a very neat form of homeostatic device, typical of Green’s supremely practical turn of mind. He never attempted to patent it, and it was soon employed by aeronauts across Europe.
Of course the trail rope could not be used over cities, or any kind of built-up or industrialised area. But apart from London and the sea ports, the cathedral cities of the shires and the manufacturing towns of the Midlands, England was still very largely a rural landscape. So Green employed his trail rope with what now seems amazing insouciance across the whole countryside: dragging it crashing through lines of trees and hedgerows, hissing across fields of crops or cattle, and not infrequently lifting the odd tile or slab of stonework from church roofs or isolated barns. This was a land still without barbed wire, let alone telegraph lines or electrical pylons, and the trail rope suggests a lost age of open parklands, isolated villages and largely unpopulated countryside.fn12 If he descended on a gentleman’s estate, Green could expect immediate help from the estate labourers, and usually a warm welcome and much hospitality from the squire at the great house. The balloon was in its own way an old-fashioned expression of pastoral values and pleasures.
But it was also a commercial proposition. In 1836 Green negotiated an agreement with Frederick Gye and Richard Hughes, proprietors of the immensely popular Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, on the banks of the Thames, to supply balloon events as part of the garden’s attractions to Londoners, alongside brass bands, food stalls and horse-riding. Balloons were also a superb new means of publicity. For the next twenty years Vauxhall became associated with spectacular balloon launches, and various balloon dramas, until it was finally closed in 1859.
Part of Green’s contract provided him with the finances to construct to his own specification a huge eighty-foot-high coal-gas balloon with a seventy-thousand-cubic-foot capacity. It cost £2,000, an unheard-of sum, and was known initially as the Royal Vauxhall. Its livery was a red-and-white vertical candy stripe, with a Latin inscription from Ovid’s Metamorphoses emblazoned grandly round the circumference: ‘Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi’ – ‘Surely the sky lies open, let us go that way!’fn13 This was taken as signifying an appropriate pedagogical gesture on the part of Green or the Vauxhall proprietors: balloon travel was not mere entertainment, it would open the mind as well as the skies.
The Royal Vauxhall was capacious, with a nine-foot oval wickerwork basket, capable of carrying at least nine passengers, as well as a massive grappling iron and a huge hand-cranked winch to raise and lower the famous manila trail rope. To begin with it supplied paying passengers with short, tethered ascents to a hundred feet, so they could admire a view that stretched right up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s. Equally, of course, the balloon could itself be seen for miles around London, a hugely effective piece of advertising.
After various preliminary trials, Green pulled off the most spectacular advertising coup for the Gardens in November 1836, when he set out on a legendary overnight flight from London to the Continent. The balloon team consisted of Green himself, Robert Hollond, a wealthy MP who partly financed the flight, and Monck Mason, an Irish musician and balloon enthusiast (suitably, he played the flute) who talked and wrote with great fluency, and undertook to record the whole event.
The departure was well publicised, especially the spectacular list of supplies that were intended to victual the three-man crew for up to three weeks. These included forty pounds of ham, beef and tongue; forty-five pounds of cooked game and preserves; forty pounds of bread, sugar and biscuits; and not least sixteen pints each of sherry, port and brandy, together with several dozen bottles of champagne. By dividing these figures by sixty, it is possible to estimate the minimum that each of these three Victorian gentleman was expected to consume per diem. For example: one and a half pounds of meat, half a pound of biscuits, a pint of fortified wines, and several glasses of champagne. Indeed, Mason made many jokes about the ‘high flavour and exalted merits’ of their supplies.
Much of the weight of these provisions (two hundred pounds) would eventually of course become expendable organic ballast, although the exact arrangements for disposing of this were not advertised. To this was added four hundredweight of the actual sand ballast, hung in sacks round the outer edge of the basket.9 Overall, the weight and worldly solidity of the crew’s creature comforts were seen not as luxuries, but as a guarantee of good preparation and serious intent. In a gas balloon the amount of ballast defined the potential for remaining airborne.
Of course, food supplies were not their only baggage. There was heavy clothing including cloaks and fur hats; carpet bags for personal items; repair equipment and maps; ‘speaking trumpets, barometers, telescopes, lamps, wine jars and spirit flasks’; the mighty trail rope; hundreds of extra yards of rope and cordage; Bengal flares; and a patent safety lamp, designed on the principle of the Davy miner’s lamp. Finally there was Green’s particular delight, a patent portable coffee-brewer. Ingeniously, it worked by ‘slaking’ a supply of quick lime with water in a metal canister, thereby producing ‘chemical heat’ (calcium hydroxide) without any open flame. Moreover, it could be emptied and replenished as required.10
Most of these articles were suspended above the crew’s heads, around the wooden hoop of the balloon, in a carousel of swinging sacks and nets and bags, producing the effect of some fabulous airborne hardware store. The total payload or lifting capacity of the eighty-foot Vauxhall – including the men, the equipment, the supplies and the sand ballast – was just under three thousand pounds, the equivalent of about fifteen robust men (or a modern rugby team with their boots on).
3
Watched by an enormous crowd, they launched from the Cremorne section of the Vauxhall Gardens at 1.30 p.m. on 1 November 1836, with approximately three hours of daylight in hand. They sailed rapidly eastwards across London, down the Thames, over Rochester, diagonally across north Kent towards Canterbury and the North Foreland. This line of flight would take them over the Goodwin Sands, out across the North Sea towards the Baltic, and possibly even Scandinavia. It was much too far north for Green’s liking.
Green immediately impressed his crew with a quietly confident demonstration of balloon navigation. If they gained height, he announced, they would turn south. He briskly ordered Mason to release half a sack of ballast, and they watched silently as the whole horizon appeared to revolve beneath them, turning slowly and ‘majestically’ northwards at Green’s command. At first confused, Mason gradually realised that the Vauxhall had entered an upper airstream and was flying due south towards Dover. ‘Nothing could exceed the beauty of this manoeuvre,’ he thought.11
They sailed over the first twinkling lights of Dover port at exactly 4.48 p.m., ‘almost vertically over the Castle’.12 It was precisely the point from which Blanchard and Jeffries had begun their historic flight almost fifty-one years before. They crossed the Channel just before dusk, overflying Calais at three thousand feet, and then dropping to recover the easterly airstream. As the last light failed, Green calculated their average land speed so far at twenty-five miles per hour, with the probability that it would increase over the flat expanses of Flanders and Belgium. They were now on a compass course of approximately 100 degrees, a fraction south of due east, headed in the general direction of Brussels, Liège, Cologne, Frankfurt, Prague, Moscow … So the balloon disappeared into the gathering penumbra of Continental Europe.
Their next act was to sit down to a huge meal of cold meats and wine, spread on the central work bench of their basket, and accompanied with ‘other liquors’. Mason noted that the champagne was unmanageable at any altitude, as due to the lower pressure it simply shot frothing out of the bottle, revealing what he called its ‘natural tendency to flying’.13 Perhaps under the influence of these refreshments, the landscapes of northern France seen after dusk, with isolated points
