The Age of Wonder (29 page)

In theory this dual design combined the best lifting characteristics of hydrogen and hot air. Pilâtre also believed that by allowing him to climb or descend rapidly and at will, it would enable him quickly to find different air currents at different elevations. So he would finally be able to solve the problem of navigation, not by artificial wings or oars, but by naturally harnessing the winds and staying in air currents blowing in the required direction. In this way he would navigate steadily northwards, and easily conquer the Channel and knit together
La Manche
(’the sleeve’).

In practice, of course, he had designed a lethal combination of highly inflammable gas and naked flame. He may have had his own misgivings. There was considerable evidence that, being deeply in debt to his sponsors, and forced to carry ‘the honour of France’, he launched against his better scientific judgement. Certainly he set out in bad meteorological conditions, and with damaged balloon fabric, and persuaded a third passenger to get out of the basket at the last minute. Pilâtre’s English fiancée, Miss Susan Dyer, pleaded desperately with him to postpone the attempt.
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But Pilâtre responded with a dramatic and highly emotional letter. ‘For God’s sake don’t mention such a thing! It is now too late. Give me encouragement. I would rather pierce my heart with a knife than give up this attempt. Even if I were certain of meeting death.’
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At 7 a.m. Miss Dyer watched as the cannons fired, and Pilâtre’s double balloon rose splendidly in the dawn light to 5,000 feet. It floated out to sea, then seemed to hesitate, and began to drift back over the French coast. It was losing height, and clearly something was wrong. Accounts differ as to what happened next. Using telescopes, witnesses saw Pilâtre-still apparently calm-repeatedly pulling the rope that operated the hydrogen gas-valve at the top of the balloon. It appeared to have jammed in the open position. At the same time his companion Romain was seen frantically lowering the brazier as far below the gallery as possible. The air around the balloon was full of twinkling sparks.

A small, bright crown of yellow flame now began to appear at the top of the balloon, where the hydrogen gas was venting. For a moment the balloon looked to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, suspended triumphantly above the French cliffs. Then it folded up upon itself, and began to drop to earth, slowly at first, like a long, smoking shroud. According to some farm workers, Pilâtre shouted a warning to them through his speaking-trumpet to keep back. Then he attempted to leap clear at the last moment, possibly to slow the descent of his companion. Both aeronauts were killed, their bodies so horribly broken and ruptured that they were buried the same evening in the little local church at Wimereux.

These were the first recorded deaths of balloonists, and the event shook the scientific community across Europe, and changed the public perception of manmade flight. It seemed all the more shocking because the ascent was a semi-official one, and Pilâtre was a young and glamorous national hero, his name known throughout the Continent.
^♣

His fiancée Susan Dyer collapsed, and was taken back to her convent. Records show that she died soon afterwards. It is possible that she was pregnant with Pilâtre’s child, and committed suicide. Pilâtre de Rozier’s fate was even mourned by the English poet Erasmus Darwin:

Where were ye, Sylphs! When on the ethereal main
Young Rozier launch’d, and called your aid in vain?…
Higher and yet higher his expanding Bubble flies,
Lights with quick flash, and bursts amidst the skies.
Headlong he rushes through the affrighted air
With limbs distorted, and dishevelled hair,
Whirls round and round, the flying crowd alarms,
And Death receives him in his sable arms!…
So erst with melting wax and loosen’d strings
Sunk hapless Icarus on unfaithful wings!
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11

Hitherto, ballooning in England had been largely dominated by foreigners, French and Italians. This was partly due to the lack of encouragement from the Royal Society, despite the best efforts of Dr Sheldon and Dr Jeffries. But it was also due to the general feeling that ballooning was not a serious scientific pursuit, and was best left to commercial showmen or wealthy private eccentrics. The death of Pilâtre de Rozier in 1785, and Lunardi’s accident at Newcastle in August 1786, which resulted in the death of young Ralph Heron, also discredited ballooning with the British public for a generation. From 1790 virtually any balloon sighted in English skies would be assumed to be French and hostile. The aeronaut would find the ground even more dangerous than the skies.

