Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

American balloonists, unlike their British counterparts, had a vision of their nation’s untamed nature, the wilderness and vastness – the endless great prairies, forests and lakes. Their long and daring attempts at trans-America flights were always made from west to east because of the prevailing winds. They were also haunted by the idea of crossing the ultimate wilderness, the three and a half thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean.

This was at a time when most long-distance transport in America was still by horse, wagon or stagecoach, or else by boat slowly along one of the great rivers like the Ohio or the Mississippi. Railroad-building had only begun in 1830, with the Baltimore and Ohio Line, and by 1840 there was still only about 2,500 miles of track in the whole country, almost all of it confined to local lines on the eastern seaboard, between Charleston and Boston. The great cities of the mid-west, like Chicago and Cincinnati, were served primarily by paddle steamers or Wells Fargo stagecoaches until the 1850s, and serious railroad-building westwards did not begin until after the passing of the Railroad Act of 1862.

When Charles Dickens went to America in 1842, although he was rapturously received, hospitably cared for and most generously financed, his five-month ‘national tour’ remained largely along the east coast, visiting Boston, New York, and Washington. He got as far north as the Niagara Falls, no further west than Kentucky, and no further south than Missouri and a thoroughly unpleasant ride in a steam paddleboat down the Mississippi. Subsequently he complained about most of it in his American Notes (1842).

No one was sure where a trans-American balloon flight should start from, or in which direction it should go. But it had huge symbolic power as an idea. There was no real equivalent challenge in Europe. Such a flight would celebrate the land as one vast, rolling entity. It would in a sense both discover America, and knit it together. It would also be a potential money-spinner.

No aeronaut was crazy enough to suggest starting in California, still part of Mexico and not yet part of the Union. The thought of attempting to fly across the Rockies was simply suicidal. A balloon was rumoured to have crossed the Alleghenies in West Virginia, but large parts of the mid-western states were still settler and cowboy country, with the barest township amenities. In practice any launch site required at least three things: a local source of coal gas or the means to produce hydrogen gas; a local newspaper that could whip up interest and funding; and a telegraph link which could carry the news and generate publicity. It would also help to have a populace who were wealthy enough and educated enough (or at least sufficiently gullible) to subscribe good money.

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The experience of the great professional French aeronaut Eugène Godard, who began his first American tour in 1854, suggests the possibilities of American ballooning up to that date. Godard, then aged twenty-seven, and already a regular star of the Paris Hippodrome, arrived in New York with a complete and glittering aeronautical roadshow. His suite of five balloons included his flagship, an impressive 106,000-cubic-foot aerostat, gloriously decorated and diplomatically named the Transatlantic. He hired a publicity agent to advertise them as ‘The Most Beautiful Balloons in America’. He himself was billed as ‘Member of the Parisian Academy of Arts and Sciences’, and ‘Chief Aeronaut to the Austrian Army’, both largely invented designations.

His crew consisted of his fearless wife, and a small team doubling up as aerial trapeze artists, spangled female acrobats, and daredevil parachutists. The aerial horseriding, particularly relished on the American plains, was performed with appropriate sang-froid by Madame Godard, while the comic rope or ‘lasso’ act (with breathtaking slips and catches) was executed with Gallic style by Monsieur Godard himself. Their first tour went as far south as New Orleans, then up the Mississippi Valley, via St Louis and on to Cincinnati, then known as ‘the Metropolis of the West’, though really the capital of the mid-west. Here, significantly, the Cincinnati Gazette appointed Mr J.C. Bellman as its first official ‘Balloon Editor’. Godard found he could earn good money not merely by charging a twenty-five-cent admission fee to his launches, but from taking on board paying passengers, who could enjoy the heady novelty of wining and dining at several thousand feet.

The newspaper link was the crucial one. Balloons supplied wonderful copy, combining opportunities for lyrical descriptive writing with dramatic incidents and the satisfactory suspense of near-disasters. In fact, a complete disaster was the best copy of all. Bellman accompanied Godard on several of his showpiece ascents, including one long-distance flight to Hamilton, Ohio, which produced a memorable article with much emphasis laid on ‘alfresco repasts of cold duck and turkey’ at fifteen thousand feet, and the tossing overboard of empty champagne bottles. Actually Godard refilled them with water, so Bellman could time their explosive impact after a fall of exactly three minutes twenty-five seconds, a piece of ‘science’ that somehow fascinated his readers.

