In an increasingly fantastic sequence worthy of Baron Munchausen, Nadar was reported to have performed the acrobatic feat of crawling up the outside rigging of his balloon, staunching the escaping gas with his scarf, and then clambering back down into his basket. He was next observed to produce a gleaming duelling pistol from his shoulderbag, coolly take aim at his adversary, and bring down the Prussian balloon with a single shot. Nadar then threw out a last bag of ballast, and safely sailed over the Paris ramparts to land triumphantly in the middle of the Champs-Elysées. In fact, of course, he never left Paris at any time during the whole siege.63
Nevertheless, Nadar’s real-life career as publicist remained as remarkable as ever. While Paris struggled to rebuild its battered boulevards and burnt-out monuments (including the whole of the Palais du Louvre), and to recover its identity as the international capital of culture, Nadar turned his attention from aeronauts to artists. In April 1874 he organised the historic First Exhibition of Impressionist Painters, hung at his own gallery attached to his photographic studios at 35, boulevard des Capucines.
The definitive roll-call of contributors included Monet (with his famous signature canvas Impression, soleil levant), Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Sisley and Pissarro, all modestly grouping themselves under the title ‘Société anonyme des artistes peintres’. The provocative ‘anonymous’ was almost certainly Nadar’s simple but brilliant marketing idea. The concept for this hugely influential exhibition had grown out of his friendship with Manet, who had earlier dedicated his painting Jeune femme en costume Espagnol to Nadar. In 1878 Nadar also helped to organise the first retrospective exhibition of Honoré Daumier’s work. From this time on, the reborn idea of Paris as the luminous home of the Impressionist painters, and all the cultural glitter of the coming Belle Epoque, steadily took hold across Europe and America, and the city’s renaissance began.fn40
The true history of the siege balloons emerged only slowly. In summer 1871 Camille Flammarion collaborated with James Glaisher in England to produce a second English edition of Travels in the Air. In this Glaisher added a short Preface on the aeronautical history of the siege, in which ‘the balloon has proved itself so great an assistance to the French Nation’. He also printed a basic inventory of all the flights that left Paris – at this date given as numbering only sixty-two. Glaisher’s marginal notes lamented the ‘scourge of Prussian occupation’, but also seemed to blame republicans like Fonvielle for the destruction of the Second Empire: ‘It is hard to forgive all the agitators who, by their writings, have helped to dethrone the best of Emperors and to bring France to her present terrible condition. Vive l’Empereur!’64
Fonvielle himself stood unsuccessfully as a Deputy in 1871, and published a series of inflammatory accounts of the Paris Commune, notably La Terreur, ou la Commune de Paris dévoilée (1872). He also wrote a thrilling account of his own flight out of Paris in the balloon L’Egalité, which after several terrifying brushes with the Prussians had landed successfully in Belgium on 24 November 1870. Soon afterwards he gave up both politics and ballooning altogether, and concentrated entirely on popular-science writing.
Gaston Tissandier was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, but less for balloon flying than for his organisational work for the provisional government at Tours. In 1872 he and his brother Albert founded an important popular-science journal together, La Nature: Revue des sciences, with Gaston writing and editing the articles, and Albert producing most of the illustrations. Fonvielle also contributed to this. The luminous globe on its cover could be mistaken for an ascending balloon, but in fact it was a rising sun.
