The Age of Wonder (25 page)

Nonetheless, it was d’Arlandes who had the courage and honesty to record all these exchanges, and to describe his companion, in a phrase that became celebrated, as ‘
l’intrépide Pilâtre, qui ne perd point la tête
’-the intrepid Pilâtre, who never loses his head. When they landed, d’Arlandes vaulted out of the circular gallery, expecting the huge collapsing canopy to burst into flames at any moment. As he ran anxiously round the outside of the balloon, he found Pilâtre standing quietly contemplating the great gold and blue dome as it finally settled back to earth. ‘We had enough fuel to fly for an hour,’ was all he said. Pilâtre was holding their basket of provisions, with his green topcoat neatly folded and placed on top. A few moments later a wild, cheering crowd of
le petit peuple de Paris
(not yet
citoyens
) gathered round them. Pilâtre handed them the basket of provisions to celebrate, but they also seized the green topcoat, and tore it into little pieces as souvenirs.
¹¹

3

This was all very picturesque, and is the ‘first flight’ that has gone down in the history books. But in fact the Montgolfier was a crude and virtually uncontrollable monster. A far more significant ascent followed just ten days later, when Dr Alexandre Charles made the first ascent in a true hydrogen balloon.

Charles pioneered a number of technical breakthroughs. They included an elongated wickerwork basket safely suspended on ropes beneath the canopy; an impermeable balloon skin made of silk coated in rubber and enclosed in netting; a controllable gas-valve at the top of the balloon for venting; and, most important of all, a finely tuned system of ballast bags filled with sand which could be jettisoned by the kilo or by the gram, precisely as required by the aeronaut. Dr Charles had in effect invented nearly all the features of the modern gas balloon in a single brilliant design.

He launched from the Tuileries Gardens in Paris on 1 December 1783, with a scientific assistant, M. Robert. They attracted what has been estimated as the biggest crowd in pre-Revolutionary Paris, upwards of 400,000 people, about half the total population of the city.
¹²
It was a glorious pink-and-yellow, candy-coloured balloon, thirty feet tall, and the crowd loved it. The wickerwork basket, a sort of
chaise longue
for two, was completely festooned with flags and bunting. Dr Charles had a full payload of scientific equipment aboard-mercury barometer (which was used as an early form of altimeter), thermometer, telescope, sandbags and several bottles of champagne. In a nice gesture, he handed the release cord to Joseph Montgolfier: ‘Monsieur Montgolfier, it is for you to show us the way to the skies!’

Dr Charles later recalled his feelings as the balloon lifted above the trees of the Tuileries and across the Seine. ‘Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total
hilarity
that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off. I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles for ever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical ecstasy. My companion Monsieur Robert murmured to me-I’m finished with the Earth. From now on it’s the sky for me! Such utter calm. Such immensity!’
¹³
Benjamin Franklin, American Ambassador in Paris, watched the launch through a telescope from the window of his carriage. Afterwards he remarked: ‘Someone asked me-what’s the use of a balloon? I replied-
what’s the use of a newborn baby?
’

Two hours later they landed twenty-seven miles away at Nesle, skimming across a field and chased by a group of farm workers, ‘like children chasing a butterfly’. Once the balloon was secured, in a moment of euphoria Dr Charles asked M. Robert to step out of the basket. Released of his weight, and with Charles alone aboard, the balloon rapidly relaunched and climbed into the sunset, reaching the astonishing height of 10,000 feet in a mere ten minutes. One thousand feet per minute: a truly formidable and terrifying ascent. Dr Charles kept calmly observing his instruments, and making notes until his hand was too cold to grasp the pen. ‘I was the first man ever to see the sun set twice in the same day. The cold was intense and dry, but supportable. I had acute pain in my right ear and jaw. But I examined all my sensations calmly. I could
hear myself living,
so to speak.’

