The pleasure is in the birdlike leap into FLIGHTS OF FANCY the air, the peaceful silence, and the grandeur of the aspect. The terror lurks above and below. An uncontrolled as- A history of ballooning cent means frostbite, asphyxia, and death in the deep purple of the strato- By Steven Shapin sphere; an uncontrolled return shatters bones and ruptures organs. We’ve always aspired to up-ness: up Discussed in this essay: is virtuous, good, ennobling. Spirits are lifted; hopes are raised; imagination Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, by Richard Holmes. Pantheon. 416 pages. soars; ideas get off the ground; the sky’s $35. pantheonbooks.com. the limit (unless you reach for the stars). To excel is to rise above others. Levity ome years ago, when I lived in as photo op, as advertisement, as inti- is, after all, opposed to gravity, and you SCalifornia, a colleague—a distin- mate romantic gesture. But that’s not don’t want your hopes dashed, your guished silver-haired English how it all started: in its late-eighteenth- dreams deated, or your imagination historian—got a surprise birthday pres- century beginnings, ballooning was a brought down to earth. ent from his wife: a sunset hot-air- Romantic gesture on the grandest of In 1783, the French inventor and balloon trip. “It sets the perfect stage for scales, and it takes one of the great his- scientist Jacques Alexandre Charles your romantic escapade,” the balloon torians and biographers of the Romantic wrote of the ballooning experience as company’s advertising copy reads, rec- era to retrieve what it once signi ed. if the envelope were filled not with ommending balloons as ideal platforms hydrogen but with laughing gas: “Noth- for marriage proposals as well as wed- ublished in 2009, Richard ing will ever quite equal that moment dings, anniversaries, and birthdays. PHolmes’s The Age of Wonder: of total hilarity that lled my whole “Your loved ones will thank you for the How the Romantic Generation body at the moment of take-off.... It time of their lives!” Champagne and Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Sci- was not mere delight. It was a sort of soft drinks are part of the package: $350 ence is a thrilling survey of how the physical rapture.” You go up and you get a couple for an hour in the air. For my Romantics saw the relationship be- light-headed. “The rst impression [on colleague, what began as fantasy ended tween science and the literary imagina- ascent] is a novel sensation of well- in farce. Caught in unfavorable winds, tion. Beauty combined with terror was being or contentment,” the French as- the balloon came down where it was the de nition of the Romantic notion tronomer and balloonist Camille Flam- not meant to. Dignity wounded, but not of the sublime, which wedded aesthet- marion wrote. Guy de Maupassant took much else, the couple, their picnic bas- ic pleasure to fear, the darkness of un- a ride in a balloon in 1887 and reported ket, and the empty champagne bottles reason, and the power of mysterious that a “profound and hitherto unknown were decanted into the middle of a forces. There was no Two Cultures sense of well-being flooded through suburban boulevard, to hoots of deri- problem: poets and novelists embraced me . .. a feeling of utter carelessness, sion from a small pack of adolescents. and were moved by the scienti c imag- in nite repose.” It’s just right that a Modern ballooning can be a mass ination. In science itself, the sublime remarkable proportion of early balloon- spectacle too. Every year in October, flowed from new understandings of ists seem to have packed champagne, hundreds of hot-air balloons launch into electricity, magnetism, gases, and tele- with the bonus that the empties could the blue skies above Albuquerque, New scopically revealed nebulae; in science be thrown out to reduce weight. Levels Mexico, and almost a million people ction, the pattern of the sublime was of Life, Julian Barnes’s moving medita- come to watch. The special-shapes sec- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; in paint- tion on grief, casts the aspirations of tion of the event has had balloons in ing it was represented by the brooding early ballooning, like the ight of Ica- the form of a saguaro cactus, a Hallow- landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich rus, as a tragicomedy of human limits een pumpkin, a champagne bottle, a and the light-storms of J.M.W. Turner; and the yearning to transcend them. Pepsi can, SpongeBob, and Airabelle and in poetry it was Wordsworth’s the Flying Cow with her Beautiful Ud- “Tintern Abbey”: In the beginning, birds ew, and God der (advertising a local dairy). made the birds. Angels ew, and God Apart from the occasional high-rise Of aspect more sublime; that blessed made the angels. Men and women had scienti c experiment, sky-dive record mood, long legs and empty backs, and God attempt, and Richard Branson– In which the burden of the mystery, had made them like that for a reason. In which the heavy and the weary To mess with ight was to mess with sponsored transatlantic adventure, that’s weight pretty much what ballooning has God. It was to prove a long struggle, Of all this unintelligible world, full of instructive legends. become—the Ascent of Man as brief Is lightened . . . encounter with the lower atmosphere, And what could shake off the weight he invention and early years of Steven Shapin teaches history of science of earthiness, inspire awe, and instill Tballooning occupy one chapter at Harvard. terror better than a balloon ascent? in The Age of Wonder, but

