fn18 Some things about the Civil War battlefields were peculiarly invisible from a balloon. For example, that more than half of all the ordinary, non-commissioned troopers were boys under seventeen; and that nearly two-thirds of all casualties of whatever rank were caused by disease – especially acute diarrhoea – not by battlefield wounds. Perhaps least visible of all was the fate of the black troops who fought so heroically for the Union. Of more than twenty-seven thousand deaths among these black soldiers, fewer than three thousand perished in combat – the rest died from disease, their conditions were so bad. Balloon observers also had little to report about the great question that had triggered the Secession: black slavery. Their occasionally flippant attitude to what they might have seen was caught in a facetious article that appeared at the home town of ballooning, in the Cincinnati Gazette for 22 October 1861: ‘LaMountain has been sent up in his balloon, and went so high that he could see all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and observe what [the Confederate troops] had for dinner at Fort Pickens, Florida … A reporter asked him if he could see any Negro insurrections, and he said that he did see some black spots moving around near South Carolina, but found out afterwards that they were some ants which had got into his telescope.’19 It is instructive that Cincinnati was a Union city, of apparently solid anti-slavery sentiment.
fn19 I was amazed to find Thaddeus Lowe’s long, grey gunmetal observation binoculars, much battered from use, at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. They have been placed, with brilliant appropriateness, in a solitary plain glass cabinet at the foot of an exhibition of modern observation satellites, dating from the 1960s. The astonishing images taken from these orbiting space satellites, some military but most civilian, suggest that they are the ultimate heirs to Lowe’s observation balloons. The dazzling photographs of the earth beneath, breathtaking in their detail and formal patterning, are surely what Lowe must have dreamed of seeing one day from his tiny, swaying, perilous platform.
fn20 Lowe added a further note towards the end of his life, while completing his memoirs as an old man in California: ‘As I write, a good piece of it lies before me on the table, now frail and discoloured with age.’ It is easy to imagine him turning this last fragment of the silk dress balloon carefully with his fingertips. I found it strangely moving to discover that very piece, a stiff section of dark-red material about the size of a playing card, folded into one of his letters, and still stored in the Library of Congress Archive, Washington, in 2010. It is not surprising that the story has inspired at least one modern romance, The Last Silk Dress (1988), by Ann Rinaldi, later retitled as Girl in Blue. Here the coloured silk dresses are even identified with their individual owners, as the balloon comes to life: ‘The men on the dock were spreading the silk out, making it smooth. You could see the bright coloured patches, jumping and bubbling … Lying there on the dock, the crazy patchwork mass of material was like something alive. The men had all they could do to hold it down as the gas hissed in … We stood and watched as fold by fold of the balloon took life and it rippled into a mass of shimmering, bouncing silk … Connie screamed in delight and pointed out Francine’s green, Lulie’s striped pink, and all the other colours we recognized from the girls at Miss Ballard’s … The balloon was taking on a life of its own.’56
fn21 For the record, the nearest thing to an actual non-stop trans-American balloon flight did not take place until May 1980. The helium-filled balloon travelled west to east, just as Professor Henry and John Wise had always prophesied. The Kitty Hawk was flown by Maxie Anderson and his son Kristian, for four days and nights, from Fort Baker in California to Sainte-Félicité in Quebec, a distance of 3,313 miles. Anderson had also been the first to fulfil the transatlantic dream. In 1978 he flew with Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman in Double Eagle II, from Maine to Picardy in northern France, a distance of 3,107 miles. Their insulated gondola is displayed in the Udvar-Hazy Center, Dulles International Airport, Washington, DC. His and Ben Abruzzo’s names live on in the new Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the greatest of all American balloon fiestas is based. Anderson also founded the Anderson Valley Vineyards, which marketed a famous aeronautical rosé wine, christened ‘Balloon Blush’. It is surprisingly dry.
