The Age of Wonder (30 page)

Ballooning added to this new awareness of the complexity and subtlety of clouds, a growing Romantic preoccupation which can be followed in the paintings of Turner and Constable, the notebooks of Coleridge and the poetry of Shelley. When Shelley refers to ‘the
locks
of the approaching storm’ in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819), he is using Howard’s definition
cirrus.
‘The Cloud’ (1820) demonstrates a remarkably accurate and scientific understanding of cloud formation and the convection cycle.
⁷⁶
Goethe wrote a number of essays on clouds, atmospheric pressures and weather, and translated passages of Howard, asking him to compose and send his Autobiography to Germany, and describing him as ‘the first to define conceptually the airy and ever-changing forms of clouds, thus delimiting and fixing what had always been ephemeral and intangible, by accurate observation and naming’.
^♣

Clouds became fascinating both as scientific phenomena-the generators of electricity, the mysterious indicators of winds and changing air pressure-and as aesthetic phenomena: the ‘moods’ of the sky reflecting those of the observer, alterations of light over landscape, symbols of change, destruction, regeneration. It could be argued that the Romantics actually invented the idea of ‘the weather’ itself, as it now preoccupies us; as well, of course, as ‘inner weather’.

The first mapping overview of the earth, with drawings made from the balloon basket, revealed the patterns of towns and countryside, the growth of roads, the meandering of rivers, in a new way. Although maps were also the result of trade, exploration, military campaigning and turn-pike-building, the creation of the British Ordnance Survey-the first state mapping programme in the world-was partly inspired by balloons.

Ballooning produced a new, and wholly unexpected, vision of the earth. It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above, but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature. For the first time the impact of man on nature was clearly revealed: the ever-expanding relationship of towns to countryside, roads to rivers, cultivated fields to forests, and the development of industry. It was comparable to the first views of the earth from space by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s, producing a new concept of a ‘single blue planet’ with its delicate membrane of atmosphere. The famous photograph ‘Earthrise’ was taken from lunar orbit in December 1968.

Ballooning proved to have extraordinary theatrical power to attract crowds, embody longing, and mix terror and the sublime with farce. It became showmanship, carnival, pure euphoria. A successful balloon launch, in the hands of one of the early masters like Pilâtre, Lunardi or Blanchard, became a communal expression of hope and wonder, of courage and comedy. The balloon crowd (especially in Paris) foreshadowed another kind of crowd-the revolutionary crowd. It contained elements of prophecy, both political and scientific. It was like a collective gasp of hope and longing.

Curiously, it was not the men of science, so much as the poets and writers, who continued to see ballooning as a symbol of hope and liberation. Erasmus Darwin celebrated the daring of the first balloonists, and the new vision of the world their intrepid flights opened up in the 1780s:

The calm Philosopher in ether sails,
Views broader stars and breathes in purer gales;
Sees like a map in many a waving line,
Round earth’s blue plains her lucid waters shine;
Sees at his feet the forky lightning glow
And hears innocuous thunder roar below.
⁷⁷

Coleridge wrote in his notebooks of the balloon as an image of powerful but mysterious flight. He compared the appearance of a balloon in the sky to that of a flock of starlings climbing and spinning upon itself. It was ultimately an image of human longing and inspiration, both uplifting and terrifying.
⁷⁸

Wordsworth began his poem
Peter Bell
(1798) with a playful image of flying in a sort of dirigible airship, or balloon boat.

There’s something in a flying Horse,
There’s something in a huge Balloon:
But through the Clouds I’ll never float
Until I have a little Boat
Shaped like the crescent-Moon…

Away we go!-and what care we
For treason, tumults, and for wars?
We are as calm in our Delight
As is the crescent-Moon so bright
Among the scattered Stars.
⁷⁹

Perhaps Shelley put it best, when he was a young undergraduate at Oxford in 1811, and had just witnessed another of Sadler’s balloon ascents one sparkling summer morning from Christchurch Meadows: ‘The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable; the art of navigating the air is in its first and most helpless infancy; the aerial mariner still swims on bladders, and has not yet mounted the rude raft…It would seem a mere toy, a feather, in comparison with the splendid anticipations of the philosophical chemist. Yet it ought not to be altogether condemned. It promises prodigious faculties for locomotion, and will allow us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we so ignorant of the interior of Africa?-Why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever.’
⁸⁰

^♣
Ian McEwan, in the famous opening scene from his 1997 novel
Enduring Love,
describes a similar horrific balloon death.