82 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2014 Holmes has long been smitten by the ing gas, it was vital that the envelope always tricky: with the hot-air design subject, and Falling Upwards is a glori- leak as little as possible: varnished silk you damped the re, and with hydrogen ous, zzing book about manned bal- was used in early designs, with the or coal-gas balloons there were release looning from the first theatrically panels (or gores) very carefully stitched valves. Grappling irons or anchors were staged French ascents in 1783 to the together. (Both gas and silk were ex- used on landing to seize on to some- disastrous Swedish attempt to reach the pensive, so ballooning was a game ei- thing on the ground. Later innovations North Pole in 1897—“the last great ther for rich men or for those who could were intended to make landings less romantic balloon expedition of the get rich men’s backing. The cost of the lethal: around 1830, a heavy drag rope nineteenth century.” 22,000 yards of silk for Le Géant, an was introduced, trailing the aerostat to How did balloons work? They as- enormous French balloon constructed reduce both its forward and its down- cended because they were lighter than in 1862, was £6,000, equivalent to per- ward speed, and a rip panel in the en- air, and there were two main ways of haps $10 million today.) velope could be torn away at the last achieving levity. The rst ight was You could increase levity by stoking minute to achieve rapid deation. taken in an aerostat designed by the the re (in the case of the genre that Controlling a balloon’s lateral move- Montgol er brothers whose buoyancy became known as montgol ères) or, with ment is easier to summarize: you couldn’t was provided by hot air—dangerously the hydrogen-filled balloons called do it in the Romantic era and, for all generated by a smoky re in a brazier charlières (after Jacques Charles, one of practical purposes, you still can’t. There xed under the neck of the envelope. their inventors), by throwing overboard were attempts throughout the nine- (The balloon stayed up just as long as some sand- lled ballast bags. With gas teenth century to steer balloons by using its enclosed air was hot.) Soon balloons balloons, altitude could be compro- a complex of ropes and sails, but they were being lifted by lighter-than-air mised by added weight from icing and didn’t particularly work. What you can manufactured gases, rst hydrogen— the accumulation of moisture, and from hope to do is nd an altitude where the produced by passing sulfuric acid over temperature changes. The higher the winds are blowing in the direction you iron scraps—and, later, coal (or town) ambient temperature, the greater the want to go, and the fact that this is now gas, which from the 1820s on could be lifting power of the gas, but you didn’t somewhat easier owes much to the wind- tapped from the municipal mains. want the gas to expand so much that charting observations carried out by Since hang time was a matter of retain- the envelope exploded. Descending was nineteenth-century aeronauts. “Basel with the Rhine bridges, viewed from the north,” courtesy Swiss Federal Archives for Historic Monuments, Eduard Spelterini Collection. All photographs by Eduard Spelterini, who in 1898 became the rst person to cross the Alps by air. A monograph of his aerial photography on glass negatives, Eduard Spelterini: Photographs of a Pioneer Balloonist, was published in 2007 by Scheidegger & Spiess, and a selection of his work was on view in November at the Venice Biennale. REVIEWS 83 Balloonists often wound up far from eld to the west of Hannover. Le Géant alloons were understood as their intended destinations; some found began careering over fields at thirty Bcutting-edge science, but, like themselves going backward; others dis- miles an hour, crashing into trees and Frankenstein with his monster, appeared into the vastness of the ocean shearing off branches, nearly running human beings couldn’t completely con- and were never seen again. With the into an oncoming train (which braked trol these creations—and that play spectacular use of balloons to carry just in time), before being confronted between human ingenuity and the awe- people and messages out of Paris during with the other great communications some power of nature was a part of the 1870 Prussian siege, some landed technology of the nineteenth century, a what elicited an aesthetic and emo- where they were meant to, west and string of telegraph wires running paral- tional response to ballooning. In 1871, south of enemy lines; one came down lel to the rails (“Four electric wires—four Flammarion gloried in his submission in Norway; and several, unluckily, de- guillotines,” the chief aeronaut recalled to the balloon’s dynamic will: “Thou scended in Germany, where the aero- thinking). The balloonists miraculously shalt y off to the regions of storms and nauts were shot as spies. No balloon survived that encounter, though they tempests, and I shall be forced to follow ever managed a return journey to Paris: bounced across German farmland for a thee! I shall become thy plaything; microfilm-carrying homing pigeons further ten miles before coming to rest. thou shalt do what thou wilt with