Reach for the Skies Read online

  I’d been warned about this. My colleague Will Whitehorn, now the president of Virgin Galactic, began his career in the air-sea-rescue business, covering the oil platforms of the North Sea. He wasn’t yet working for Virgin, but I had bent his ear a few times by phone, getting advice on the sorts of safety procedures we needed for our flight. On one occasion, as we drifted off into general chat, Will said to me, “You know, it’s the weirdest thing. No one ever lets go.” He described his early training sessions to me. One of the first things you learn in air-sea rescue is to resist the urge to cling on to something if it suddenly lifts you off the ground. “It must be our monkey past or something: you suddenly get it into your head that the trees are safer than the ground, and up you go.”

  The urge to cling has killed hundreds over the years, and no matter how hard you train, or how experienced you are, you can never entirely learn your way out of the habit. In 1983, Per dislocated his shoulder after falling 30 feet off a rope he should never have held on to. If even Per can be blindsided by this dangerous urge, then no one is immune. He jumped off the Virgin Atlantic Flyer; I stayed behind.

  Per is built like a grizzly bear; with him gone, the balloon was about 200 pounds lighter. Once more, and for the final time, it rocketed into the air. I watched the sea fall away beneath me; seconds later, fog enveloped everything.

  “The last time I had jumped, I had pulled the wrong release tag and jettisoned my parachute.”

  I was as good as dead.

  Alone in charge of the balloon, I fought down my mounting panic. I figured that if only I could get to 8,000 feet, I could parachute off the capsule. Then it occurred to me: if I came down with the capsule, I would have a better chance of being spotted. My parachuting technique wasn’t faultless. The last time

  I had jumped, I had pulled the wrong release tag and jettisoned my parachute, and the skydivers around me had had to help me activate my reserve. (They later presented me with a Wally of the Year award. I accepted with a grin, thankful still to be alive.)

  No: better to stay with the capsule, bring it down as slowly as I could, and jump off at the last moment. Looking back, this was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I was lucky, too, of course: as I came out through the bottom of the clouds, I saw the gray sea below me—and I also saw an RAF helicopter!

  I waited until I was just above the sea. I pulled my life-jacket ripcord and hurled myself into the water. It was like diving into knives, it was so cold. The life jacket brought me back to the surface and righted me. I turned and watched the balloon. Without my weight, it soared back up like a magnificent spaceship and vanished in the clouds.

  Incredibly, Per survived. He was picked up by a dinghy two hours after jumping into the ocean without his life vest. He was airlifted to the same ship as I was, and when I saw him his face was as white as flour and he couldn’t stop his teeth chattering.

  I think of that moment, and I think of all the pioneers who came before us and who came so near to perishing. I think of Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the first man to cross the Channel by air, hurling his trousers into the sea in a frantic attempt to arrest the descent of his balloon. I think of the passengers on board Le Géant, the largest balloon ever constructed, clinging for dear life to the furniture aboard a gondola so grand and heavy it smashed down trees during its forced descent.

  Researching these stories, I’ve noticed something disturbing: the earlier the exploit, the more cartoonlike it appears. The passage of time has robbed these adventures of their reality. The terror and horror of these incidents has leached away until, in many cases, only the absurdity is left. Will our own desperate dunking in the Atlantic one day seem like Blanchard’s—merely quaint? Merely amusing? Probably.

  That may be why we regard the prehistory of flight with such incredulity. We just can’t believe so many people would risk their necks in projects that, with hindsight, were so obviously doomed to failure. Still, the many accounts that exist worldwide of prodigious flights from mountain heights, minarets, and belfries speak for themselves. No doubt these stories are seriously exaggerated, but there are too many for us to dismiss them altogether. Long before the Montgolfiers built their first balloon, people risked their lives in pursuit of the dream of flight.

  Peru’s ancient Nazca Lines make sense only from the air—so whom were they for?

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  Lighter than Air

  Scratched upon Peru’s vast, barren Nazca Plains are hundreds of long, ruler-straight lines: the work of people who lived about 1,500 years ago. From the ground, Nazca is totally incomprehensible. From the air, it’s the world’s most astonishing and haunting art gallery—a surreal collection of huge geometric symbols and giant drawings of birds and animals.

  In 1973, an American called Jim Woodman visited the site. Woodman had a theory. Quechua—a language spoken in the Nazca area—has a word for “balloon maker.” A pottery shard discovered on the site contains a design remarkably like a balloon. In Guatemala, village rituals included the construction and launch of small, smoke-filled balloons. South American balloons have been around for a long time. Were they ever big enough to carry people? Were they big enough and controllable enough to allow the Nazca people to map out their extraordinary art from the air?

  It all came down to materials. The Montgolfiers succeeded where their precursors had failed because, as paper makers, they had access to the finest papers, linens, and varnishes. Did the Nazca Indians boast any remotely airtight materials?

  Jim Woodman’s research led him to the village of Cahuachi, not far from Nazca. There, the ancient dead of the village are wrapped in burial shrouds, some of them 1,500 years old—and the older the shroud, the finer the weave! In 1975, Miami’s International Explorers Society, using only traditional tools, wove a gondola out of reeds from Lake Titicaca and constructed an enormous tetrahedron balloon from fabric virtually identical to that used to make ancient burial shrouds. On a clear spring day in 1975, Condor I was prepared for launch.

  To pilot the craft, Jim Woodman was joined by Englishman Julian Nott, a professional balloonist who’s since amassed 79 world ballooning records and 96 British aviation records. The trouble was that Nott, like Woodman, was more than six feet tall, so they had to straddle the gondola rather than sit inside it. Neither wore a parachute. A tar fire was used to fill the envelope with hot smoke, and when the safety lines were released, the balloon rocketed up at around 18 feet per second. Condor I reached 380 feet above the Nazca Plains and drifted for a good minute and a half.

  Afterward, Julian Nott was careful not to claim too much for the experiment, but his account is inspiring:[W]hile I do not see any evidence that the Nazca civilisation did fly, it is beyond any doubt that they could have. And so could the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Vikings, any civilisation. With just a loom and fire you can fly! This raises intriguing questions about the development of science and, most of all, the intellectual courage to dare to fly, to dare to invade the territory of the Angels.

  Of the 16 children born to the Montgolfier family, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne were not the most likely business partners. Joseph was a maverick and a dreamer, hopeless in business. Étienne was severe, dapper, responsible, and a bit dull.

  One night in 1777, as his laundry dried over a fire, Joseph noticed pockets forming under the material. The next day (this, anyway, is the story) he set about building a box out of very thin wood. He covered the sides and top with lightweight taffeta cloth, and under the bottom of the box he lit some crumpled paper. The contraption lifted off its stand and collided with the ceiling.

  He wrote to his brother, “Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.”

  The mental leap from laundry to ballooning was not a large one. The Montgolfier family had been making paper since the fourteenth century, and Joseph and Étienne had learned their trade well. They knew about advances in paper and fabric production. They had an intimate
working knowledge of new coatings and resins and finishes. And they had nearly a century of aeronautical designs and experiments to draw from—projects, mainly French and Italian, that had been nudging ever more closely toward achieving manned flight by balloon.

  Perhaps it occurred to Joseph as he watched his laundry billowing that, after centuries of waiting, the materials necessary for manned flight were at last available. Whether of silk or paper, envelope materials could now be made that were light, strong, and relatively leakproof. What used to be toys could now be scaled up.

  And how! The first (unmanned) balloon the brothers made was so buoyant, they lost control of it on its very first test flight. Their next model, which weighed about a quarter of a ton, took to the air on June 4, 1783. While it was filling with smoke it “seemed only a covering of cloth, lined with paper, a sort of sack 35 feet high,” wrote Fulgence Marion in 1874. (“Fulgence Marion” is the none-too-cryptic pseudonym for Nicolas Camille Flammarion, the celebrated French astronomer and spiritualist. Flammarion researched his short, popular history of early flight well; it would go on to feed the imaginations of writers from Mark Twain to Edgar Rice Burroughs.)

  As it inflated, however, the brothers’ balloon “grew large even under the eyes of the spectator, took consistence, assumed a beautiful form, stretched itself on all sides, and struggled to escape. Meanwhile, strong arms were holding it down until the signal was given, when it loosened itself, and with a rush rose to the height of 1,000 fathoms in less than ten minutes.”

  Seeing the thing cover two kilometers and reach about the same height, official onlookers quickly passed the word to Paris.

  Meanwhile, amid the hubbub generated by these unmanned balloon launches, and with the promise of a manned flight just a few weeks away, the French physicist Louis-Sébastien Lenormand was working on a different but closely related problem: assuming you could get up in the air, how exactly were you going to get down again?

  The history of modern parachuting is exactly as long as the history of modern ballooning, and for the obvious reason. Balloons do not “land”; they crash. Half the art of ballooning is to make your crashes so gentle that you can fool yourself into calling them landings. In any event, you have no fine control over the process. Designing a reliable escape vehicle was essential, and work began on the task even before manned balloons left the ground.

  Lenormand’s first experiment was not calculated to win any science prizes. He simply jumped out of a tree clutching two umbrellas. When that did not kill him, he went on to build a 14-foot parachute with a rigid wooden frame. On December 26, 1783, he jumped from the tower of the Montpellier Observatory. He landed uninjured. Among the cheering crowds was Joseph Montgolfier: the balloon pioneer had come along to judge this interesting bit of safety equipment for himself!

  Lenormand’s rigid parachute: a promising safety feature for pioneering balloonists!

  On their arrival in Paris, the Montgolfier brothers set to work on their next unmanned balloon demonstration. They collaborated with wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon to build an envelope of fireproof taffeta to carry three animals aloft: a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. (The sheep was thought to have a roughly human physiology. The duck, unlikely to be harmed by altitude, would come to harm only if something about the balloon flight itself proved dangerous. The rooster—a bird that spends its life on the ground—was included as a further control.)

  On September 19, 1783, before a huge crowd at the royal palace in Versailles that included Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI of France (who couldn’t see the point of the animals and had wanted to send condemned criminals up instead), the flight was a barnstorming success. It covered two miles at an altitude of about 1,500 feet and landed safely.

  Following the successful demonstration at Versailles came several tethered manned flights. By the end of October 1783, three passengers had been lifted up to 99 meters (325 feet) into the air: the physics and chemistry teacher Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the wallpaper magnate Réveillon, and Giroud de Villette, another wallpaper manufacturer from Madrid.

  Now Étienne started construction of a truly monstrous envelope—nearly two cubic kilometers in size, painted and gilded and decorated with streamers—to carry people into the air in free flight. Even as the brothers prepared for their first untethered manned launch, a significant rival was snapping at their heels. His name was Jacques Charles, a bureaucrat who, inspired by the writings of American inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin, had given up his civil-service career to pursue a scientific one.

  Charles was no mere also-ran. He had a wholly different way of getting balloons into the air. Rather than inflate his balloon with hot air, he planned to fill it with a rare and expensive gas. Hydrogen, 16 times lighter than air, had been discovered seven years before by the British scientist Henry Cavendish. Charles—a firm favorite on the Paris lecture circuit—delighted in filling soap bubbles with hydrogen, watching them rise, and then setting a match to them, causing small explosions. There was a serious point to these demonstrations: Charles believed that hydrogen gas would one day lift people into the skies—and he was determined to be the first passenger. His first task was to create a balloon envelope capable of holding hydrogen for any length of time. The Montgolfiers’ varnished taffeta balloons were not especially airtight, and a lighter gas like hydrogen would escape even faster than ordinary air would, making flight impossible. If you’ve filled regular balloons with helium for a children’s party, you’ll probably have noticed that they shrink and shrivel after just a few hours. That’s because atoms of helium are lighter than the atoms that make up the air and work their way through the rubber much more easily. Hydrogen atoms are lighter still.

  Charles joined forces with the brothers Anne-Jean and Marie-Noël Robert, who had found a way to coat fabric with natural rubber. A couple of months before the Montgolfier balloon’s first manned voyage, Charles and his assistants constructed a balloon of rubber-coated taffeta, 12 feet in diameter, and set about filling it with hydrogen. Getting this was the hard part. Hydrogen was so expensive to make, a public subscription was started in Paris to help the team afford the 1,125 pounds of iron and 560 pounds of sulfuric acid they needed—all to inflate a balloon that could barely lift 22 pounds. The filling took four hours!

  On the morning of August 26, 1783, a day before the launch, workmen maneuvered the balloon out of the Robert brothers’ workshop and secured it to a wagon, “surrounded on all sides by eager multitudes,” so that “the night-patrols, both of horse and foot, which were set to guard the avenues leading to where it lay, were quite unable to stem the tide of human beings that poured along to get a glimpse of it.” Marion’s account gives a great sense of the occasion: “A vanguard, with lighted torches, preceded it; it was surrounded by special attendants, and was followed by detachments of night-patrols on foot and mounted. The size and shape of this structure, which was escorted with such pomp and precaution—the silence that prevailed—the unearthly hour, all helped to give an air of mystery to the proceedings.”

  Troops were stationed around the Champ de Mars, and as the day wore on,an immense crowd covered the open space, and every advantageous spot in the neighborhood was crowded with people. At five o’clock the report of a cannon announced to the multitudes, and to scientific men who were posted on elevations to make observations of the great event, that the grand moment had come. The cords were withdrawn, and, to the vast delight and wonder of the crowd assembled, the balloon shot up with such rapidity that in two minutes it had ascended 488 fathoms [more than 2,900 feet]. At this height it was lost in a cloud for an instant, and, reappearing, rose to a great height, and was again lost in higher clouds.

  And there the story might have ended, had the team not made a crucial error: they had sealed the bottom of their balloon.

  They must have imagined that their expensive hydrogen gas would somehow have escaped from the balloon had they left the bottom open. But since hydrogen is so m
uch lighter than air, this was never going to happen. In sealing the envelope, Charles and the brothers Robert had in fact guaranteed a rather spectacular end to their balloon’s maiden flight. The higher it rose, the less pressure was exerted by the surrounding air, and this drop in pressure allowed the gas inside the balloon to expand. Had the balloon been left open at the bottom, the rapidly expanding gas could simply have vented out of the bottom. As it was, the envelope stretched, and stretched . . .

  Having swept virtually unnoticed over the French countryside, the balloon burst right over the heads of “a number of peasants, whose terror at the sight and the sound of this strange monster from the skies was beyond description.” A couple of local monks hurried to the scene to make things worse, telling the startled crowd that had gathered around the wreckage that it was the hide of a monstrous animal, at which point “they immediately began to assail it vigorously with stones, flails, and pitchforks . . . They finally attached the burst envelope to a horse’s tail, and dragged it far across the fields.”

  Shock of the new: fearful peasants tore the world’s first gas balloon to shreds.

  The king, who’d been following Charles’s experiment closely, rushed through a proclamation explaining the experiments. It was headed “Warning to the People on Kidnapping Air-Balloons.”

  On November 21, 1783, dressed in blue velvet suits and wearing plumed hats, Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier and the soldier François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, became the first men ever to ascend to the skies in untethered flight. Their vehicle was a hot-air balloon constructed by Étienne Montgolfier: the brothers had won the race to build the first manned aircraft.

  It was quite a sight. The upper part of their balloon was embroidered with fleurs-de-lis and the signs of the zodiac. The design around the middle alternated the king’s monogram with images of the sun. The lower part was a chaos of masks, garlands, and spread eagles. A circular gallery “made of osiers [willows] and festooned with draperies and other ornaments” hung off the bottom of the balloon.