^♣
Jeffries subsequently claimed that in this manner they lightened the balloon by ‘no less than five or six pounds’. As a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter, he seems to imply that each of them voided well over two pints of urine, which is more than twice the normal male bladder content. Moreover, cold shrinks the male bladder, and Blanchard at least was a notably small and lightly-built man. The probable solution to the surprising amount of weight released is that they defecated as well. No doubt Jeffries felt that this last detail was too much even for scientific candour.

^♣
Recent studies by French aeronautical experts, based on the claim that only the top of the Charlier canopy was burnt in the immediate vicinity of the sprung venting valve, have suggested that Pilâtre’s basic double-balloon design was perfectly sound. Against all expectation, it appears that the hydrogen was not ignited by a spark from the Montgolfier brazier. The probable cause of the catastrophe was a spark caused by a build-up of static electricity, as Pilâtre pulled the valving line and it chafed against the balloon silk. Audoin Dollfus,
Pilâtre de Rozier
(1993, Chapter 7, ‘Les Causes du Drâme’). It would be interesting to know what Miss Susan Dyer might have thought of this ingenious explanation. Nevertheless, it is true that the first successful non-stop circumnavigation of the globe was performed by a combined helium and hot-air aerostat, with propane burners, the Breitling Orbiter 3, in March 1999.

^♣
In fact Lamarck had published a paper ‘On Cloud Forms’ in Paris in 1802, but his definitions were less authoritative than Howard’s, and he used French terms-such as
attroupés
for
cumulus
-which were less easily accepted internationally at this period. If Napoleon had won the European war, weather forecasting might be more Gallic today; as it is, modern French forecasters still give barometric pressures in ‘
hectopascals
’, and have difficulty distinguishing between drizzle, showers and rain. See Richard Hamblyn,
The Invention of Clouds
(2001).

4
Herschel Among the Stars

1

Sir Joseph Banks had predicted that British astronomy would go further than French ballooning. In the summer of 1785 William Herschel embarked on his revolutionary new project to observe and resolve the heavens with a telescope more powerful than ever previously attempted. His first move was to draft a preliminary technical specification for Banks to submit to the King. It was a monumental proposal.

What he intended to build was a telescope ‘of the Newtonian form, with an octagon tube 40 foot long and five feet in diameter; the specula [mirrors] of which it would be necessary to have at least two, or perhaps three, should be from 36 or 48 or 50 inches in diameter’.
¹
The telescope would have to be mounted in an enormous wooden gantry, capable of being turned safely on its axis by just two workmen, but also susceptible to the finest and most minute fingertip adjustments by the observing astronomer. The mirrors would weigh about half a ton each, and cost between £200 and £500. They would have to be cast in London and shipped by barge up the Thames for polishing.
²
Casting would be a major feat of technology, and twenty workmen would be required to effect a continuous process of polishing with newly designed machinery.

The forty-foot would be higher than a house, extremely susceptible to wind, and very exposed to adverse weather conditions, especially frost, condensation and air-temperature changes, which could ‘untune’ the mirrors like musical instruments. The astronomer (Herschel was now approaching fifty) would be required to climb a series of ladders to a special viewing platform perched at the mouth of the telescope, from which a fall would almost certainly prove fatal. The assistant (Caroline) would have to be shut in a special booth below to avoid light pollution, where she would have her desk and lamp, celestial clocks, observation journals and coffee flasks. But she would see virtually nothing of the stars themselves.

Astronomer and assistant would be invisible to each other for hours on end, shouting commands and replies, although eventually connected by a metal speaking-tube. It would be rather as if they were the tiny crew of some enormous ship, one up on the bridge, the other below in the chart room, intimately dependent on each other but physically isolated. Perhaps this was the premonition of a new kind of vessel: a spaceship flying through the starry night.
³

All this would require a new level of funding by the King. The estimate of expenses totalled £1,395, with an annual running cost of £150. This huge sum did not include Herschel’s annual salary of £200.
⁴
When he submitted this enormous research-grant application, Herschel austerely did not promise any immediate results-more planets, more comets, more sightings of extraterrestrial life forms. Instead he tried to reassure Banks in the most sober terms: ‘The sole end of the work would be to produce an Instrument that should answer the end of inspecting the Heavens, in order more fully to ascertain their
construction.
’
⁵