me.” proved much more successful. The optimistic entrepreneur who had Holmes cites, but doesn’t clearly en- In 1863, the well- nanced and well- organized the ight turned disaster into dorse, another writer’s suggestion that catered Le Géant was launched from commercial opportunity by producing a the Victorian balloonist represents a Paris on what was supposed to be a long- sensational book about the crash land- “Freudian ‘regression’ into a passive, distance eastward ight, perhaps as far ing, illustrated by a lithograph of the childlike, dreamlike, oceanic or ‘infan- as Poland or Russia. Dining over Bel- balloon-train encounter. The image was tile’ state,” oating above the earthly gium, the six passengers opened half a copyrighted, and royalties from its repro- world of “masculine effort and control.” dozen cases of ne wine, and for break- duction helped nance not only recon- This is mere psychobabble, but there fast the next day over Germany there struction of the great balloon but a pub- was certainly something louche about were croissants and coffee. Later, after licity campaign to drum up support for the theater of women on an aerial much tactical deliberation, the aero- building a heavier-than-air “aero- stage. Balloons assumed a minor role as nauts decided to touch down in an open locomotive” that really could be steered. erotic technology when enterprising

“Eiger, Mönch, Finsteraarhorn, and Jungfrau from an altitude of approx. 4,000 m, viewed from the west,” 84 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2014 courtesy Swiss Federal Archives for Historic Monuments, Eduard Spelterini Collection French aeronauts began taking their amboyant attire, she wore large, ex- ly. The aming balloon fell onto the roof attractive wives, girlfriends, and young travagantly feathered bonnets, white of a building in the Rue de Provence, nieces for gaseous rides. In 1799, André- cotton dresses with high waists, and and while still tangled in the rigging Jacques Garnerin arranged for his wife, low décolletage. She disdained the Sophie clung for a while to a parapet Jeanne-Geneviève, to perform the rst more capacious baskets used by other high above the street. “À moi, à moi!” she parachute jump from a balloon by a balloonists, ying instead in a tiny sil- cried out to the shocked spectators, be- woman, and soon she had an equally ver gondola whose sides were barely a fore losing her grip and falling to her audacious French rival in Sophie Blan- foot high. It was, Holmes writes, “like death. Sophie’s sensational last show was chard. Sophie had developed an in- standing in a ying champagne buck- reported throughout the world. fatuation with balloons as a child, after et.” Her professional specialty was The dangers of this sort of thing witnessing an ascent by the dashing, nighttime pyrotechnic displays over the were now thoroughly appreciated, but then-married-with-kids aeronaut Jean- Parisian gardens of Tivoli and Luxem- the heyday of risqué female ballooning Pierre Blanchard. The coup de foudre bourg, setting off rockets, cascades, and was still to come. In the 1850s, another was approximately mutual, for Blan- the blue-colored ares known as Bengal French aeronaut, Eugène Godard, took chard felt for the little Sophie what she lights. She became such a star that his wife and a troupe of saucily dressed felt for the big balloon, and, as rumor Napoleon made her of cial aeronauti- young women on a tour of America, had it, vowed to marry her when she cal entertainer for state festivals, and where, suspended beneath the balloon, was eighteen. “Sensation incomparable!” after the Bourbon Restoration she was they performed acrobatics on trapezes she cried on her rst ascent with Blan- appointed to a similar position under and, incredibly, rode horses on plat- chard, in 1804. They eventually mar- Louis XVIII. forms slung below the balloons. By the ried when Sophie was twenty-six, and Sophie’s end, when it came in 1819, end of the century, such displays had soon she became a crucial part of his was suitably theatrical. Ascending from become xtures at both British and touring act. Tivoli one summer’s night, she had just American fairs. In 1891, a Yorkshire Shy on earth, Sophie was trans- begun her displays when the hydrogen poster announced that “Miss Maude formed into a fearless exhibitionist at in her envelope caught re. The crowd Brooks will Drop from the Clouds” at 500 feet, and she continued solo after below thought it was yet another stun- the Rotherham Cricket Grounds: “She Blanchard died, in 1810. Adopting ning dramatic effect, and cheered wild- will endeavour to alight within the

