there always remains the most enduring early dream or fantasy of flying, which is a metaphysical one. The ultimate purpose is to fly as high as possible, and then look back upon the earth and see mankind for what it really is. This idea has persisted since the beginning, and still continues, sometimes in a satirical form, and sometimes in a visionary one.
The seventeenth-century French dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac (a fearless duellist and also an intellectual provocateur) convincingly reported a secret flight to the moon, undertaken sometime before his death in 1655. It appeared in his posthumously published work Histoire comique des états et empires de la Lune (Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon). Cyrano’s flight is powered by glass cluster balloons, filled with dew and drawn skyward as the droplets are heated by the sun and evaporate: ‘I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me, upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them, as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high, that at length I found myself above the middle Region of the Air. But seeing that Attraction hurried me up with so much rapidity that instead of drawing near the Moon, as I intended, she seem’d to me to be more distant than at my first setting out …’
After an initial power failure and crash-landing, the final approach, made with the additional aid of gunpowder and a lunar force-field, is memorably disorientating: ‘When according to the calculations I had made, I had travelled much more than three-quarters of the way between earth and moon, I suddenly started falling with my feet uppermost, even though I had not performed a somersault … The earth now appeared to me as nothing but a great plate of gold overhead.’
When Cyrano eventually lands, he is captured and cross-questioned by various lunar inhabitants. One, more kindly than the others, remarks: ‘Well, my son, you are finally paying the penalty for all the failings of your Earth world.’28 Presented before the Lunar Court, he narrowly escapes being condemned to death for impiety. He has maintained the ridiculous notion that ‘our earth was not merely a moon, but also an inhabited world’. He returns in sober mood, crash-landing near a volcano in Italy.29
Some three hundred years later, on 24 December 1968, the Apollo 8 spacecraft came round from the dark side of the moon. The astronaut Bill Anders later recalled: ‘When I looked up and saw the earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up lunar horizon, an earth that was the only colour that we could see, a very fragile-looking earth, a very delicate-looking earth, I was immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own planet, the earth.’
The trip produced one of the most famous colour photographs ever taken. It has become universally known as ‘Earthrise’. The small, beautiful planet earth is sliding above the bleakness of the cratered moon surface, and hanging against the blackness of outer space. From this vision arose the whole modern concept of planet earth as the ‘small blue dot’ of life, amid a dark and mysterious universe.30
The dream of flight is to see the world differently.
2
Fiery Prospects
1
Just like space flight, early balloon flight offered military as well as metaphysical prospects. Cavallo’s dream of scientific ballooning was soon displaced by prospects of a more warlike kind. Benjamin Franklin had warned Sir Joseph Banks of this possibility, and such signs of the times were recognised by many contemporaries, including Banks’s clever younger sister, Sophia. She had begun to make a collection of balloon memorabilia, which she stuck into an enormous red-leather folio scrapbook especially purchased for the purpose. It would eventually run to over a hundred items.1 One of her earliest specimens was a British cartoon, dated 16 December 1784, entitled ‘The Battle of the Balloons’.
This shows four balloons, two flying the French fleur de lys and two the British Union Jack, manoeuvring for aerial combat. Their crews are armed with muskets, but also, more menacingly, with broadside cannons. Their muzzles point through portholes cut in the balloon wickerwork.2 Here the balloon is already conceived of as a weapon of war, comparable to the navy’s ships of the line.
Sophia also had an eye for many of the more eccentric examples of balloon propaganda. One set of this type was ‘Mr Ensler’s Wonderful Air Figures’, in which balloons were constructed in various animal and mythological shapes, such as the ‘Flying Horse Pegasus’. Some of these figures were intended to be provocative, like the giant ‘Nymphe coiffée en ballon et habillée à la Polonaise’. The Frenchified style of this description suggests sexual mockery. Then there was the bluffly patriotic ‘Mr Prossor’s Aerial Colossus’, showing an enormous ‘Sir John Falstaff’ floating defensively above the Dover cliffs.3 Such inventions were probably pure design fantasies, or at the most models, never actually manufactured full-size. But they suggest how balloons would become powerful forms of imaginative propaganda later, in the nineteenth century.fn8
2
The first actual military balloon regiment, as Franklin had prophesied, was indeed French. The Corps d’Aérostiers was founded at the château of Meudon outside Paris on 29 March 1794. Less than three months later, on 26 June, the French army first made use of a military observation balloon at the Battle of Fleurus, against an Austrian army, and again a few weeks later at the Battle of Liège (where it was witnessed by the galloping Major Money). The balloon, manned on both occasions by a daring young officer, Captain Charles Coutelle, provided vital information prior to successful cavalry charges, and both battles were won by the fledgling French Revolutionary army.
The balloon school at Meudon was immediately expanded, and Coutelle showered with medals and appointed its commanding officer. He rapidly drew various lessons about military aerostation. First, that it was difficult to inflate a balloon with hydrogen on the battlefield. (Lavoisier was immediately coopted to invent a simpler method of generating hydrogen.) Second, that it was extremely hazardous to launch a tethered balloon if anything more than a light breeze was blowing. Held, kite-like and unnaturally on its cable against the force of the wind (instead of moving tranquilly within it), the balloon canopy would often thrash about and sometimes tear. Moreover, instead of gaining height it would fly horizontally and low. Above all, the basket would become highly unstable as an observation platform. Coutelle also remarked that it was not always easy to transmit really accurate and continuous observations from an airborne basket to a ground controller. Signal flags, scrawled messages or maps were rarely adequate. In most cases the aeronaut had simply to be winched back down, so he could deliver his appreciation verbally to a commander, in person and on the ground. Interestingly, it proved very difficult to get any commander to go up to see for himself.
But overall Coutelle believed that balloons promised considerable military value. He argued that, under the right conditions, a balloon would give an immense intelligence advantage to an army on the move, whether defending or attacking. It provided a wholly new tactical weapon, a ‘spy in the sky’ which could supply vital warning of troop build-ups and defensive positions, as well as preparations for attack or (equally vital) for retreat. Such observations could give a commander a decisive initiative in the field.
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