It was one of Sir Joseph Banks’s most dramatic diplomatic coups that he had convinced the King to announce a grant by September 1785. The sum was a generous one: the entire construction costs and four years’ running expenses-a total of £2,000. The one implied proviso was that Herschel needed to come up with results by the end of 1789. In November 1785 Banks was already sending tactful enquiries through William Watson: ‘Sir Joseph Banks is come to Town, & expressed a wish to know from you what preparations you have made relating to the great Telescope, & how far you have proceeded in the work itself. He said that he was very desirous of knowing, that he might be enabled to give the King a history of your proceedings.’
⁶

In fact there was no immediate progress that autumn. To Caroline’s dismay, Herschel had decided that his grand project required a new house with larger grounds for constructing and erecting the telescope, and more outbuildings for workshops. A first move from Datchet to Clay Hall, nearer to Windsor, had proved abortive when their new landlady objected to the cutting down of trees, and sought to raise the rent on the ingenious grounds that Herschel’s monster telescope, if it were ever built, would count as an ‘improvement’ to the house. Herschel wondered mildly if each new astronomical discovery would increase the valuation, and thereafter require a corresponding increase in the rent.

On 3 April 1786 they moved again (the Herschels’ third move in four years), to ‘The Grove’, a quite small and rather dilapidated country house on the edge of the tiny village of Slough, three miles north of Windsor. It was owned by a wealthy local family, the Baldwins, whose various relations also owned two local inns, the Dolphin and the Crown, and were extensive landowners in the district. The Crown was the main mail-coach halt on the London to Bath turnpike, now rerouted as the modern A4 through Slough. (The original sleepy road junction has become a pedestrianised section of the busy high street, though still known locally as ‘the Crown crossroads’.)

The youngest member of the family, Mary Baldwin, was a considerable heiress, and had married a retired London merchant, John Pitt, who was some twenty years older than herself. They decided to lead an easy-going country life, and had their own large, comfortable house less than a mile away from The Grove at the little village of Upton. They proved hospitable and friendly neighbours, and soon got to know the Herschels socially. John was in ‘a declining state of health’, so William would walk over at weekends, and sit talking to him in his well-appointed library. Caroline seems to have got on rather well with the Pitts’ son Paul, an only child who had just started at nearby Eton College.
⁷

The Grove stood in secluded grounds, 200 yards south of the Crown Inn, on the east side of the road to Windsor. Though it was surrounded by trees, the ground dropped away sharply to the south, offering a good observational platform. It was also ideal for rapid communications with London and Maskelyne’s observatory at Greenwich, as well as remaining close to the King’s residence. Indeed the turrets of Windsor Castle could be seen from the terraced walk on the south of the property, a constant reminder of the expectations of the royal patron.
⁸
The house itself was not large: four bedrooms and a servants’ attic. But it had extensive sheds and stables which were gradually converted into workshops and laboratories, and a wash house that became a forge. Above the stables were a series of haylofts which could be converted into a separate apartment. Caroline claimed these for her own. She had them roughly whitewashed, and put into use as a bedroom and a writing room, with a small outside staircase leading up to a flat roof from which she hoped to carry out her comet ‘sweeps’ in security and independently. This became her ‘cottage’ and occasional residence, a first step towards domestic independence at the age of thirty-six.

The Grove also had a large flat area of rough gardens in front of it, ideal for levelling and laying the extensive circular brick foundations of the wooden gantry for the forty-foot telescope. The brickwork was capped with Portland stone, though later this was cracked by frost and had to be sheathed in oak.
⁹
As work progressed, Herschel had all the surrounding trees cut down, including a magnificent row of ancient elms, ‘to the grief of everyone who knew that sweet spot’, as one neighbour observed. Characteristically, Herschel took no notice of their objections.
¹⁰
This scattered collection of buildings would later become known as ‘Observatory House’, and Herschel’s telescope would be marked on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map for Berkshire in 1830.
¹¹

The launch of the new project changed the quiet rhythm of the Herschels’ lives. The spring of 1786 was ‘a perfect Chaos of business’, as Caroline put it with a certain relish: ‘If it had not been sometimes for the intervention of a cloudy or a moonlight night [bad for stellar observation], I know not when my Brother (or I neither) should have got any sleep; for with the morning came also the workpeople of which there were no less than between 30 or 40 at work for upwards of 3 months together, some employed with felling and rooting out trees, some digging and preparing the ground for the Bricklayers who were laying the foundation for the telescope, and the carpenter in Slough with all his men.’
¹²