“Mont Blanc group from an altitude of approx. 2,800 m, viewed from the north, 8 August 1909,” courtesy Swiss Federal Archives for Historic Monuments, Eduard Spelterini Collection REVIEWS 85 Grounds, but in the event of not doing things to do with balloons, and so did chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and in 1797 so, will return with all possible speed, many others. The military could use Napoleon took the Corps d’Aérostiers appear on stage, and give an account of them: Franklin rst suggested that a eet along with him in his invasion of Egypt. her Aerial Voyage.” Some women bal- of balloons could transport an invasion (Before the balloons could be unloaded, loonists reckoned they were aiding the army, for example, from France to En- Admiral Nelson destroyed them all in suffragette movement; others saw gland. During the Revolutionary and the 1798 Battle of the Nile.) The high themselves as circus performers. The Napoleonic Wars, British observers point of nineteenth-century military shows went on in Britain until the tended to regard all balloon sightings as ballooning was in the American Civil outbreak of the Great War, when the potentially hostile, but the caprice of the War, when Northern entrepreneurs ag- national mood became less playful. winds scotched the idea of airborne gressively sold President Lincoln on the military vehicles and, indeed, any no- idea of forming a balloon corps in the ny balloon flight,” Holmes tion of using balloons as practical forms Union Army. Balloons were used to “Awrites, “was always essentially a of military or civil transport. (Balloons some effect in the bloody Virginia Pen- piece of theatre.” From the start, might move over the ground at astonish- insula campaign of 1862. At 1,000 feet, balloons were enormously engaging ing speeds—twenty, thirty, even ninety a tethered balloon could survey Confed- spectacles. As early balloonists wafted miles an hour—but, from the 1820s, erate forces up to twelve miles away, across the French countryside, amazed trains had the advantage of showing up dropping down notes to be taken to the and delighted landowners called up, where they were supposed to.) Union general or using a telegraph wire inviting the aeronauts to land and share A better military concept was using strung along the tethering rope. In the a light collation of cold chicken and (of balloons to gather intelligence. Send Siege of Yorktown, a Union general course) champagne. Jacques Charles’s them up tethered to the ground and the went up himself to confirm a secret first ascent was said to have drawn aeronauts could overlook the enemy and rebel withdrawal from the town. 400,000 spectators, among them Benja- note their disposition of forces. The The Confederates didn’t have much min Franklin, who, when asked what French Revolutionary Army established of a technological response, but the was the use of a balloon, replied: “What’s a balloon regiment in 1794 for surveil- remarkable episode of the “Silk Dress the use of a new-born baby?” Franklin lance purposes, with mobile gas- Balloon” in the defense of Richmond himself soon thought up some practical generating facilities designed by the became part of Southern legend. The

86 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2014 “Jungfrau, west face,” courtesy Swiss Museum of Transport, Lucerne balloon envelope was said to have been English scienti c aeronaut James Glai- of balloon writing are accounts of the sewn up from “a shimmering mass of sher celebrated what the balloon had receding terrestrial soundscape. Drift- multicolored silks” cut from ballroom achieved: “it has done for us that which ing above the Surrey countryside in dresses patriotically donated by dozens no other power ever accomplished; it 1863, even the scienti cally restrained of Southern women. It was, Holmes has grati ed the desire natural to us all Glaisher was moved to aerial idyll: writes, “a balloon made of gleaming to view the earth in a new aspect.” Southern dreams”—Up in the Air as True, tall peaks had been climbed, but The cheering cry of children was fre- Gone with the Wind. The Rebel balloon as Flammarion wrote: quently heard above all other sounds. was meant to be launched over Rich- Geese cackled, and, frightened, scut- tled off to their farms; pheasants mond from a small tugboat, but a The grandest and most sublime view seen from the summit of a high moun- crowed as they were going to roost, and Union gunboat captured both tug and as we approached the end of our jour- balloon. Writing many years after the tain . . . bears no comparison to the beauty of nature as seen perpendicular- ney packs of dogs barked in the wildest war, a Confederate general described ly from the regions of space. Thus only state of excitement. the seizure as an act of “ungallantry”: it can we perceive the beauty and gran- was “the meanest trick of the War, and deur of nature in all its sublimity. Gliding at night over Belgium in one I have never yet forgiven.” 1836, the British balloonist Charles The value of the information pro- The “Earthrise” photograph taken by Green and his crew reported on the vided by balloons ran up against the Apollo 8 in 1968 became an icon of Industrial Revolution made eerily au- endemic intelligence problem of inter- the environmental movement, but it dible. They were, Holmes says, preting what was seen, and the fog and was with balloons that, as Holmes dust of war made seeing no easy matter. writes, “Man’s growing impact on the gradually overwhelmed by the thun- The Union corps was disbanded after surface of the planet for the rst time derous machine noise, the choking in- dustrial smells, and the haunting 1862 and balloons played no further became visible.” sound of men below still working on part in the war—but the perspective Seeing earth from a new point of the night shifts. There was disembod- they offered powerfully affected view made a strong impression. More ied shouting, coughing, swearing, me- nineteenth-century aesthetic, social, surprisingly, so did hearing it. Some of tallic banging and sometimes, weirdly, and political sensibilities. In 1871, the the most lyrical passages in the genre sharp echoing bursts of laughter.

