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 signied. 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 denition 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 scientic imag- innite 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 scientic 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- Montgoler brothers whose buoyancy became known as montgolères) 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.