2013 non-fiction, an informal history of the rise and fall (sorry) of
the man-carrying balloon.
Holmes has mostly written biographies, and his emphasis here is
on personalities rather than technical details. He skips for the most
part past the Montgolfiers (I gather they're mentioned more in his
earlier The Age of Wonder), but describes Charles Money's flight to
raise money for a hospital from Norwich to the North Sea in 1785.
Immediately following this is an account of the Strelzyks' and
Weltzers' escape from East Germany in 1979, and then it's back to 1783
and the first flight by hydrogen balloon. After this the narrative
becomes generally chronological, but it tends to give all the details
of the career of a single aeronaut before mentioning the next.
So we have the American entrepreneur John Wise who hoped to start a
balloon mail service across the USA; Félix Nadar, the French
photographer and gifted self-publicist; Sophie Blanchard and her
firework-carrying flights. There are also tales of the Napoleonic
Corps d'Aérostiers, the American Civil War where observation
balloons were heavily used in war for the first time (although,
bizarrely, none of the aerial photographs has survived), and the
balloons built in Paris to allow mail and a few select people to
escape the Prussian siege of 1870-1871. The last major story is of
Salomon Andrée's attempt in 1896 to reach the North Pole by balloon,
and while this lost some of its impact because I already knew the
outcome, some rare moments of technical explanation show why he
thought his system of sails and drag-ropes would in fact be able to
steer his balloon (and how quickly it all went horribly wrong).
There's very little after the turn of the 20th century, and certainly
nothing about observation balloons in the World Wars.
But in many ways Holmes seems to be more interested in the mental
effects of balloons on those who flew them and those who witnessed
their flight. Jules Verne was inspired to write Cinq semaines en
ballon, an account of a balloon flight across Africa, which by its
huge success changed his literary direction towards tales of
futuristic adventure. Victor Hugo was a tireless enthusiast and
booster of Nadar, and his republican sympathies made ballooning in
France a republican cause. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a detailed account of
a balloon-trip to the moon, with horrific images quite possibly
inspired by the alien vistas reported by real aeronauts. And the
idea of flight was seized upon by visionaries, seeing freedom from
gravity as a workable analogue to freedom from tyranny.
There's a broad division between the "horizontal" balloonists, who saw
the balloon as a means of transport and communication, and the
"vertical" ones, who attempted to build a science of meteorology and
to explore the unknown heights above the levels of
conveniently-accessible mountains (in an era well before anything like
usable oxygen equipment had been produced). Even as the ability to
produce hydrogen in the field was increasing, the steam engine was
making balloons obsolete; plans for a balloon passenger service across
America, or indeed across the Atlantic, came to nothing in the face of
slower but distinctly more reliable craft.
This book is just about balloons; there's a brief mention of
Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and an even briefer one of Henri Giffard who
made the first controlled powered flight (by dirigible) in 1852, but
mostly as context to show how the balloon had quickly reached the
limits of what was possible without making it into something other
than a balloon. Through the nineteenth century its popularity seems to
have waxed and waned primarily as a result of publicised successes and
failures.
If I didn't have Wikipedia and other such sources to look up the
technical details, this would be a tremendously frustrating book. As
it is, Holmes clearly had access to plenty of unusual records, and
while he's good about attribution I'd have loved more of that side of
things here. Even so, this is essentially a book of love for the
idea of the balloon, of quiet flight for a few hours, coming to rest
who-knows-where, not in a hurry and not for any special reason but
purely for the joy of it.
Recommended to me by Phil Masters.
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