On 31 July 1873 Jules Duruof and his wife Caroline made an epic twenty-two-hour flight in his new balloon, the Tricolore, over the North Sea. Once again, they launched from the place d’Armes in Calais, and once again in dangerous storm conditions. They had intended to postpone the flight, and it had been banned on safety grounds by the mayor of Calais, but they were surrounded by a hostile crowd, who mocked Duruof’s claims to be a siege balloonist, and jeered at him as a ‘patriotic coward’. This was too much for the erstwhile Aérostier. ‘Let us show them we are not afraid to die,’ he is reported to have shouted, somewhat stagily, to Caroline. He promptly cut away the retaining ropes, and they were whirled away across the square and straight out to sea. It might have seemed an almost suicidal gesture, but it was also well-calculated in the grand Duruof style. The next afternoon they were pulled out of the sea by a British fishing boat in the Skagerrak.65
The incident was widely reported in the French press, and letters began to pour in with personal memories of how Duruof and the other balloonists had brought Paris hope in those dark days. These stirred up enough publicity for the siege balloonists as a group to receive belated recognition. A special medal was struck for them, commemorating the ‘Emploi des Aérostats pour La Défense de Paris’.66
A national monument was also designed, a bronze balloon with various mythological figures clinging around the edge of the basket. A bronze homing pigeon was ingeniously incorporated, apparently fluttering around the rigging. It was installed on a large stone plinth at the rond-point at the Porte de Neuilly in 1874, where it was much favoured by small boys, just as Nadar’s original Neptune had been at the place Saint-Pierre. It also appealed, of course, to the local pigeons. French critics thought the balloon too small and heavy in appearance, out of scale with the figures beneath, and giving the impression of weighing them down to earth rather than lifting them up to glory. German critics were much more severe: they destroyed the entire memorial the moment they marched back into Paris in the summer of 1940.
In April 1875 the reputation of the balloonists’ courage was publicly reinforced when Gaston Tissandier joined the three-man scientific team to make the high-altitude ascent in the Zénith. This was a deliberate attempt to break the Glaisher–Coxwell record, using a new oxygen breathing apparatus designed by the other two crew members, Théodor Sivel and Joseph Croce-Spinelli. Starting from the La Villette gasworks, with all its associations with the siege balloons, they reached around twenty-two thousand feet safely, and began using oxygen from small rubber bladders. Shortly after, they all collapsed from asphyxia.
When Tissandier, the only crew member with extensive balloon experience, recovered consciousness, the Zénith was hurtling downwards. The other two men were slumped on the floor of the basket, with blood streaming from their mouths and ears. Somehow Tissandier managed to control the final descent, but both the others were found to be dead on landing. Tissandier was the sole survivor.67 The French government was by now much more disposed to celebrate its aeronauts. Sivel and Croce-Spinelli were buried in an elaborate tomb in Père Lachaise, close to Sophie Blanchard’s, dramatically showing their draped, life-size figures lying like chivalric knights of the air.
In 1876, partly as recognition of his heroism during the disastrous Zénith flight, Gaston Tissandier received the annual Gold Medal from the Société Française de Navigation Aérienne, and was elected its president. His ballooning experiences were now legendary, and over the next decade he published nine editions of his Histoire de mes ascensions (1878–88).
Like Nadar, Tissandier became increasingly concerned with the old problem of steering aerostats. His answer was mechanical power, and he worked on various ideas for fitting balloons with engines – the forerunner of the airship. In 1881 he exhibited a working model of an electric-powered, propeller-driven dirigible at the Exposition d’Electricité. Two years later, in October 1883, with his brother Albert he successfully piloted the first electric-powered dirigible, La France. (Its engine, incidentally, was manufactured by the German firm Siemens.) It was a brilliant prototype of things to come, but was too clumsy and underpowered to cause great excitement. It did however greatly interest that Prussian officer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Tissandier published the results of his researches in Les Ballons dirigibles: Application de l’électricité à la navigation aérienne in 1885.
Tissandier now
regarded himself as retired from active ballooning, and, reverting to his professorial métier, worked steadily to put together a definitive history of the entire field. This appeared in 1890 as his superb two-volume Histoire des ballons et des aéronautes célèbres. Though he was appointed to the Commission for Military Aviation at the Ministry for War, and to the Commission for Civil Aviation at the Ministry of the Interior, he did not quite live to see a genuine aeroplane. He died in Paris on 30 August 1899, aged only fifty-five. His huge aeronautical archive, the finest single record of the Paris siege balloons, was eventually bequeathed to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Perhaps it was finally delivered by Emile Lacaze in the Richard Wallace.