On a later flight they encountered a prairie storm, and crash-landed in a tree near Caesar’s Creek, Waynesville, fifty miles from Cincinnati. One of the paying passengers broke three ribs, and Bellman was badly cut and bruised, but this produced even better journalistic copy. Later Godard’s family show went north to Boston (where he earned $3,000 for a single ascent); west again to Columbus, Ohio; and south to New Orleans. He was even rumoured to have made an ascent from Cuba.

But the cost of replacing broken equipment was high, and by the end of 1857 Godard was virtually penniless, and considering joining the New Orleans Minstrel Show. However, before he finally left America in 1858, he took part in a widely advertised balloon derby against an American balloon, the Leviathan, piloted by ‘Professor’ John Steiner. Forty thousand people paid to attend the launch. A thrilling collision between the two balloons occurred at fifteen thousand feet above Cincinnati, a kind of aerial joust with both pilots behaving with chivalric gallantry. The balloons somehow survived, and flew on for over two hundred miles beyond Dayton, Ohio. Eventually (and perhaps tactfully) Godard lost the race, but he had recovered his reputation and largely recouped his fortunes.

Back in Paris by 1859, with the glamour of his American tour to add lustre to his name, he had soon established the most celebrated balloon-family dynasty in France, sharing his legendary status with his younger siblings Eugénie, Auguste, Jules and Louis.

As the popularity of aerial shows, parachute stunts and balloon races (not to mention the spangled French-style artistes) spread throughout the mid-west in the 1850s, the unique American challenge of the truly long-distance flight also began to emerge.

Thanks in part to Godard, Cincinnati was now established as an ideal jumping-off point for such attempts. Its geographical position seemed ideal. A west wind blowing out of the prairies of Kansas or Iowa would carry a balloon virtually due east to Washington, a distance of four hundred miles. Admittedly the Allegheny Mountains lay in between, and the Atlantic seaboard beyond. Equally, if the eastward wind trajectory turned north, it would swing a balloon in an ever increasing arc towards New York (560 miles), then Buffalo on the Great Lakes (six hundred miles), or even to Montreal, Canada (980 miles). On the other hand, if the wind turned southwards, the arc would swing towards Richmond, Virginia (five hundred miles), then Charleston, South Carolina (630 miles), and eventually Florida (810 miles).

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From the shifting population of local American balloonists and barnstormers, three men were to make their mark by the late 1850s in a way that would soon make the Godard-style circus look flashy and old-fashioned. They were a different breed from such itinerant showmen: men of book-learning, business and scientific aspirations. They could lecture and write, as well as fly. They often adopted the courtesy title of ‘Professor’, and wore bow ties even when in a balloon basket.

All three also had names that looked suitably memorable on a publicity poster: John Wise, John LaMountain and Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe. These became the great triumvirate of the Golden Age of American ballooning; and naturally, they became the most celebrated rivals too. Their inspiration was the long-distance European flights of Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Charles Green. But they were even more haunted by the entirely fictitious Atlantic crossing of Poe’s ‘great balloon hoax’.

Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1808, John Wise, as his name usefully suggested, was the oldest and most experienced of the three. In fact he had invented the name. He was from German immigrant stock, originally Johan Weiss. His father was a musical instrument-maker, and he himself was brought up with Lutheran sobriety – encouraged to study music and mathematics, to be bilingual in German and English, and to work hard. An early desire to study theology was transformed into a fascination with the visible cosmos: ‘I would spend hours in the night lying upon a straw-heap looking at the stars and moon, and the arrival of a comet gave me rapturous joy. It was this kind of natural bent that first led me to indulge in aerial projects.’ This began, as it had with Franklin, with kites, then tissue-paper parachutes, then small Montgolfier fire balloons.

He was apprenticed for five years to a cabinetmaker in Philadelphia, and began to specialise in the delicate craft of piano-making. In his spare time he read scientific journals, studied ‘pneumatics and hydrostatics’, and continued to dream of flying.

Philadelphia still gloried in the name of Franklin, and still proudly remembered the symbolic flight of Jean-Pierre Blanchard, from the yard of the Walnut Street prison, in 1794. Supported by his father, Wise made his first six ascents in a series of small home-made muslin balloons in 1835–36. Then a silk balloon, unhappily called the Meteor, exploded while deflating, throwing him ten feet in the air, severely burning his hands and face and blinding him for several days. It also set fire to the clothes of several bystanders, though strangely there were no legal ramifications, possibly because the flight had been funded by public subscription. Wise was soon back in the air, with a balloon more cautiously named the Experiment. By 1837 he had reached a useful deal with the Philadelphia Gas Works Company, and was learning to cultivate the local press, one of the most influential on the east coast. By his thirties he was an acknowledged figure in the town, and had made launches from many of its squares and parks.

