rising in the lightened balloon to a magnificent ten thousand feet. From this vantage point he saw the sun set for a second time on the same day. It was a revelation.
Dr Charles’s brilliant account of this ascent was widely published in both Britain and France, and catches a euphoric tone which never quite disappears from subsequent balloon accounts. He had laid in supplies for an aerial journey of many hours – fur coats, cold chicken and champagne. But what he actually tasted was that existential substance:
Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off. I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles and persecutions for ever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical rapture … I exclaimed to my companion Monsieur Robert – ‘I’m finished with the Earth. From now on our place is in the sky! … Such utter calm. Such immensity! Such an astonishing view … Seeing all these wonders, what fool could wish to hold back the progress of science!’ 12
Benjamin Franklin watched the launch through a telescope from the window of his carriage. Afterwards he remarked, ‘Someone asked me – what’s the use of a balloon? I replied – what’s the use of a new-born baby.’
The same sense of escaping into an utterly new world is displayed by Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaedia, or Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester in 1785. This is his account of a single flight made on 8 September 1785, flying northwards above the river Mersey, from Chester to Warrington in Lancashire. It must be one of the most remarkable books about the experience of ballooning ever written. It also included flight maps, and the first aerial drawings ever made from a balloon basket.
Baldwin was one early pioneer of the existential attitude to ballooning, in which the idea that the ‘Prospect’ itself – the free ascent, the magnificent views, the whole ‘aerial experience’ – was the real point of flight. He believed that ‘previous Balloon-Voyagers have been particularly defective in their Descriptions of aerial Scenes and Prospects’. Consequently he took with him a battery of recording equipment: a variety of pens and red lead pencils, special ‘Ass Skin Patent Pocketbooks’, paints and brushes, drawing blocks and perspective glasses, telescopes and compasses. Airopaedia contained the first ever paintings of the view from a balloon basket, an analytic diagram of the corkscrew flight path projected over a land map, and a whole chapter given up simply to describing the astonishing colours and structures of cloud formations.
Baldwin also notices how the balloon responded to air currents arising from the earth beneath. His careful flight-mapping shows how it was constantly drawn downwards to follow the cool, curving airflows above the meanderings of the river. Similarly, the heady act of leaning directly over the side of the basket to paint, observe and measure makes him sensitive to shifts in shade and colour and perspective on the ground below.
One typical observation reads: ‘The river Dee appeared of a red colour; the city [Chester] very diminutive; and the town [Warrington] entirely blue. The whole appeared a perfect plane, the highest buildings having no apparent height, but reduced all to the same level, and the whole terrestrial prospect appeared like a coloured map.’13
Baldwin also writes wonderfully well about clouds, and the prismatic effects of light. He clearly perceives a whole new world opening out around him, and expresses a euphoric emotional reaction. Indeed, to keep these feelings within bounds, he writes of himself throughout his flight in the third person: ‘A Tear of pure Delight flashed in his Eye! of pure and exquisite Delight and Rapture!’ For him, ballooning instinctively combined both scientific discovery and aesthetic pleasure. But perhaps it should provide more? He could imagine the time when ‘aerostatic ships make the Circuit of the Globe’.14
7
The essential mystery of ballooning – the enigmatic meaning of the original dream – was there from the start. Almost a decade after its invention by the Montgolfier brothers, with flights recorded in many nations, including Germany, Italy, Russia and America, it was still not clear, either to the Royal Society in London or the Academy of Sciences in Paris, what the true purpose or possibilities of ballooning really were. Don Paolo Andreani had flown from Milan in February 1784; Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries had traversed the Channel in January 1785; Pilâtre de Rozier had died attempting the same crossing in the opposite direction with a composite hydrogen and hot-air balloon in June 1785 (thereby becoming the first scientific balloon martyr); Baron Lütgendorf had ‘partially’ flown at Augsburg in August 1786; and Blanchard had gone on to demonstrate ballooning in virtually every major city in Europe, finally crowning his international career with what he claimed was the first ever American ascent, from the city of Philadelphia in January 1793, carrying an ‘aerial passport’ endorsed by President George Washington, and successfully crossing the Delaware river into New Jersey.15
Yet all these ascents were essentially public spectacles and entertainments. ‘Flight’ itself remained a novel and surprisingly unexplored concept. What, in practice, could balloons actually do for mankind, except provide a hazardous journey interspersed with the fine aerial ‘Prospects’ that men like Dr Charles and Thomas Baldwin recorded so eloquently?
According to Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the Parisian promoter of the Montgolfier balloons, they might, for example, provide observation platforms: for military reconnaissance, for sailors at sea, for chemists analysing the earth’s upper atmosphere, or for astronomers with their telescopes. It is notable that most of these applications were based on the notion of a tethered balloon. In fact many of the Montgolfiers’ early experiments were made with tethered aerostats, held to the ground by various ingenious forms of harness, guy ropes or winches.fn5
The poet and inventor Erasmus Darwin’s first practical idea of balloon power was, paradoxically, that of shifting payloads along the ground. He suggested to his friend Richard Edgeworth that a small hydrogen balloon might be tethered to an adapted garden wheelbarrow, and used for transporting heavy loads of manure up the steep hills of his Irish estate. This convenient aerial skip would allow one man to shift ten times his normal weight in earth, but also in bricks or wood or stones. In fact it might cause a revolution in the entire conditions of manual labour.17
Similarly, Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, had the initial idea that balloons could increase the effectiveness of earthbound transport, by adding to its conventional horsepower. He saw the balloon as ‘a counterpoise to Absolute Gravity’ – that is, as a flotation device to be attached to traditional forms of coach or cart, making them lighter and easier to move over the ground. So ‘a broad-wheeled wagon’, normally requiring eight horses to pull it, might only need two with a Montgolfier attached. This aptly suggests how difficult it was, even for a trained scientific mind like Banks’s, to imagine the true possibilities of flight in these early days.18
Benjamin Franklin, ‘the old fox’, as Banks’s secretary Charles Blagden called him, was quick to suggest various menacing military applications, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to fix Banks’s attention. ‘Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each’ could easily transport an effective invasion army of ten thousand marines across the Channel, in the course of a single morning. The only question, Franklin implied, was which direction would the wind be blowing from?19
His other speculations were more light-hearted. What about a ‘running Footman’? Such a man might be suspended