News of the proposed monster telescope brought a steady stream of visitors to Slough: men of science, academics from the universities, foreign tourists, and too many dignitaries from the Court. Caroline would grow increasingly impatient at their tendency to interrupt Herschel’s work. She developed her own laconic way of registering this impatience: ‘Professor Sniadecky often saw some objects through the 20 foot Telescope, among others the Georgian satellites. He had taken lodgings in Slough for the purpose of seeing and hearing my Brother whenever he could find him at leisure. Himself was a very silent man.’
¹³
She was always happy, however, to welcome old friends like William Watson and Nevil Maskelyne, and new supporters from the Royal Society like Charles Burney (who was also in favour of hot-air balloons). Americans were notably well-received.

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the moral implications of there being a ‘plurality of worlds’. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his brother Jacob, touching on the speculations of European authors like Fontenelle and Huygens, but which he tended to avoid with his English contemporaries. Neither Herschel nor Caroline recorded exactly what was said, but it is clear from his own diaries that Adams would have put lively and unorthodox views: ‘Astronomers tell us that not only all the Planets and Satellites in our Solar system, but all the unnumbered Worlds that revolve round the fixt Stars are inhabited…If this is the case all Mankind are no more in comparison [with] the whole rational Creation of God, than a point in the orbit of Saturn.’

Like the poet Shelley a generation later, Adams liked to press this argument one stage further. If astronomy discovered extraterrestrial civilisations, then surely the earth-based doctrines of Christian redemption became absurd, or at least mighty inconvenient for the Lord. ‘I ask a Calvinist, whether he will subscribe to this alternative: EITHER God Almighty must assume the respective shapes of all these different Species, and suffer the penalties of their Crimes, in their stead; OR ELSE all these Beings must be consigned to everlasting Perdition?’
^14
♣

Amidst all the bustle of visitors and workmen, Herschel was despatched by royal command in July 1786 to deliver and erect one of his ten-foot telescopes, as King George’s special gift to the University of Göttingen, which was fast becoming the centre of scientific studies in Germany. His brother Alexander was to accompany him as business manager. This was both a great honour and a great inconvenience, and for the first time in her life Caroline was left wholly in charge of both the construction work on the forty-foot and the continuing observation programme of nebulae and double stars. Currently they had completed 572 sweeps, identified 1,567 nebulae, and found two tiny new moons orbiting Georgium Sidus (a discovery that particularly amused the King).
¹⁵

Caroline’s first response was thoroughly domestic. She started a new day book, neatly headed it ‘Book of Work Done’, drew a careful set of parallel columns, and recorded her inventory of tasks.

July 3rd 1786. My Brothers William and Alex left Slough to begin their journey to Germany…By way of not suffering too much by sadness, I began with bustling work. I cleaned the brass work for the 7 and 10 feet telescopes and put curtains before the shelves to hinder the dust from settling upon it again. I cleaned and put the [mirror] polishing room in order and made the gardener clean the work-yard, put everything in safety and mend the Fences.

She would not tolerate idling among the workmen, who evidently caused difficulties. The gardener was reprimanded for lolling about the lawns: ‘he gave me the name of “Stingy—” in the village, because I objected to his being there when not wanted’.
¹⁶
It would be interesting to know what the ‘—’ stood for: the fact that Caroline was female, foreign, diminutive, unmarried, disciplined, or brilliantly gifted perhaps?

That afternoon she did needlework and went shopping in Windsor; when she got back she was mortified to find ‘there had been four foreign Gentlemen looking at the instruments in the garden, but did not leave their names’. Later unannounced visitors that month included Nevil Maskelyne and his wife, three members of the great Dolland telescope family, the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, Tiberius Cavallo (the balloon expert from the Royal Society), her friend Dr James Lind, the Prince Resonico and the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, Dr Antony Shepherd. The question of visitors became more awkward as July progressed, and for the first time made Caroline aware of the social anomaly of her position. ‘I was often put into great perplexity by such self-inviting visitors; for I could only look upon myself as an individual who was neither Mistress of her Brother’s house, nor of her Time, and for that reason could, nor would, ever give invitations.’ She also found the endless ‘gossipings’ of Alexander’s pretty but ‘foolish’ new wife, who came over from Bath, intolerable.
¹⁷