The much-feared aerial invasion by Napoleon’s army never materialised. Nonetheless, the French Revolutionary army experimented with a gas observation balloon at the battle of Fleurus against Austria in 1794, and the first Corps d’Aerostation and balloon school was formed at Meudon. Lavoisier came up with a cheap method of producing hydrogen for the military, by passing water over red-hot iron, and two young scientists, Charles Coutelle and Nicolas Conte, were appointed to lead the balloon teams and the school. Gaston Tissandier, in his
Histoire des Ballons et Aeronauts Célèbres
(1890), recounts that the young military balloonists took local girls up with them for joyrides and thrilling aerial love-making over the side of the basket, so the first Mile High Club was also formed.

The Corps d’Aerostation eventually fielded four balloons, complete with special hangar tents, winches, gas-generating vessels and observation equipment. Napoleon took the Corps with him to Egypt in 1798, but their equipment was destroyed by Nelson at the battle of Aboukir Bay in July of the following year. Napoleon disbanded the Corps and school at Meudon in 1799, and the rumours of a French airborne army invading Britain remained confined to the realms of fantasy and propaganda. Military balloons were not used again in any conflict until the American Civil War.

In 1810 James Sadler (as inexplicable as ever to his wife) returned to more carefully planned and extended balloon flights, in a series of ascents from Oxford and Bristol. He planned to use his theory of ‘oceanic air currents’ to navigate across the Irish Sea, a much longer and greater challenge than the English Channel crossing.
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He believed that these fixed currents existed at various altitudes, flowing steadily in different directions, and could be mapped and used for navigated flight by altering the height of the balloon and so changing direction. On 24 September Sadler made a preliminary ascent over the Bristol Channel, but was baffled by rising and contrary winds, and forced to ditch in a rough sea just off Combe Martin cliffs, when blown perilously towards them without sufficient height to clear them.
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He said that the worst thing about the entire flight was that he threw overboard Dr Johnson’s barometer, in a last futile attempt to lighten the balloon and clear the cliffs. However, the experience he gained of ditching in the sea may subsequently have saved his life.

In July 1811 Sadler continued his experiments by making an ascent from Trinity College Great Court, Cambridge, and landed in a gale near the little village of Stansted. Another, calmer, ascent, from Hackney on 12 August, was made with a scientific observer on board, Henry Beaufoy. Beaufoy kept a minute-by-minute log of the flight, using an array of instruments and carefully noting his physical sensations and impressions. This ascent was also recorded in a beautiful engraving.
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Sadler attempted a crossing from Dublin to Liverpool on 1 October 1812, a distance of over a hundred miles, by far the longest balloon flight yet attempted in the British Isles. After a 200-mile dogleg which took him off course north-easterly almost to the Isle of Man, he was swept back safely southwards over Anglesey, where he could have landed. However, he determined to find the direct easterly current to carry him all the way to Liverpool, threw out ballast and climbed again.

Sadler was now steadily swept back out to sea on a northerly airstream, which would eventually have taken him to the Scottish coast or the Isle of Skye-or even to the North Pole. As dusk was coming on, he decided to ‘valve’ and ditch in the sea, so he could be picked up by a passing boat. But once he was down in the water, the boat refused to approach him. ‘I observed that the sailors seemed fearful of coming too near, lest the Balloon should get entangled in their rigging.’
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Undismayed, Sadler performed the extraordinary feat of relaunching from the sea by dropping emergency ballast. He flew on northwards till he found a second boat, and ditched for a second time, now almost in the dark. The ship’s captain saved him by cleverly running his bowsprit through the balloon’s rigging before it sank. Sadler’s extraordinary skill and
sangfroid
in ditching and relaunching from the sea, and then ditching a second time virtually in the dark, demonstrated his exceptional gifts as a natural aeronaut. But he had not achieved the historic Irish crossing, and the challenge was eventually to be passed to his son Windham. James Sadler published a vivid account of his attempt, ending with an appeal for greater public support of scientific ballooning: ‘Aerostation is too intimately connected with the entire range of Science, its exhibitions are too brilliant and interesting, not to deserve the patronage which a liberal public always confers on desert…It is so well calculated to throw light on the obscure science of
Meteorology,
to develop many interesting facts in
Magnetism,
and to assist the progress of
Chemistry and Electricity,
that its success must be regarded as interesting to Philosophy [science] in general.’
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One Oxford student who responded was Percy Shelley, now aged twenty, who continued to follow Sadler’s career and to pursue his fascination with balloons as symbols of liberty. In the winter of 1812 he sent up a series of silk-covered fire balloons, sewn by his teenage wife Harriet, from the beach at Lynmouth, Devon. Each carried copies of his revolutionary pamphlet ‘A Declaration of Rights’. He also composed a rather good sonnet on the subject:

Bright ball of flame that thro the gloom of even
Silently takes thine ethereal way
And with surpassing glory dimmst each ray
Twinkling amid the dark blue depth of Heaven;
Unlike the Fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou
Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,
Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow
A watch-light by the patriot’s lonely tomb,
A ray of courage to the opprest and poor…
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James Sadler’s son Windham made his first solo flight from Cheltenham in 1813, aged only seventeen. He too revealed himself as a natural aeronaut, and four years later, in 1817, he attempted the first Irish crossing that had eluded his father. The flight was again made from Dublin, but this time was better prepared, with careful meteorological planning and the launching of small pathfinder balloons. Windham made the sixty-mile crossing to Wales on a direct easterly course, a journey of five hours. Having learned from his father’s experience, the moment he reached land Windham valved the balloon and came down just south of Holyhead.
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Like his father, Windham Sadler championed the scientific value of ballooning, and decried its shameful neglect by English backers in the years that followed: ‘Strange as it may appear, England, the seat of Science and Literature, has remained satisfied with gazing on the casual experiments of Foreign Aeronauts…although Cavendish first discovered and Priestley first suggested the application of that powerful agent, Hydrogen Gas, to the purposes of Aerostation!’
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But in 1824, at the age of twenty-seven, Windham had a terrible accident when his balloon grapple-line tangled in a chimney during a high-wind landing in the Pennines. He was thrown out of the basket, and hung suspended upside-down by his legs for several minutes, until he finally fell to his death. Devastated, his father James never set foot in a balloon basket again.

12

The early heroic period of ballooning, between 1783 and 1800, appeared to come to a dead end. Individual balloonists went on flying, but not for long. Dr Jeffries returned to Boston in 1789. Lunardi died poverty-stricken in Lisbon in July 1806. Blanchard collapsed with a heart attack after a forced landing in Holland in 1809, and died a few weeks later while apparently attempting to parachute from his new balloon. A few celebratory ascents continued in Paris, notably by the showman Jacques Garnerin and by Blanchard’s eccentric young wife Sophia, who specialised in aerial firework displays. But she too was killed in 1819, when her balloon was ignited by fireworks. It must have looked as if ballooning was, scientifically speaking, a
cul de sac.

Though the hydrogen balloon or Charlier triumphed (temporarily) over the hot-air balloon or Montgolfier, the inability to navigate either form of aerostat appeared to destroy all hopes of finding any immediate technological applications. Balloons simply remained beautiful, expensive and dangerous toys, although the high ascents achieved by the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac and others did promise hoped-for advances in meteorology. Gay-Lussac ascended to 23,000 feet above Paris in 1804, establishing the limit at which human beings can breathe. The mysteries of barometric pressure, the function of clouds, the generation of winds and weather systems, were increasingly fascinating.

Interest in meteorology, a nascent science, grew and produced the beautiful cloud classifications of Luke Howard and the valuable wind-scale system of Francis Beaufort. Howard (1772-1864), a Quaker and the first professional meteorologist, published his great study and classification of atmospheric phenomena,
On the Modification of Clouds,
in 1804. He first proposed the four basic cloud-types, using Latin terms in imitation of Linnaean cataloguing. These were
cumulus
(heaped cloud),
stratus
(layer cloud),
cirrus
(long-hair or high mare’s-tail cloud) and
nimbus
(raincloud), with various combinations such as
cumulo-nimbus
(the classic heaped-up rain-carrying clouds of an English summer). All are still in use, with additional combinations such as
cirro-stratus
(high, thin, fine-weather clouds). Howard was elected to the Royal Society in 1821, but did not achieve a consistent theory of atmospheric pressures and gradients (high-and low-pressure systems), upon which all weather forecasting would ultimately be based, although he outlined this in his last work,
Barometrographia
(1847). But he called new attention to the formation and transformation of clouds, their seasonal varieties and characteristics, and above all perhaps to their astonishing beauty.
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