means and a literary symbol of industrialisation. By contrast, ballooning would come to be seen as essentially bucolic, even pastoral. It was silent, decorative, exclusive, and refreshingly unreliable: a means to mysterious adventure rather than a mode of mundane travel.1 fn11
So, at this very time of the railway boom, a new kind of flying was starting to capture people’s imagination. It was marked by the emergence of what might be called the ‘recreational’ balloon. These were increasingly large, sophisticated and well-equipped aerostats, designed to take several paying passengers, and with luck to make a profit for their owners. Though they were commercial propositions, they retained an ineffable romance. They often had ‘royal’ in their names, in deference to the new young Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837.
They were recreational balloons in several senses, constructed and flown by a new breed of balloon businessmen and entertainers, aerial entrepreneurs who regarded themselves as skilled professionals as well as artists of the air. Crucial to their commercial success was the discovery that coal gas, cheap and reliable and easily available from the urban ‘mains’, could be substituted for expensive and unstable hydrogen. Their most memorable flights would also be over urban landscapes.
Drifting silently above London or Paris, or any of the industrialised centres of northern Europe, they granted their passengers a new and instructive kind of panorama. They revealed the extraordinary and largely unsuspected metamorphosis of these cities, with their new industries and their hugely increased populations. What they found spread out below them had never been seen before in history. It was both magnificent and monstrous: an endless panorama of factories, slums, churches, railway lines, smoke, smog, gas lighting, boulevards, parks, wharfs, and the continuous amazing exhalation of city sounds and smells. Above all, what they saw from ‘the angel’s perspective’ was the evident and growing divisions between wealth and poverty, between West End and East End, between blaze and glimmer.
2
The most celebrated British balloonist of this second generation was Charles Green (1785–1870). He was famed for his 526 successful ascents, and his absolute sang-froid in emergency. An annual Charles Green Silver Salver is awarded to this day by the British Balloon and Airship Club for the most impressive technical flight of the year. Green’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery presents him like a plain, good natured farmer. He sits stiffly at a window, with his famous striped Royal Nassau balloon hanging in the sky above his right shoulder. His image is rendered with the solidity and simplicity of an English pub sign. Yet his character was far from straightforward: a curious mixture of earth and air, of ballast and inflammable gas, of the worldly and the visionary.
Everyone agreed that the stocky and rubicund Green was jovial and easy-going on the ground. Yet he became strangely fierce and commanding in the air, a veritable martinet. This kind of Janus-like character can sometimes be found among amateur yachtsmen – twinkling and expansive in the club bar, but fiery authoritarians at the helm. It has perhaps something to do with the loneliness and stress of command. In ordinary company, a contemporary journalist found Green ‘garrulous, and delighting all with his intelligence, his enterprise, his enthusiasm and his courtesy’. But once installed in the aerial kingdom of his balloon basket, he became ‘taciturn, and almost irritable’, rarely speaking, but always ready to ‘roar out’ commands at crucial moments of manoeuvring or landing. Apart from his balloon logbooks, he left few, if any, written accounts of his own flights. Yet he inspired others to do so, and many of the classic descriptions of Victorian ballooning, especially over London, by John Poole (1838), Albert Smith (1847) and Henry Mayhew (1852), were written after memorable voyages with Charles Green.4
Green came from a family of fruit merchants, based in Goswell Street on the edge of the City of London. This was, and still is, a bustling district of small businesses and shops, modest houses and working cafés. It is where Dickens’s Pickwick Papers begins, with Mr Pickwick leaning out of his lodging windows onto Goswell Street and greeting ‘that punctual servant of all work, the sun’ on a cheerful morning in 1827. How or when Green became fascinated by ballooning remains a mystery. Fruit and veg do not seem an obvious source of aerial longings. He would only say that ballooning started as a hobby, after he had been trying to improve the gas lighting in the family shop. Possibly the idea for using mains coal gas to inflate a balloon came to him during these experiments.5
Born in 1785, Green was working full-time in his father’s shop from the age of fifteen, and little is known about his earliest flights until 1821, when he was approaching forty. It would seem that he began ballooning when he was already a successful businessman, perhaps as a kind of sport, and was determined to find a way around the huge expense of hydrogen. He made his first ascent using coal gas, from the newly installed Piccadilly mains, launching from Green Park in London on 19 July 1821. But Green must already have had some reputation as a balloonist, for the launch was part of the public celebrations for the coronation of George IV, the balloon was decorated with the royal arms, and the site at Green Park was close to St James’s Palace. This was not usually a place of popular entertainment, and the ascent must have been officially sanctioned and even subsidised.
Green gradually established himself as part of a new generation of professional balloonists. They could hire out their services, and their balloons, to any employer or institution who wanted to celebrate a special occasion or mark a notable event. But initially Green still had to put on novelty shows like Garnerin, and he is recorded as ascending on the back of a horse harnessed to his balloon hoop from the Eagle Tavern, City Road, in August 1828. This was the same tavern from which Lieutenant Harris and Miss Stocks had launched their fatal flight four years previously.
A friend gave a whimsical description of Green in these early fairground days, going aloft on the back of a pony, while feeding him by hand with beans. He added a brief biography of the pony’s career with Green: ‘Finally having experienced more ups and downs than any horse, perhaps, that ever existed, he quitted a life of public service, and was buried in the garden of his master at Highgate where he now reposes.’6
What made Green exceptional, quite apart from his flying skills, was his ability as a businessman. He drastically reduced the cost of commercial ballooning by negotiating an agreement with the London Gas Light and Coke Company to purchase coal gas to power his balloons. The concept of using ‘pit-coal’ gas for ballooning was not new, and had been recommended by Tiberius Cavallo in his Aerostation study as long ago as 1785. But it took Victorian technology and enterprise to apply it. The London Gas Company had itself only been founded in 1812, but within five years it had laid nearly thirty miles of gas mains, and a decade later had more than enough capacity to inflate Green’s balloons.
Green had calculated, using experiments with small models, that household coal gas was about half as effective as hydrogen, but less than a third of the cost. A seventy-thousand-cubic-foot balloon would cost £250 to inflate with hydrogen, but only about £80 with coal gas. It was also much quicker and safer to use, as it was delivered under pressure by the urban gas mains, which also supplied street lamps and public buildings.7
By 1835 Green had made over two hundred ascents, and established himself as the leading professional balloonist in Britain. He had also invented a new piece of balloon technology: the trail rope. This was a simple, self-regulating ballast device, which allowed a gas balloon to adjust its own height when flying at altitudes below five hundred feet. Made of heavy manila cordage, the trail rope was winched out of the basket and simply left to drag along the ground several hundred feet below. Whenever the balloon dropped closer to the ground, more trail rope – and hence more ballast weight – was transferred from the balloon basket to the earth.