“The Pyramids of Gizeh near Cairo from an altitude of approx. 600 m, 21 February 1904,” courtesy Swiss Federal Archives for Historic Monuments, Eduard Spelterini Collection REVIEWS 87 The soundscape of a metropolis of- tion of portraying territory from “toys”—but other features of the view fered a particular political resonance. above—from a view that, it was de haut en bas were less expected and For Glaisher, London from a mile thought until the 1780s, no one could richer in implication. Here it all was— high sounded “like the roar of the ever have—was available to frame cathedrals, castles, and working-class sea.” And from 7,000 feet, “the roar of views from a balloon that no one had houses, town and country—“standing the town ... was a deep, rich, contin- ever had before. Early balloonists, that side by side in friendly juxtaposition,” uous sound—the voice of labour.” is, for all their amazement, knew what as one English balloonist put it, Aeronauts repeatedly said that the to see when they looked earthward. “mixed up together in the one scene” earth below looked like a map, and The smallness of big terrestrial things as if conjured “by the magic virtues of here it was a fortunate historical ac- was soon taken as a matter of course— some great enchanter’s wand.” The cident that the cartographic conven- people were “ants” and buildings were high and the low, from the balloon’s perspective, were seen on a level. “All perception of comparative altitudes of objects on or near the ground is lost,” Glaisher noted, “and the whole has the appearance of a plane.” Incomparable senior The politics of the balloon’s leveling perspective gripped Romantic and living in Pennsylvania. radical imaginations. A cat may look at a king, and from the balloon you could look down on whomever and whatever you wanted. A balloon ig- A unique senior living nored national borders; it needed no passport; it inspired thoughts of free- community in historic dom in the earthbound, the oppressed Bucks County, PA and enslaved. Percy Shelley fancied embraces Quaker values that a balloon appearing in the skies including dignity, respect over Africa “would virtually emanci- pate every slave, and would annihilate and a commitment to slavery forever,” and Victor Hugo prom- diversity. Pennswood ised that ballooning would bring about Village features inspiring “the liberation of all mankind,” “uni- natural beauty, a versal peace and freedom.” Holmes doesn’t nd this entirely lu- welcoming atmosphere dicrous: air travel and satellites, he and a diverse group of writes, “are the sine qua non of our neighbors who push the global civilization; and space ight may yet become the nal means of its salva- envelope of intellectual tion.” But that’s going a bit too far. By and cultural achievement. the end of the nineteenth century, the future lay, Holmes acknowledges, not Pennswood Village is strong on caring, too, with a full continuum with the gaseous cloud but with the of on-campus, resident-centered care, and easy access to the heavy mechanical bird. Holmes breaks region’s award-winning medical centers. off his story with the emergence of new technologies for taking to the air— It’s all just a short drive from Philadelphia, or an enjoyable train engine-powered dirigibles and xed- wing aircraft, both of which were rap- trip to New York or Washington, DC. And it’s all not-for-profit, at a idly recruited into military arsenals and surprisingly affordable price. pro t-making enterprises. The zeppelin was never intended as a platform for Romantic imaginations and airplane Call 888-401-9652 travel far above the clouds has long ago today for your FREE lost whatever romance it once had. But the propane- red hot-air balloon is still information kit. with us: you can go up in one on a sum- 1382 Newtown-Langhorne Rd mer evening, oating in a most peculiar Newtown, PA 18940 way, marveling at the peace and seren- www.pennswood.org ity, looking down on the throb of mod- ern civilization. And then you come PNWDHM back to earth. n

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