The official French celebration of the greatest aeronautical triumph in history was symbolically crowned by Henri Giffard’s giant captive balloon at the Paris Exposition Universelle of summer 1878. This huge multicoloured aerostat – more an aerial cathedral than a mere balloon – was gloriously tethered at the very heart of Paris, in the place de la Carousel opposite the rebuilt Louvre palace. It was nearly nine hundred thousand cubic feet, well over ten times the capacity of the average siege balloon, and four times that of Nadar’s Le Géant. It stood 220 feet high, and would turn out to be the largest conventional balloon ever constructed. It had a massive lift of twenty-seven tons – nearly three times the total weight of all the siege airmail taken out of Paris, and could carry over fifty people at a time. It would eventually take up over thirty-five thousand sightseers, and for the first time the concept of mass flying began to emerge in Europe.68
Yet the Mammoth also marked the end of the great balloon era. For all its size and power, it was a captive, a slave. It was raised and lowered under the tutelage of huge, hissing, iron steam winches, and controlled by the same gleaming, massive mechanism that powered factories and drove railways. The beautiful free-flight balloon had been turned into a monstrous, creaking, submissive, industrial elevator. The dream of flying had moved elsewhere.fn41
11
Extreme Balloons
1
From this time on, the dream of free flight was increasingly handed over to proponents of various forms of heavier-than-air machine. As Nadar and Tissandier had seen in France, Sir George Cayley in England, Count von Zeppelin in Germany and Samuel Cody in America, the future lay with the engine-powered airship; and very soon with the true fixed-wing aeroplane. The romantic age of the free gas balloon was passing. As Victor Hugo had predicted, the future lay with the bird, not the cloud.
Or, more strictly, the future lay with the bird’s aerofoil rather than the balloon’s envelope. Despite generations of would-be birdmen, it was not the flapping of birds’ wings that ultimately held the clue to human flight, but the basic shape of their wing feathers. Birds’ wings form a natural aerofoil. They are not flat or paddle-like, as one might think, but curved and concave. Amazingly, this basic aerofoil shape can be observed even in an individual wing feather.1 This makes the upper surface area of each wing larger (or longer) than the lower one. In consequence, the air has to flow more rapidly over the upper surface, and more slowly over the lower surface. This produces a thinning or decrease of air pressure above the wing, and a corresponding build-up or increase of pressure beneath the wing. So, as a bird’s wing moves through the air, it is in effect pushed upwards from below, and simultaneously sucked upwards from above. These combined forces produce aerodynamic lift, or flight. Moreover, this sort of flight, unlike balloon flight, is independent of wind direction. By adjusting the aerofoil curve of each wing separately, a bird can turn, climb and dive freely in three dimensions. Not even an airship could really achieve this.
Working airships would appear in France by the end of the 1880s. Charles Renard made seven flights out of Paris and back in an electric-powered airship in 1884–85.2 In Germany, an experimental Zeppelin – with an aluminium body and a Daimler petrol engine – would fly over Lake Constance in 1900. The Wright brothers flew their aeroplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903; and Louis Blériot crossed the Channel in July 1909.
Meanwhile, aerostation itself began to seem old-fashioned, almost a form of antiquarianism. Within a decade it had declined essentially to a rich man’s hobby, and fell largely into the hands of eccentric aristocrats and wealthy sportsmen. There was a great vogue for ‘champagne ballooning’, reaching its apogee in the Edwardian period, when the famous Gordon Bennett Annual Long Distance Balloon Race was inaugurated in 1906.fn42 Rules and clubs were formed, international cups and prizes competed for, birthdays and fashionable weddings were celebrated in the air. There was a glamorous ballooning ‘season’, as for racing, polo, or yachting. These rich amateur balloonists also enjoyed taking up literary and artistic figures on both sides of the Channel, like Guy de Maupassant or H.G. Wells, on what were essentially celebrity jaunts.