He began gently to release the hydrogen gas-valve. Within thirty-five minutes he was safely back on
terra firma
-a term that took on new meaning-alighting a mere three miles from his first landing point. His ascent had been almost vertical. It was the first solo flight in history. ‘Never has a man felt so solitary, so sublime,-and so utterly terrified.’ Dr Charles never flew again.
¹⁴

Public excitement was huge in France that winter. The Musée de l’Air now at Le Bourget has many display cabinets of balloon memorabilia: plates, cups, clocks, ivory draughts pieces, snuffboxes, bracelets, tobacco pipes, hairclips, tiepins, even a porcelain bidet with a balloon design painted on the interior carrying a flag marked ‘adieu’. Many sexually suggestive cartoons soon appeared: the inevitable balloon-breasted girls lifted off their feet, monstrous aeronauts inflated by gas enemas, or ‘inflammable’women carrying men off into the clouds.
¹⁵

The science writers Faujas de Saint-Fond and David Bourgeois both published handbooks to the science of flight in 1784. Bourgeois opened ecstatically: ‘The idea of taking to the air, of flying through sky, and navigating through the ether, has always appealed so strongly to mankind, that it has appeared in numerous classical legends and folktales from the remotest antiquity. The wings of Saturn, the eagle of Jupiter, the peacocks of Juno, the doves of Venus, the winged horses of the Sun all bear witness…’ He did not mention Icarus.
¹⁶
His list of the innumerable benefits of ballooning included weather prediction, telescope observation of the stars, geographical exploration (’he will cross burning deserts, inaccessible mountains, impenetrable forests, and raging torrents’), military reconnaissance and heavy cargo carrying.
¹⁷

All sorts of ingenious theories about how a balloon might be steered were also proposed: by enormous oars, by wings, by hand-cranked propellers, spinning ‘
moulinets
’, silk-covered paddles, and even giant bellows.

4

In England, George III formally wrote to the Royal Society asking if research into ‘air-globes’ should be sponsored by the British Crown, or left to private individuals. An enterprising Swiss chemist, Aimé Argand, had released an eighteen-inch hydrogen balloon from the terrace at Windsor Castle on 26 November 1783, first getting the King himself to hold the string and feel the tug. Intrigued, George offered to put up money from his own funds to finance some early experiments.
¹⁸
He received a cautious reply from Sir Joseph Banks, who still felt that there was inadequate experimental evidence for balloons’ utility. The French, he seemed to imply, were always inclined to mistake novelty for real science.
¹⁹
This reaction was very unlike that of the French Académie des Sciences, who were determined to sponsor Pilâtre de Rozier in further ascents and larger balloons, seeing all sorts of possibilities, both commercial and military.

In fact Banks could see the revolutionary nature of the science, but still doubted the technological application. A week after he had received reports of Dr Charles’s spectacular demonstration of the first hydrogen balloon, he wrote privately to Franklin in Paris. ‘Dr Charles’s experiment
seems
decisive…Practical Flying we must allow to our rivals. Theoretical Flying we claim ourselves…Mr Cavendish when he blew soap bubbles of his Inflammable air, evidently performed the [same] experiment which carried Dr Charles on [his] memorable flight.’ Banks thought that when the French-‘our Friends on your side of the water’-had ‘cooled a little’ in their naïve enthusiasm for ballooning, they would realise what advances the English were making in the penetration of the skies through another method-astronomy. Astronomy promised a far greater knowledge of ‘the repositories of stars and meteors’. Franklin-‘the old fox’-must have thought this an oddly evasive response; but then he did not know Herschel’s plans for the giant forty-foot telescope, whereas Banks did.
²⁰

Banks said the Royal Society would keep a watching brief, while remaining closely informed of developments in ‘the new Art of Flying’ by its corresponding Fellows such as Franklin and the English Ambassador to Paris, the Duke of Dorset.
²¹
Yet Banks himself, still the Romantic explorer, was secretly intrigued and excited. He alerted Henry Cavendish and commissioned his confidant and Secretary, Charles Blagden-a decided francophile-to keep a close eye on developments. Banks also noticed that his sister Sophia had begun to keep an album of balloon cuttings. It included an early street ballad, ‘The Ballooniad’, which eloquently complained: ‘Ye Men of Science! How ye stood aloof/Nor gave of all your Knowledge one kind proof.’
²²

English opinion was generally divided about ballomania. Samuel Johnson had written a ‘Dissertation on the Art of Flying’ in Chapter 6 of
Rasselas
in 1759. His approach was satirical-his Flying Artist flaps his wings and falls off a cliff into a lake-but he recognised the power of flight over the human imagination: ‘How easily shall we trace the Nile through all its passages; pass over to distant regions and examine the face of Nature, from one extremity of the Earth to the other.’
²³
Yet when Johnson was asked his opinion by a female correspondent, he at first described the balloon in as deflating a manner as he could muster.

