Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

467 Pages·2013·12.45 MB·English

by  Richard Holmes

RICHARD HOLMES
Falling Upwards
How We Took to the Air
To Eleanor Tremain and John Lightbody
with love and balloons
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Voices Overhead
1. The Falling Dream
2. Fiery Prospects
3. Airy Kingdoms
4. Angel’s Eye
5. Wild West Wind
6. Spies in the Sky
7. Gigantic Voyages
8. Vertical Explorations
9. Mariners of the Upper Atmosphere
10. Paris Airborne
11. Extreme Balloons
Epilogue
Classic Balloon Accounts
Illustrations
Picture Section
Footnotes
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Voices Overhead
‘A Cloud in a paper bag’
JOSEPH MONTGOLFIER, 1782
‘Someone asked me – what’s the use of a balloon?
I replied – what’s the use of a new-born baby’
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1783
‘Practical flying we may leave to our rivals the French.
Theoretical flying we may claim for ourselves’
SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1784
‘I would make it death for a man to be convicted of flying, the moment he could
be caught’
WILLIAM COWPER, 1794
‘O Thou who plumed with strong desire
Would float above the Earth – beware!
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire –
Night is coming!’
P.B. SHELLEY, 1818
‘There’s something in a flying horse,
There’s something in a huge balloon’
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1819
‘No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species, unless he
has been up in an air-balloon’
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON, 1825
‘Your balloon voyage so occupied my mind that I dreamt of it!’
J.M.W. TURNER, 1836
‘Beautiful invention, mounting heavenward – so beautifully, so unguidably!
Emblem of our Age, of Hope itself’
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1837
‘How should I manage all my business if I were obliged to marry – I never
should know French, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon’
CHARLES DARWIN, 1838
‘To look down upon the whole of London as the birds of the air look down upon
it, and see it dwindled into a mere rubbish heap’
HENRY MAYHEW, 1852
‘Chance people on the bridges peering over the parapets, into a nether sky of
fog, with fog all round them as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in misty
clouds’
CHARLES DICKENS, 1852
‘The basket was about two feet high, four feet long … to me it seemed fragile
indeed … the gaps in the wicker work in the sides and the bottom seemed
immense and the further we receded from the earth, the larger they seemed to
become’
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER, 1862
‘Poetry has described some famous descents into the subterranean world … But
we have just had an ascent such as the world has never heard of or dreamed of’
THE TIMES, 1863
‘Next to the climbers of the Alpine Club, in order of utter uselessness are the
people who go up in balloons, and who come down to tell us of the temperature,
the air-currents, the shape of the clouds, and amount of atmospheric pressure in a
region where nobody wants to go, nor has the slightest interest to hear about’
BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE, October 1864
‘Dear Nadar, I must beg you to renounce these terrible balloon-antics!’
GEORGE SAND, 1865
‘I am an Ancient Mariner of the Upper Atmosphere’
CHARLES GREEN, 1868
‘Paris is surrounded, blockaded, blotted out from the rest of the world! – and yet
by means of a simple balloon, a mere bubble of air, Paris is back in
communication with the rest of the world!’
VICTOR HUGO, 1870
‘It has already done for us that which no other power ever accomplished: it has
gratified the desire natural to us all to view the earth in a new aspect’
JAMES GLAISHER, 1872
‘The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All the gold
had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared’
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1878
‘Is it not a little strange to be floating here above the Polar Sea?
To be the first that have floated here in a balloon! How soon, I wonder, shall we
have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed?’
SALOMON ANDRÉE, 1897
‘Between my boots and the now distant earth there was nothing.
I wriggled my feet and laughed. I was walking on air …
I really was walking on air!’
DOLLY SHEPHERD, 1904
‘To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet is like
nothing else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to
man. No flying machine can ever better it.
It is to pass extraordinarily out of human things’
H.G. WELLS, 1908
‘The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the
earth’
CHINESE PROVERB
1
The Falling Dream
1
My own flying dream began at a village fête in Norfolk. I was four years old.
My uncle, a tall and usually silent RAF pilot, had bought a red party balloon
from a charity stall, and tied it to the top button of my aertex shirt. This was my
first balloon, and it seemed to have a mind of its own. It was inflated with
helium, which is a gas four times lighter than air, though I did not understand
this at the time. It pulled mysteriously and insistently at my button. ‘Maybe you
will fly,’ my uncle remarked. He led me up a grassy bank so we could look over
the whole fête. Below me stretched the little tents, the stalls, the show ring with
its bales of straw and small dancing horses. Above me bobbed the big red
balloon, gleaming and beautiful, blotting out the sun. It bounced off the top of
my head, making a strange springy sound, full of distance. It tugged me
impatiently towards the sky, and I began to feel unsteady on my feet. I felt that I
was falling – upwards. Then my uncle let go of my hand, and my dream began.
2
Throughout history, dreamlike stories and romantic adventures have always
attached themselves to balloons. Some are factual, some are pure fantasy, many
(the most interesting) are a provoking mixture of the two. But some kind of
narrative basket always seems to come tantalisingly suspended beneath them.
Show me a balloon and I’ll show you a story; quite often a tall one. And very
frequently it is a story of courage in the face of imminent catastrophe.
What’s more, all balloon flights are naturally three-act dramas. The First Act
is the launch: the human drama of plans, hopes, expectations. The Second Act is
the flight itself: the realities, the visions, the possible discoveries. The Final Act
is the landing, the least predictable, most perilous part of any ascent, which may
bring triumph or disaster or (quite often) farce. The ultimate nature of any
particular balloon ascent – a pastoral, a tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama, even a
sitcom – is never clear until the balloon is safely back on earth. Sometimes it is
not clear even then.
Even the well-known fable of the Cretan engineer Daedalus and his young son
Icarus, so often retold as the Genesis myth of flying, is curiously ambiguous in
its outcome. It appears originally in Book VIII of Ovid’s long poem
Metamorphoses, ‘The Transformations’, completed two thousand years ago,
around 8 AD. Having constructed wings for both of them, Daedalus and son
launch into the empyrean together, but famously the impetuous Icarus flies too
high; the wax joints of his feathered wings melt ‘in the scorching heat of the
sun’, and he tumbles down into the sea. Yet this primal legend of flight is more
complex than it might appear.
It is often forgotten that in the same Book VIII of Ovid’s poem, Daedalus also
has a twelve-year-old nephew (the son of his sister) called Perdix. Perdix is a
brilliant and precocious child inventor, loved by all in Crete. But Daedalus, in a
crazed fit of grief and jealousy after the death of Icarus, hurls Perdix ‘headlong
down from the sacred hill of Minerva’. Yet unlike Icarus, Perdix does not crash
to earth and die. Instead, he takes to the air and flies with divine aid: ‘Pallas
Athene, the goddess who fosters all talent in art and craft, caught him and turned
him, still in mid-air, to a fluttering bird and covered his body with feathers, so
the strength of his quick intelligence sprang into his wings and feet.’ He becomes
Perdix, the partridge (perdrix in French), a child who has indeed learned to fly
successfully – although unlike Icarus he always remains close to the ground,
‘and does not build his nest in mountain crags’.1