Maupassant went up in a balloon in 1887. He had printed invitation cards to the launch, as for a luncheon party, but its real purpose was to advertise the publication of his strange autobiographical novella, Le Horla. The balloon was named after the book, and the flight was an early form of publicity book tour from Paris to Belgium. Le Horla is a story of incipient madness, and Maupassant himself was already suffering from grave mental problems, from which he would die in 1893. Perhaps for that very reason the balloon flight seemed rapturous, a strangely releasing and therapeutic experience: ‘The heady perfume of cut hay, wildflowers, damp green earth rose up through the air … A profound and hitherto unknown sense of well-being flooded through me, a well-being of both mind and body, a feeling of utter carelessness, infinite repose, total forgetting …’3
H.G. Wells ingeniously used the account of a runaway balloon flight to open his futuristic novel The War in the Air (1908). His protagonist, Bert Smallways, is accidentally swept away in a hydrogen balloon from Dymchurch Sands, on the Kent coast, and travels across the Channel and all the way to Germany. Initially Bert’s sensations are euphoric: ‘To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet – and to that height Bert Smallways presently rose – is like nothing else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to man. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarily out of human things.’4
But it is a sign of the times that Bert’s balloon finishes up over a secret Zeppelin factory in Bavaria. He sees the future lying beneath him in the form of row upon row of ‘grazing monsters at their feed’. These are ‘huge fishlike aluminium airships’, some over a thousand feet long, each capable of ninety miles per hour into a headwind, and fully equipped with guns, bombs and ‘wireless telegraphy’. The fleet is commanded by an Admiral von Sternberg, who is described in terms of the Franco-Prussian War, as ‘the von Moltke of the War in the Air’.5 Having inadvertently observed all these modern secrets from his old-fashioned balloon, Bert Smallways is symbolically shot out of the skies by a volley of German gunfire.
What remained of serious free ballooning at the end of the nineteenth century was notable for increasingly extreme and quixotic flights. These were usually of two kinds: reckless and bizarre attempts to entertain local crowds, or else equally reckless attempts to establish some kind of world record. Such exploits were intentionally dangerous and controversial, and brought all kinds of drama and fatalities, usually accompanied by huge and sensational press coverage. Yet all but a few were quickly forgotten. It was, in a sense, the fin-de-siècle of ballooning: stylised, extravagant and gloriously picturesque, but ultimately as ephemeral as a breath of air. Yet among these strange latterday balloonists there were a small band who deserve to be remembered. They were often unearthly in their courage.
2
In Britain, this aerial champagne culture produced an extraordinary late fashion for female balloon acrobats and trapeze artists. This was a risqué tradition that had hitherto been largely confined to France, and the spectacular performances of the Garnerin and the Godard girls. Now it appeared in England, a striking demonstration of the fin de s
iècle of ballooning.
Dozens of celebrity female aeronauts and artistes began performing at county fairs and festivals across the land, executing acrobatics, releasing aerial firework displays, or doing parachute jumps, in a tradition that went right back to Sophie Blanchard. Many of them are only remembered by a few colourful posters that have survived in provincial museums, announcing their promised aerial feats, in sixty-point letterpress and garish red, green and gold illustrations.
Posters can still be found that announce ‘Miss Marie Merton’s ascent’ at Wolverhampton fairground in 1891. Or newspapers that advertise Maude Brooks and Cissy Kent as ‘the stars of Lieutenant Lempriere’s Aerial Show’. A poster declares that on 2 June 1891 ‘Miss Maude Brooks will Drop from the Clouds’ at the Cricket Grounds, Rotherham, in South Yorkshire: ‘She will endeavour to alight within the Grounds, but in the event of not doing so, will return with all possible speed, appear on stage, and give an account of her Aerial Voyage.’
These performances were not as frothy and light-hearted as they seem. Maude Brooks was seriously injured when her balloon collapsed during an ascent from a Dublin garden party on 25 May 1893. She managed to release her parachute, but fifty feet above the ground it tore and she landed heavily, breaking her legs and arms, and permanently damaging her spine. Such threats of death or injury hung over all of these aeronauts.6
Perhaps the most famous Edwardian balloon girl was twenty-year-old Dolly Shepherd. Flying regularly from the Alexandra Palace, and fairgrounds all over England, she popularised a truly terrifying balloon act in which she ascended several thousand feet hanging beneath a trapeze, then pulled a simple release cord and dropped back to earth by parachute. Dolly used no balloon basket at all, but hung fully exposed from her trapeze bar, dressed in a blue-trousered flying suit, with a jaunty cap and tight lace-up boots to show off her legs. Her only instrumentation was a tiny altimeter, which she wore as a silver bangle on her left wrist. She had many male admirers, and received several offers of marriage. But she had an even greater following among young working-class women, who regarded her as a portent of women’s rights.