fn22 In fact the first true airship or dirigible had already been invented in France by the engineering genius Henri Giffard (1825–82). In September 1852, Giffard successfully flew his baguette-shaped hydrogen balloon with a three-horsepower steam engine slung beneath it, driving a ‘helice’, or propeller. It was steered with an upright rudder, and flew twenty-seven kilometres southwards from the Paris racecourse to Trappes. However, it was slow and clumsy, and would not fly against contrary winds. Hampered by lack of money to develop his ideas, and despite receiving the Légion d’Honneur in 1863, Giffard spent the rest of his career doggedly building bigger and bigger captive hydrogen balloons. With equal irony, his wonderful steam engines were used to power their cable winches on the ground. His final balloon was a true captive monster, a King Kong of the balloon world. In his late fifties Giffard’s eyesight began to fail, and, unable to contemplate a world without a visual horizon, he committed suicide. But his ideas influenced Charles Renard’s airship La France, which made its maiden flight in 1884; and later still, as we shall see, Salomon Andrée in the Arctic.
fn23 It is often forgotten that at this time Jules Verne still had profound doubts about scientific progress and technology. In this same year, 1862, he wrote the short dystopia entitled ‘Paris in the Twentieth Century’, about a young poet living in a world of skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, chemical warfare and global telegraphy, where even the dead can be revived by electric shock treatment. Far from being happy, Michel Defrenoy is deeply depressed by the materialism of society; he can find no serious books or music, and he detests living off synthetic food made from coal. A new ice age engulfs the whole of Europe, and Michel dies in the snow outside Père Lachaise cemetery clutching an unpublished book of his poems entitled Hopes. When Verne presented the draft of this grim vision to Hetzel, he refused it: ‘Wait twenty years to publish this book. No one today will believe your prophecies, and no one will care about them – It will damage your reputation.’ Instead he persuaded Verne to turn to the balloon story. The manuscript was only recovered over a hundred years later, by Verne’s great-grandson, in 1989. It was finally published in 1994, and paradoxically, its pessimism rather enhanced Verne’s reputation.41
fn24 It is instructive, and poignant, to compare this with Percy Shelley’s views some fifty years earlier: ‘The balloon 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.’50
fn25 As so often with ballooning, the boundaries between fact and fiction remain curiously porous. In summer 1962, a real balloon voyage across Africa, starting from Zanzibar, was undertaken by three Englishmen to celebrate the centenary of Verne’s Five Weeks. The story is told in Anthony Smith’s delightful balloon classic Throw Out Two Hands (1963). (The title refers to the tiny amounts of sand ballast required to adjust the equilibrium of a hydrogen balloon.) The modern trip was presented as an African safari from the air, with great attention paid to wildlife and conservation. One of its notable feats was to overfly the Ngorongoro crater, though unlike Verne’s volcano, this was not erupting at the time. As the expedition was partly sponsored by the Sunday Telegraph, Smith and his amiable camera crew, Douglas Botting and Alan Root, had considerable technical back-up, and were only too grateful to rely on the help of local tribesmen, rather
than fighting them. The style of the book might be described as post-colonial jovial. The balloon itself is christened Jambo, and ballooning is presented as an eccentric European sport, whimsical rather than imperial in its manner. The next year Smith became the first Briton (following Nadar’s avatar Michel Ardan) to cross the central Alps in a balloon.
fn26 The motif of the small boy carried away by a runaway balloon is so frequent in balloon history that it has almost reached the status of a myth to rival Icarus. Most recently a boy was carried off in a home-made balloon from a farm in Colorado in 2009; though significantly this later turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by his father. Ian McEwan makes memorable use of the runaway balloon in Chapter 1 of Enduring Love (1997), where it becomes a symbol of fatality, or fatal attraction, which brilliantly predicts the themes of his entire novel. The forces at work have a kind of ‘geometrical’ inevitability, in both physics and psychology. The fate of John Logan, lifted off his feet into the air when he gallantly tries to save the boy, and subsequently dropping to his death, is a bad case of falling upwards, which leaves the witnesses racked with guilt, while the small boy himself eventually floats back to earth quite unharmed. McEwan reflects further, and mordantly, on the fatal nature of balloons in his Introduction to At the Mercy of the Winds, by David Hempleman-Adams (2001). It is clear that, like Charles Dickens before him, McEwan profoundly distrusts them, even as instruments of the imagination, and possibly for similar reasons. The result is one of the most haunting opening chapters in contemporary fiction.
