years earlier and had barely changed in the decades since. The time was late in 1783. “Only rarely,” historian Richard Hallion writes, “do revolutionary systems and technologies appear within the same year, but such is true of the balloon: the practical balloon constituted the dual invention of the papermaking brothers Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier and scientist Jacques Alexandre César Charles” (47).
The first launched the hot-air balloon, the second the gas balloon.
On October 15, 1783, the Montgolfiers sent their first man up in a hot-air balloon, a tethered flight—i.e., the balloon was literally on a leash. On December 1, 1783, Professor Charles went up himself in the first hydrogen balloon—an untethered journey that covered some twenty-five miles and ultimately climbed to 9,000 feet. Charles had recognized “that one could fly by creating a balloon filled with a lifting gas … namely the 17-year-old discovery hydrogen” (Hallion, 49). Isolated in 1766 by British chemist Henry Cavendish, hydrogen went by the nickname “flammable air,” ranked as the lightest of gases, and offered the greatest lifting potential.
Furthermore, Charles’s balloon was a surprisingly advanced vehicle: “a pattern of fishnet-like netting surrounded the upper hemisphere of the balloon … to form an attachment point for support ropes holding the ornate crew gondola” (Hallion, 56). As for the balloon’s envelope, Henry Dale writes that Charles had “constructed a balloon of silk [which was] made impermeable to gas by varnishing it with dissolved rubber. They filled the envelope through lead pipes by adding sulphuric acid to iron filings which, in the process of oxidizing the iron, produced great quantities of hydrogen gas” (12).
Immediately these became the standard procedures, the same measures staying in force for many decades. As chapter 11 of this book reveals, not much had changed by Verne’s day: the lifting gas in his fiction is invariably hydrogen. In fact, as George Denniston sums it up, “Hydrogen-filled balloons … became the balloons of choice throughout the world for almost two centuries” (16).
But if the procedures remained the same, so did the shortcomings. “The two big problems of lighter-than-air flight were propulsion and steering,” as Dale notes (22). “Until they were resolved, the balloon for the most part remained a hobby for the rich and a fairground attraction for the masses rather than a practical vehicle for carrying passengers or freight.”
Fledgling Flier
That’s where things stood when Verne took on the topic of flight as a would-be author. High adventure and exotic locales had intrigued him from his boyhood—he grew up in the French industrial town of Nantes on the Loire River, a quick hop upstream from a busy Atlantic seaport. By then the machine age was well under way, steam-powered locomotives and ocean liners were practical parts of the culture, and flights by gas balloon were a major curiosity.
Samples of Verne’s boyhood writing survive from his teens, including an unfinished novel from his eighteenth year (Herbert Lottman, 17). By the time of “A Journey by Balloon,” he was twenty-three and had just broken into public print. Over the 1850s the Musée des familles published three short stories and two novellas by him, pieces in multiple genres: two tales of dark science, two Latin American adventure sagas, and a manhunt in the polar regions.
He was busier as a scriptwriter, although still not earning much. Over that same general period Verne penned some twenty plays and librettos, notably slapstick farces plus books and lyrics for musical comedies. His first professionally staged work, The Broken Straws, had a Paris run of about a dozen performances in 1850.
More than a decade would go by before Verne earned both fame and decent sales, so he was still a fledgling when “A Journey by Balloon” ap peared. As indicated, it’s a disturbing performance. Threats to life and limb throb under every paragraph, giving the tale unusual tension and ferocity. Verne’s grip is so firm, the reader stays with him even through long stretches of expository material—in fact these educational digressions are almost a respite from the multiplying dangers, from our visceral fears. So as the intruder grows more crazed and the vehicle keeps climbing, we learn about early ballooning … its value in wartime … and its bloodcurdling failures, falls, and death tolls.
A dozen years later, several elements in this early story would be recycled in Five Weeks in a Balloon:
• The vehicle is a hydrogen balloon.3
• The skyjacker claims he has a way to steer balloons.
• Sophie Blanchard’s death is described in detail.
• Likewise the flight of Garnerin’s balloon to Rome.
• At the climax the gondola is cut loose.
• The narrator clings to the netting and reaches safety.
As for the educational matter on the history of ballooning, this is echoed in similar expository passages in Five Weeks in a Balloon—and of course, in much of Verne’s fiction throughout his career.
In other ways too this powerful little story foreshadows Verne’s later writing. Rejected by the scientific community, the maniacal skyjacker is the first of Verne’s “dangerous scientists … the scientist who presents a serious danger to Nature, to society, and to humanity” (Arthur B. Evans, 1988, 83). He’s the precursor of Verne’s darker protagonists, his villain-heroes—Captain Nemo, the aeronaut Robur, the warmongering Schultze. And the story veers toward science fiction when it daydreams of balloons that are sky palaces, prefiguring futuristic vehicles such as Nemo’s Nautilus or Robur’s schooner-shaped helicopter.
Fans will recognize another old standby when the narrator plays word games with one of Newton’s laws: “Their courage was in inverse ratio to the square of their speed of retreat.” Verne rang further changes on Newton down through the years, sometimes seriously, as in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) … sometimes ironically, as in Captain Grant’s Children (1867) where John hopes a flood rain will have a “duration in inverse ratio to its violence” … and sometimes comically, as in The Earth Turned Upside Down (1889) where a lovelorn widow “feels drawn to scientists in proportion to their mass and in inverse ratio to the square of their distance. And J. T. Maston was so plump, she just couldn’t keep her distance.”
However, it should also be noted that the educational matter in “A Journey by Balloon” tallies with accounts by today’s scientists and historians, which means that Verne did a fair amount of homework. This raises the question: how did he become interested in this topic? Some scholars suggest he was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s ballooning tales. Others point to his friendship with aeronaut and promoter Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, professionally known as Nadar. And still others deny he had any interest at all, asserting that “Verne did not like balloons” (William Butcher, 149). Yet this tightly detailed, solidly researched story from 1851 casts doubt on all of these theories.
First of all, Poe couldn’t have been a factor. Jean Jules-Verne (30) reports that his grandfather read the American storyteller “in the years following 1848,” yet young Verne had no English, and Poe’s two ballooning yarns, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835) and “A Balloon Hoax” (1844), weren’t available in French until after he had published “A Journey by Balloon.” Translated by Alphonse Borghers, the first Gallic version of “Hans Pfaall” came out in 1853 (Arthur Hobson Quinn, 519); as for “Balloon Hoax,” it appeared in 1856 as part of Charles Baudelaire’s first Poe collection, Histoires extraordinaires (Lottman, 84). Furthermore, Nadar’s influence figures even farther down the road: Butcher (145–46) has him entering Verne’s life in 1861.
A number of