Happy are you, Madam, that have ease and leisure to want intelligence of air balloons. Their existence is, I believe, indubitable, but I know not that they can possibly be of any use. The construction is this. The chemical philosophers have discovered a body (which I have forgotten, but will enquire) which dissolved by an acid emits a vapour lighter than the atmospherical air. This vapour is caught, among other means, by tying a bladder compressed upon the bottle in which the dissolution is performed; the vapour rising swells the bladder, and fills it. The bladder is then tied and removed, and another applied, till as much of this light air is collected, as is wanted. Then a large spherical case is made (and very large it must be) of the lightest matter that can be found, secured by some method like that of oiling silk against all passage of air. Into this are emptied all the bladders of light air, and if there be light air enough, it mounts into the clouds, upon the same principle as a bottle filled with water, will sink in water, but a bottle filled with aether would float. It rises till it comes to air of equal tenuity with its own, if wind or water does not spoil it on the way. Such, Madam, is an air balloon.
²⁴

William Herschel’s friend William Watson witnessed one of Pilâtre’s preparatory unmanned test flights at Versailles in October 1783. Even though the great wallowing Montgolfier canopy had got caught in some nearby trees, Watson was thrilled by the prospect of regular manned flight, and wrote enthusiastically to the earthbound astronomer, proposing a joint ascent as soon as possible. ‘Don’t you expect to fly soon? I expect to make many a pleasant flight to Datchet. I forgot to say the machine was 70 foot high and 46 wide.’ Herschel immediately thought of the possible use of balloons as observation platforms, carrying telescopes into the clear upper air. It was a development which would eventually lead to the launch of the great orbiting Hubble Telescope in 1997.
²⁵

Surprisingly, balloons did not appeal to the gothic novelist Horace Walpole, though perhaps at sixty-six he was a little old for such perilous novelties. He thought balloons might be sinister: ‘Well! I hope these new
mechanic meteors
will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race-as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.’ It was an ominous prophecy.
²⁶

Some considered that there might be an arms race in balloon technology. Franklin could see that balloons might easily be adapted for military purposes. Reconnaissance was the obvious one: ‘elevating an Engineer to take a view of an Enemy’s army, Works etc. or conveying Intelligence into, or out of, a besieged Town’. Much more menacing, however, especially for the British Isles, was the possibility that they could support an airborne invasion army from France. ‘Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each’, Franklin calculated, could carry a force of 10,000 troops rapidly into the field, crossing rivers, hills or even seas with speed and impunity. ‘They could not cost more than five Ships of the Line…Ten thousand Men descending from the Clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a [regular] Force could be brought together to repel them.’
²⁷

Nevertheless, neither Benjamin Franklin, nor Dr Johnson, nor Horace Walpole could prevent the balloon craze reaching England by summer 1784. Small unmanned gas balloons began to sprout everywhere in the summer sky. Herschel saw them over the Thames Valley, Parson Woodford saw them in Suffolk. Gilbert White wrote a beautiful description of seeing an early manned balloon drifting serenely over his beech wood one idyllic October evening at Selborne in Hampshire: ‘From the green bank at the S.W. end of my house saw a dark blue speck at a most prodigious height…In a few minutes it was over the maypole; and then over the fox on my great parlour chimney; and in ten minutes behind my great walnut tree. The machine looked mostly of a dark blue colour; but sometimes reflected the rays of the sun, and appeared a bright yellow. With a telescope I could discern the boat, and the ropes that supported it. To my eye this vast balloon appeared no bigger than a tea-urn.’