fn27 Charles Green lived to follow Glaisher’s adventures, dying safely in his bed at Aerial Villa in March 1870. A ‘Green’ tomb, with a fine bas relief of a fully inflated balloon in Highgate Cemetery, East Division, is always considered his memorial. In fact it belongs to a different balloonist, Charles Green Spencer, who died twenty years later. But there is a touching connection. Charles Spencer was the eldest son of Green’s early balloon assistant Edward Spencer, who named his boy after his beloved aeronautical captain. Charles Green Spencer himself was evidently proud of his father’s connection with Green, and grew up to found a balloon-manufacturing business, Charles Green Spencer & Sons; on his death in 1890 he was described on this tomb as ‘Aeronaut of Holloway’. As in most balloon baskets, there is room enough for two. Memorials took another form when Henry Coxwell acquired the remains of the actual Nassau after Green’s death, lovingly restored it, and took it up to ten thousand feet above Holloway in Green’s honour. Green never turned his memoirs into a book, but much of the contents of the balloon portfolio that Fonvielle saw are now held in the Cuthbert-Hodgson Collection at the National Aerospace Library, Farnborough, Hampshire.
fn28 Proverbial weather sayings and dates still persist. Among the most famous are ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’ and ‘If St Swithin’s day be fine, it brings forty days of sunshine.’ By contrast, rainfall on Napoleon’s birthday indicates a wet autumn in France. Many of these weather proverbs do have a basis in scientific fact. For example a ‘red sky’ in the west at sunset indicates the presence of high-altitude cirrus of a stable, well established high-pressure or anti-cyclone system, which will continue fine weather for next twenty-four hours. The forty days of dry weather prophesied by a fine St Swithin’s day (15 July) in England is roughly the time the summer anti-cyclone pattern needs to be established by the Gulf Stream coming over the Atlantic. This high-pressure system then tends to remain, bringing fine weather until early September. If, however, it ends early, by 15 August (Napoleon’s birthday), then low pressure or cyclones tend to remain dominating the Gulf Stream for the rest of the summer, bringing cooler and less stable weather. These trends are evident on modern isobar maps, although increased melting of the North Polar ice cap in summer is predicted to alter this pattern in the future, and is already doing so around the globe. See internet ‘Climate Change’ sites of the Royal Society and the World Wildlife Fund.
fn29 To give a sense of what Glaisher’s figures meant, the height of Mount Everest, first measured by British Trigonometrical Survey in 1849, was generally accepted as 29,002 feet. It was first climbed with oxygen in 1952. It is agreed, even among trained and acclimatised modern climbers, that a ‘death zone’ commences at twenty-six thousand, almost exactly the figure of five miles given by Glaisher. At twenty-nine thousand feet air pressure is approximately one-third that at sea level, and oxygen is absorbed into the blood at one-third the normal rate. This leads to an increase in breathing rate from a normal twenty breaths per minute to sixty or more per minute, a rapid panting or hyperventilation which is itself exhausting and painful. Oxygen deprivation also leads to muscular failure, blurred eyesight, and great difficulty in thinking quickly or clearly. Glaisher remarked perceptively that under these conditions it was particularly hard to ‘take a decision’.42
fn30 Just how lethal this ascent might have proved was demonstrated over a decade later by the fatal Zénith high-altitude attempt above Paris in 1875, when two of the three aeronauts were killed. Here is the sole survivor, Gaston Tissandier’s, account of losing consciousness: ‘I now come to the fateful moments when we were overcome by the terrible action of reduced pressure (lack of oxygen). At 22,900 feet torpor had seized me. I wrote nevertheless, though I have no clear recollection of writing. We are rising. Croce is panting. Sivel shuts his eyes. Croce also shuts his eyes. At 24,600 feet the condition of torpor that overcomes one is extraordinary. Body and mind become feebler. There is no suffering. On the contrary one feels an inward joy. There is no thought of the dangerous position; one rises and is glad to be rising. I soon felt myself so weak that I could not even turn my head to look at my companions. I wished to call out that we were now at 26,000 feet, but my tongue was paralysed. All at once I shut my eyes and fell down powerless and lost all further memory.’45
fn31 The concept of atmospheric zones, or layers (‘stratos’), encircling and protecting the earth, like concentric shells or the skins of an onion, is one of the radical discoveries of nineteenth-century science. It begins with the ascents of Glaisher and Coxwell, but is not fully developed until the work of the French meteorologist and balloonist Léon Teisserenc de Bort (1855–1913) at Versailles. What is most striking about these protective skins or layers is their unexpected thinness, or fragility. In simplified form, modern meteorology divides these layers into four. First, the troposphere, capable of sustaining animal life, extends to about six miles up. Second, the stratosphere, which provides the protective ozone layer, continues up to thirty miles. Third, the mesosphere, which is the zone where meteors or ‘shooting stars’ are for the most part safely burnt, continues on to fifty miles high. Finally, the fourth layer, the ionosphere, where auroras and disruptive solar magnetic storms are largely held in check, stretches up to three hundred miles. Both birds and insects have been detected at the lower edge of the stratosphere, around seven miles up. But in general the sustaining troposphere (or ‘biosphere’) is not thick. Moreover, the upper limit of the ionosphere, where true planetary space begins, is only slightly ‘higher’ above the surface of the earth than the distance between London and Paris, or New York and Washington. The so-called ‘low-earth’ orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station remain here, on the edge of the ionosphere, around three hundred miles up. Such man-made satellites (approximately three thousand of them in 2012) represent perhaps the ultimate metamorphosis, and historic destiny, of the balloon. See Douglas Palmer, The Complete Earth: A Satellite Portrait of Our Planet (Quercus, 2006).
fn32 Glaisher’s high-altitude ascents continued to be admired by French aeronauts and meteorologists for the rest of the century. They soon aimed to rival and supersede his discoveries, as with the ill-fated Zénith team of 1875. Eventually, the term ‘stratosphere’ (‘sphere of layers’) was introduced to redefine Glaisher’s ‘upper air’ by Léon Teisserenc de Bort, head of the Central Meteorological Bureau in Paris, but not until 1899. Experimenting at similar heights to Glaisher, he sent up over two h
undred balloons from his estate at Versailles, though all of these were unmanned, and automatically parachuted back their instruments. With these de Bort confirmed that above approximately six to eight miles the temperature, which drops steadily from sea level to that altitude, remained constant, or even began to increase. This surprising data indicated the existence of a new zone, or skin, of atmosphere (a vague term originally adapted from the Greek, ‘the sphere of surrounding vapours’). In fact Glaisher had already submitted examples of these unexpected temperature gradients, though he had not specifically named the new layer. In 1902 de Bort suggested that the atmosphere was in effect divided into two shells or skins. He named the lower skin, containing breathable air and all active life, the ‘troposphere’ (the ‘sphere of changes’ – a phrase adapted from Glaisher). It was soon realised that all clouds, winds and pressure systems were largely confined to this troposphere. Thus the possibility of genuine long-range weather forecasting, on the basis of developing cyclones and anti-cyclones within this relatively narrow band, became a real possibility. But above all it was realised, as Glaisher and Coxwell had first demonstrated, how thin and fragile this vital band of planetary life really was.16
fn33 The short answer is that they are too busy migrating. Modern studies of airborne insects have continued with tethered ‘sampling’ balloons, and most recently with a special type of ‘vertical’ radar. Occasional high-altitude bird and insect flights occur close to the stratosphere. But what has been discovered most recently are massive, seasonal ‘airflow populations’ of migrating insects up to about nine thousand feet. These include moths, ladybirds, lacewings, locusts, hoverflies and ground beetles, as well as Flammarion’s fearless butterflies; and they may travel hundreds of miles. The numbers involved are astonishing, and give a wholly new idea of the richness (and hence vulnerability) of the troposphere. According to one study, a conservative estimate of the ‘total bioflow’ over a one-kilometre stretch of the southern English countryside is an astounding three billion insects per month. This is the equivalent to approximately ‘one metric ton of insect biomass’ regularly flying overhead, an idea at which Baron Munchausen would have rejoiced. The statistics are significant as they also throw light on other vital atmospheric phenomena. These include the study of bird migration patterns (especially those of swifts and swallows, which eat insects on the wing), the methods of insect navigation by magnetic field or even stars, and the impact of air pollution. As Flammarion also noticed, with fellow feeling, butterflies are more like balloonists than birds, because (above a certain height, say three hundred feet) they depend utterly on the wind currents for their heroic journeyings.24