He had a gift for evangelising on the subject of ballooning, and giving good, quotable interviews. ‘Ballooning is about half a century ahead of the age,’ he would announce. Balloons would soon make the much-vaunted railroads and steamships look old-fashioned, uncomfortable and above all slow. ‘Our children will travel to any part of the globe, without the inconvenience of smoke, sparks and seasickness, – and at the rate of one hundred miles per hour.’

Wise was studying the infant science of meteorology, and making technical innovations too. After several rough landings in which he was dragged across fields and through hedges, unable to deflate his balloon swiftly enough, he came up with the idea for a ‘rip panel’. This was a strip section of the balloon gore, sewn separately into the top of the envelope, which could be instantly torn away by pulling a red-painted ‘rip-cord’, thus rapidly releasing the hydrogen and deflating the balloon in seconds. Many friends thought this ‘safety’ device was in fact suicidally risky, open to all kinds of technical failure and human error. But Wise first used it successfully on 27 April 1839, and it was soon universally adopted, the first serious balloon invention since Charles Green’s trail rope.

In the mid-1840s, John Wise’s exploits in his silk balloon the Hercules were the subject of a full-page illustrated article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ballooning was hailed as a serious act of scientific demonstration, as well as a respectable entertainment. The article praised Mr Wise’s ‘orderly’ launch from the city centre, accompanied by three passengers, one of whom was his wife. This was observed by an enthusiastic but well-behaved crowd, a large proportion of whom were ‘females accompanied by children’. There was no drunkenness, and no riot. The launch was saluted not by guns, but by a brass band. The article concluded in an exalted and patriotic manner, containing a witty reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Our Philadelphia friends have generally paid much attention to the subject of aerial navigation, and the Allegheny Mountains were crossed in this manner as early as the summer of 1837. It is said that Lucifer himself is ‘the Prince of the Air’, but we shall not be at all surprised to see his dominions invaded by some enterprising Yankee in a profitable style of travel … Dr Franklin’s paper kite led to the discovery of some very important first principles of science which have since benefited the whole world. Therefore we say to our scientific ballooning friends – Go on and prosper! Or let them take the motto of New York, and cry out – ‘Excelsior!’. Our humble endeavour will be to aid in the publicity or illustration of all such flights of true genius.

The article was run alongside a literary essay by William Hazlitt on the same page. Ballooning was becoming a proper part of American culture.

John Wise’s long-term business plan was to establish the first pan-American aerial service, carrying people and mail back and forth across the continent, and eventually across the Atlantic to Europe.

But he also had a visionary, almost religious belief in ballooning itself, in its existential value. Ballooning was good for the body, but also for the soul. Its advantages were both physical and metaphysical. As Wise wrote during one of his high flights across the grand prairies around Lafayette, Indiana: ‘I feel rejoiced – invigorated – extremely happy! God is all around me – Astra Castra, Numen Lumen [the Stars my camp, the Deity my lamp]. The manifestations around me make me rejoice in God’s handiwork. Glorious reverie! … With me it never fails to produce exhilaration … The mind is illuminated.’

But this was not all. The glorious reverie also brought measurable physiological improvements. The upper air was hygienic, tonic: ballooning was a kind of aerial health cruise. In fact, ballooning produced a high: ‘The blood begins to course more freely when up a mile or two with a balloon – the gastric juices pour into the stomach more rapidly – the liver, the kidneys, and heart work with expanded action in a highly calorified atmosphere – the brain receives and gives more exalted inspirations – the whole animal and mental system becomes intensely quickened …’ A two-hour balloon trip ‘on a fine summer’s day’ was worth more than an entire fortnight’s sea cruise across the Atlantic ‘from New York to Madeira’.

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John Wise believed that there was a permanent west–east air current blowing right across the entire American continent. It had perhaps been ordained by God. It was destined to open up the whole vast land, and then the Atlantic Ocean itself, to balloons. Above all it offered the possibility of high speeds over enormous distances, a truly American-style revolution in communications. In 1850 he published A System of Aeronautics to present this case. In 1853 he petitioned Congress for public funding, but was turned down. In spring 1859 he became involved with a private scheme to construct a specially equipped balloon to make a series of pioneering long-distance west–east flights. It was ambitious in size – 120,000 cubic feet, standing 120 feet high – and being constructed of the finest Chinese silk, it cost the very considerable sum of $30,000. Wise intended to finance this as a conventional business venture, with capital from private investors. Together with a number of enthusiasts, he formed the Trans-Atlantic Balloon Corporation.