - he commenced his assault on the record by taking off from Portobello Barracks “assisted by his venerable father James Sadler with the balloon’s inflation”. Using a lightweight wicker basket coated with a leather sheet, Windham had a strategy. He aimed to keep the balloon as low as he could, and chart a straight line trajectory on a south-westerly breeze. Although perhaps fortunate to find such an obliging current, he locked his balloon onto the discovered course. His plan undoubtedly worked, enabling him to clear the Irish coast an hour after take-off when he soared above the Charles II-built Baily Lighthouse at Howth Head.

  Maintaining his low trajectory, he calculated his height by regularly dropping eggs into the water. Noting at one stage during the flight that an egg took 29 seconds to produce a splash in the sea, he was able to calculate his altitude. With the Welsh coast now coming into view, the breeze stayed favourable and swept him over Holyhead. Unlike his father a few years earlier, Windham decided to vent the balloon rapidly and land at Anglesey, instead of remaining airborne in an attempt to reach the English mainland.

  Upon landing he claimed the record, and noted in his journal with an entitled boast: “The first aeronaut to cross the Irish Channel.” It had taken him exactly five hours, almost to the minute. He then returned to Dublin, this time by boat, to attend a celebratory dinner the next day alongside the other guest of honour at the function: his balloon envelope.

  30 MAY 1818: SON JAMES DIES

  Such good luck for the Sadler’s was definitely not hereditary. James Sadler’s wife Mary had died in 1791.

  Further tragedy occurred, with the Lancashire Gazette of 30 May 1818 reporting the sudden death of James Sadler junior: “Captain James Sadler, who was killed in one of the last actions of the East Indies, was the son of the celebrated aeronaut of that same name.”

  30 JULY 1822: OTHER DANGERS FOR BALLOON PIONEERS

  People point out balloons, a ritual unperformed for other transport modes. They reserve affection for balloons that other modes of transport rarely enjoy. People don’t point to aeroplanes (OK, apart from maybe in Norfolk) or motor cars (perhaps very rural Norfolk).

  Balloons even improve landscapes, with photographers happy to click the shapes and colours of balloons soaring across a backdrop of idyllic rural England. Balloons are the welcomed aristocracy of transport, undeniably posh and exclusive yet embraced by the populace. No one looks down on a balloon. Although other transport mechanism have become obsolete balloons survive into their fifth century in good health. People like balloons. That’s why they still feel compelled to point them out.

  But being a pioneering balloonist is dangerous. Sadler had proven this as categorically as anyone could by 1784. And yet it was a lesson that remained stubbornly unlearnt by his aeronautical successors.

  In 1897 a proud Swede S.A. Andree ascended in a hydrogen balloon from Dane’s Island located approximately 600 miles south of the North Pole. It was his stated intention to reach the North Pole by air. Whereas the pole had claimed hundreds of lives - some estimates calculate that by the end of the nineteenth century nearly one thousand individuals had perished in attempts to reach the artificial construct that represents the point of the North Pole - Andree’s was the very first attempt to reach it in a balloon.

  He was so sure of his mission ending in success that he intended to continue flying his hydrogen balloon for another several thousand miles afterwards until he reached San Francisco for a pre-planned landing in the sunny Californian city. Additional hubris was added by the detail that he even reportedly packed a tuxedo in the balloon basket in order to attend the formal dinner thrown in his honour at San Fra
ncisco Town Hall. Needless to say, the caterers only got their deposit for the function.

  After taking off he and his two companions literally disappeared into increasingly thin air as they drifted away on a strong northwards breeze. They were not seen again until over thirty years later when a Norwegian boat discovered their bodies - and some photographs - in a remote Arctic region. It was a reminder, a hundred years after Sadler’s pioneer flights, how dangerous the occupation continued to be.

  The man who packed a tuxedo: S.A. Andree (Nils Strindberg/Wikimedia Commons)

  Even during Sadler’s lifetime, there were other inherent perils. In Cheltenham, Gloucestershire - the Georgian spa town which had earlier suffered a lengthy bout of balloonomania when Sadler ascended there - witnessed a malicious problem on 6 August 1822. The Strabane Morning Post continues the story:

  It is said that Mr. Green, the aeronaut, before he ascended with his balloon from Cheltenham, expressed his opinion to his companion that the cord had been cut by ‘black legs’ from London, as not less than £20,000 was betted on the event at Cheltenham, besides great sums in London. The severed cord appeared to be cut by some instrument as sharp as a razor, and the operation must have been effected with great dexterity, to avoid notice in the presence of such numbers.

  This is an early reference to celebrated balloonist Charles Green who nearly perished in a sabotaged flight. Significant sums had been wagered on the balloon not flying further than Cheltenham, an outcome that “blacklegs” were determined to provide, even if that included nobbling the aeronaut with his balloon. Green and his passenger suffered severe injuries, and were close to being killed. The Cheltenham Chronicle was at the scene, and in the balloon basket itself, as it was the newspaper’s owner who accompanied Green as his co-pilot on the flight. He filed this report in his own newspaper in a piece headlined “The Descent of Mr. Green’s Balloon at Ecton”: