Reach for the Skies Page 5

  Most balloons these days carry their passengers in a gondola or a basket, suspended directly below the open mouth of the balloon. De Rozier and d’Arlandes, however, had much more room to move around. Their three-foot-wide circular gallery ran around the mouth of the balloon and was protected on the outside by a parapet over three feet high. Below the gallery, and directly under the mouth of the balloon, there hung an iron grating. The balloon had been inflated by smoke from a fire pit on the ground. The fire had heated the iron grating to the point that, once up in the air, it would set light to any fuel dropped upon it. By throwing dried straw and wool onto the grating, the men could keep their machine afloat. That, at any rate, was the theory.

  “I was surprised at the silence and the absence of movement which our departure caused among the spectators,” wrote d’Arlandes later. “I was still gazing, when M. Rozier cried to me, ‘You are doing nothing, and the balloon is scarcely rising a fathom.’

  “‘Pardon me,’ I answered, as I placed a bundle of straw upon the fire and slightly stirred it.”

  Try as he might, de Rozier just couldn’t get d’Arlandes to concentrate. Halfway through the marquis’s spellbound recitation of all the bends of the Seine laid out below him (“Passy, St. Germain, St. Denis, Sèvres . . .”), Rozier snapped, “If you look at the river in that fashion you will be likely to bathe in it soon. Some fire, my dear friend, some fire!”

  After 25 minutes the machine landed among windmills, outside the city walls.

  The Montgolfiers had won, beating Charles’s team to the launchpad—but only by a hair’s breadth. A mere ten days after de Rozier and d’Arlandes made their first manned flight, Charles and Marie-Noël Robert ascended to a height of about 1,800 feet in his hydrogen balloon, La Charlière, “its beautiful emerald color showing to fine effect in the sun.”

  Coming in second did not do Charles any real harm. His balloon designs came to dominate the field. Most contemporary engravings, ornaments, and decorations commemorate not the Montgolfiers’ balloon but Charles’s. Model charlières filled the Paris skies, the envelopes made of a very thin parchment called goldbeater’s skin. “The whole of Paris amused itself with them, repeating in little the phenomenon of the great ascent,” writes Marion. “The sky of the capital found itself all at once traversed by a multitude of small rosy clouds, formed by the hand of man.” So many people were injured trying to make hydrogen for these toys that in the end the government stepped in and banned them.

  Charles and the Montgolfiers became the toast of France. Their pioneering balloon projects were a sensation. Along with the engravings commemorating the event, chairs with balloon backs, balloon-shaped mantel clocks, and balloon-painted crockery filled the interiors of Europe. There were commemorative knickknacks to suit every pocket. Balloons found their way into everything, from cuisine to coiffure. The hairstyles had great names: you could walk out of the salon à la Montgolfier, au globe volant, au demi-ballon, or à l’air inflammable!

  In 1784, the year following these two epoch-making launches, 52 balloon ascents were made.

  Drunk on their first victory over gravity, pioneers raced to haul heavier and heavier contraptions into the air. On January 19, 1784, Joseph Montgolfier took seven people up in a real monster. Le Flesselles boasted a gallery 72 feet in circumference. Its seats were 4 feet wide and 8 apart. Its furnace, 20 feet in diameter, burned bundles of sticks and straw. It was so big, and there were so many people crawling over and around the thing, that when it launched, a young man called Fontaine was accidentally included in the party.

  Incredibly, it did manage to get off the ground, and rose to a very creditable 3,000 feet, before the envelope tore and the whole lot came down, none too gently, less than a quarter of a mile from its starting point.

  A healthy rivalry persisted between Charles and the Montgolfiers. The teams were rivals, but there was never any animosity. They publicly complimented each other’s efforts and sometimes shared technical information.

  One of the Montgolfier brothers’ balloonists, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was, like Charles, a physics teacher who gave private lectures about the new field of gases. It was while studying Charles’s system and comparing it to the one he had already flown that de Rozier was seized by an idea. Here were two kinds of balloon, one filled with hot air, the other with a flammable gas. Why not combine the two?

  Charles warned de Rozier that he was simply “putting fire beside powder,” but Rozier would not listen. The royal court had given Rozier funds to develop his own balloon system and had begun to press him for results.

  De Rozier’s system consisted of two balloons, one inside the other. The bigger, outer balloon was filled with hydrogen. The inner envelope was a hot-air balloon (or montgolfière). The outer hydrogen balloon provided most of the lift. The hot-air “core” was used to control the altitude of the flight. Stoking the fire under the hot-air balloon would increase the amount of hot air in the balloon, swelling it and making it rise. As the balloon rose, the fall in air pressure and the warmth of the sun would make the hydrogen in the outer envelope expand, increasing the balloon’s rate of climb. At this point, the fire could be damped down, reducing the speed of ascent. Damping the fire even further would cause it to descend. “It is probable,” writes Marion, “that, by the addition of a montgolfière, [de Rozier] wished to free himself from the necessity of having to throw over ballast when he wished to ascend and to let off this gas when he wished to descend. The fire of the montgolfière might, he probably supposed, be so regulated as to enable him to rise or fall at will.”

  Staying in the air for a long time was important to de Rozier, because he was interested in setting endurance records. For starters, he wanted to be the first to cross the English Channel. De Rozier and his companion Pierre Romain were ready to make the attempt by the autumn of 1784, but technical difficulties and bad weather delayed them by almost a year, by which time another Frenchman, Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard, and his American companion, Dr. John Jeffries, had already crossed the Channel in a hydrogen-gas balloon.

  De Rozier and Romain pressed ahead, convinced that their design would eventually revolutionize ballooning. They set off from Boulogne-sur-Mer on June 15, 1785.

  “The theory,” Monck Mason comments dryly, “was correct; the error lay in the application.” After about half an hour—and with the wind obstinately forcing the balloon back to shore—the watching crowd noticed that de Rozier and Romain were showing “signs of alarm.” They quickly lowered the lid over their brazier; but it was too late.

  De Rozier had underestimated his hydrogen’s rate of expansion as the balloon rose and the surrounding air pressure dropped: “The inflammable contents of the larger sphere soon filled the vacant portions of the silk, and pouring down the tube which formed the neck of his balloon speedily reached the furnace, which was disposed at its lower extremity, and became ignited.”

  The result: an almighty bang. De Rozier and Romain fell onto the rocks at a spot between Calais and Boulogne. “The dead body of Rozier was found burnt in the gallery, many of the bones being broken. His companion was still breathing, but he was not able to speak, and in a few minutes he expired.”

  De Rozier died 200 years before his radical balloon designs came of age.

  The first balloonist to cross the Channel, Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard, was one of those people who likes to know where he’s going. Though celebrated today for his Channel crossing, Blanchard had his sights set much higher. He wanted to invent the world’s first truly practical flying machine and devoted his long and colorful ballooning career to the problem of motive power. He dreamed of airships—and they were all extraordinarily silly.

  Blanchard was born on July 4, 1753, in Petit Andelys, near Paris. Fleeing his poverty-stricken home while still a teenager, he tinkered his way to the top. His youthful inventions included a rat trap with a pistol, and a primitive bicycle. He was not a natural balloonist. He was much more interested in heavier-than-air fl
ight and struggled for a long time with designs for a manually powered airplane and helicopter. By 1782 he was exhibiting a sort of flying boat—”a machine furnished with oars and rigging, with which he managed to sustain himself some moments in the air at the height of eighty feet.”

  Still, like everyone else, Blanchard was bowled over by the Montgolfier brothers’ 1783 demonstrations of hot-air ballooning in their hometown of Annonay, and it occurred to him that balloon technology might help him develop the power systems he needed for his aircraft. Blanchard’s appetite for forward motion blinded him to virtually every other consideration. Though in other respects a gifted engineer, he showed a remarkable lack of sense when it came to handling air. He thought he could row through it!

  Some ideas seem crazy only to later, better-informed generations. Others are just plain stupid. When, toward the end of 1783, Étienne began toying with the idea, Joseph wrote: “For my sake, my good friend, reflect; calculate well before you employ oars. Oars must either be great or small; if great, they will be heavy; if small, it will be necessary to move them with great rapidity.” Already, Joseph understood the cardinal rule of ballooning: the only way you can steer is by controlling your height, catching different winds at different altitudes.

  On March 2, 1784, Blanchard and his companion Pesch, a Benedictine priest, prepared to launch their charlière (a hydrogen-gas balloon) from the Champ de Mars in Paris. Pesch had escaped from prison to be on the flight, having defied a formal instruction from his order forbidding travel on this “Devil’s invention.” Sad to say, he never got to fly. The launch was disrupted and almost canceled because of the actions of a disturbed young man, for years supposed to be the young Napoleon Bonaparte. (The rumor proved so persistent and annoying, Napoleon mentions it in his memoirs, declaring once and for all that it wasn’t him but merely an old school chum of his, Dupont de Chambon.)

  De Chambon demanded to ride in Blanchard’s balloon, and when the pilots refused, he drew his sword and leaped into the basket. He sliced open Blanchard’s hand, cut the rigging, and, before the police managed to drag him away, broke Blanchard’s taffeta-bladed “oars.” The balloon was quickly refitted, and the launch went ahead the same day—but with only Blanchard on board. (When Pesch’s order caught up with him, they exiled him to the remotest monastery they had.)

  Blanchard’s own account of his flight is a calculated and vivid bit of self-promotion. (He had, after all, to attract sponsors if he was ever to fly again. Gas balloons were far from cheap.) His wilder claims include improvising a sail in midflight to propel his balloon through the air! This is pure nonsense, since, as Fulgence Marion points out, “the whole machine, globes and sails, being freely thrown into the air, would infallibly follow the direction of the wind, whatever that might be.”

  Whether or not he really did try to rig a sail, Blanchard soon had other things to worry about: “The rays of the sun had so heated and rarefied the inflammable air that soon I forgot my rigging in thinking of the terrible danger that threatened me.” Now this bit is certainly true: Blanchard had, like Charles before him, sealed the bottom of his balloon! And as he rose, so the atmospheric pressure dropped, causing his balloon to swell to its bursting point. (There is, as I explained a few pages back, no need to seal the bottom of a hydrogen or helium balloon. Those gases are lighter than air, so they’re never going to spill out of the bottom. Blanchard picked one hell of a moment to find this out.)

  Once he’d resolved this problem, Blanchard “mounted perpendicularly.”

  The cold became excessive . . . The silence became appalling, and to add to my alarm I began to lose consciousness. I now wished to take snuff, but found I had left my box behind me. I changed my seat many times; I went from prow to stern, but the drowsiness only ceased to assail me when I was struck by two furious winds, which compressed my balloon to such an extent that its size became sensibly diminished to the eye. I was not sorry when I began to descend rapidly upon the river.

  Blanchard’s faculties returned to him: in particular, his ability to spin yarns. Despite the fact that the lunatic de Chambon had destroyed his oars, he insisted that “the fear that I should have to descend into [a river] made me agitate the oars very rapidly. I believe that it is to these movements that I owe my being able to cross the river transversely, and get above dry land.”

  Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard seeks sponsorship for his self-propelled balloon.

  Blanchard’s first voyage lasted 75 minutes. It was a considerable achievement—but Blanchard would keep banging on about those oars! It made his contemporaries wince. The physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, who had watched the whole thing, quickly and loudly contradicted Blanchard’s claim that he had in any way sailed or rowed through the air. Blanchard stuck to his guns. He knew that whoever came up with a way of directing balloons from point to point would clean up in the sponsorship stakes and the European after-dinner circuit. In Paris, however, the competition for sponsors was intense. The solution: move to London. That great capital had yet to launch a manned flight. There was his opportunity!

  On September 15, 1784, just a few weeks after Blanchard stepped off the ferry, the Italian Vincenzo Lunardi flew from London to Ware, in Hertfordshire, a total distance of nearly 25 miles and the first air voyage of any great distance. Overnight, Lunardi became the darling of London, his name splashed across the front pages, his courage extolled in popular song. Worse still, Lunardi had equipped himself with oars!

  Luckily, however, he had dropped one oar as he took off, so Blanchard’s own tales of rowing and sailing through the air still met with enthusiasm in the drawing rooms of London. For British sponsors, Blanchard represented an excellent catch-up opportunity: the first self-propelled balloons would be British!

  I suspect that by now, Blanchard was falling victim to his own wishful thinking. Of his first (solo) flight in the United Kingdom he insists that he had to row his way back to earth, “and in fifteen to twenty minutes I arrived . . . after much fatigue, my strength being nearly exhausted.” Flying alone, I suppose it would be possible to convince yourself of all manner of things. With passengers, however, it’s a different story. Imagine rowing your way to earth in front of a keen witness—or, even more challenging, a skeptical sponsor!

  Blanchard went to considerable effort never to carry anyone else on his flights. On October 16, 1784, he was due to fly with a celebrated and eccentric anatomist called John Sheldon. To the wicker car of his balloon Blanchard “had fitted a sort of ventilator, which he was able to move about by means of a winch. This ventilator, together with the wings and the helm, were to serve especially the purpose of steering at will, which he had often said was quite practicable as soon as a certain elevation had been reached.”

  All this, not to mention “a number of scientific and musical instruments, some refreshments, ballast, &c.,” kept the balloon stubbornly earthbound until, finally, Sheldon disembarked. At last, the balloon had enough buoyancy to rise. “After many vicissitudes,” writes Marion, “[Blanchard] landed upon a plain in Hampshire, about seventy-five miles from the point of departure. It was observed that, so long as he could be clearly seen, he executed none of the feats with his wings, ventilator, &c., which he had promised to exhibit.”

  At the time, no one read too much into Sheldon’s disappointed ejection from the balloon. By the time Blanchard was preparing to “row” across the English Channel, however, the penny was beginning to drop.

  Dr. John Jeffries, a Bostonian living in England, put up the money for this project—easily the most exciting of the year—on the condition that he came along for the ride. Blanchard did everything he could to put his sponsor off. He even drew up a contract stating that Jeffries agreed to throw himself overboard “if necessary for the success of the flight.”

  Jeffries called Blanchard’s bluff, and signed. After that the men’s relationship deteriorated into open warfare. Blanchard, who was preparing his balloon at Dover Castle, on the Kent coast, barricaded the camp. In re
sponse, Jeffries hired a party of sailors to storm the fortress.

  On January 7, 1785, the balloon was carried to the edge of the cliffs at Dover, and Blanchard let Jeffries into the car. Lo and behold, the balloon refused to lift. Blanchard announced that they were carrying too much weight: Jeffries would have to go. Jeffries examined the vehicle. Then he examined his copilot. Blanchard was wearing a lead belt.

  With that disposed of, the balloon rose into the air over the cliffs of Dover: a small, black, boat-shaped gondola complete with rudder, four wings, and bright, silk-covered oars. Silence reigned. For hours, the men barely spoke to one another.

  They weren’t halfway across the Channel when the balloon began to lose height. This didn’t seem a problem at first. They had, after all, plenty to throw away: a telescope, a clock, a small scientific library, musical instruments, works of art . . . By the time they were three quarters of the way across, they were throwing out letters, life jackets, and ropes. Blanchard decided to row for it. He grabbed the gondola’s silken oars and flailed at the air. Jeffries attempted to steer with the rudder. We don’t know which of them first suggested dismantling this rubbish and throwing it into the ocean, but over it went.

  The balloon kept on sinking. Now the car was skipping across the waves. They threw their coats away. They threw away the letters they were carrying. They threw away their trousers. They took turns to piss into an empty bottle and threw it overboard. And, with painful slowness, the balloon began to rise.

  Half frozen and clad only in their underwear, Blanchard and Jeffries landed in a forest near Ardres, not far outside Calais. When they got to town, Jeffries reached into his underpants and pulled out a crumpled letter addressed to Temple Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. It was the first-ever airmail.