The Introduction of the Balloon by Holmes

whose name was Joseph Montgolfier, was bringing his bags to Versailles to give a public demonstration before King Louis XVI. It was scheduled to be held in the large courtyard in front of the palace that September. All this sounded fantastical enough. But then Franklin reported that a member of the Academie des Sciences, Dr Alexandre Charles, had stolen a march on Montgolfier by inflating a silk bag with the newly discovered `inflammable air' and launching it in public from the Champs de Mars on 27 August. What was astonishing was the lifting power of this simple device. The silk bag or `balldon, although it was only six feet in diameter, had quickly risen so high that it could no longer be seen. It had crossed the Seine and travelled fifteen miles outside Paris before it burst. This was a distance which a horseman could barely cover in a hour at the gallop. Then Franklin reported that Montgolfier and his brother Etienne had successfully launched their own balloon from Versailles on 11 September. Unlike Charles's gas balloon, it was powered by hot air, it was very big, and it was beautifully decorated with heraldic symbols. Moreover, its lifting power was spectacular. In a wicker cage attached to the neck of the bag it had carried a sheep, a duck and a cockerel (the French national symbol) right over the rooftops of Versailles, and had stayed aloft for seven minutes. All the animals had returned to earth alive and well. It was clear what would happen next. Either the Montgolfiers or Charles would try to send a man up in a balloon. The prospect was amazing, and nothing else was talked about in France. Franklin thought that balloons might eventually 'pave the way to some discoveries in Natural Philosophy of which at present we have no conception. He instanced the examples of 'magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement'.2 Initially Banks wrote back sceptically. 'I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania until some experiment like to prove beneficial either to society or sci-ence is proposed: Nevertheless, he conceded by mid-September 1783 that with the Montgolfiers' Aerostatic Experiment' at Versailles, the French had 'opened a Road in the Air, and this might mark a new 'Epoch' If fur-ther experiments proved successful, then 'The immediate Effect it will have upon the Concerns of Mankind [will be] greater than anything since the invention of Shipping:3 Paradoxically enough, Banks's first conception of balloon transportation was a thoroughly earthbound one. 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 need only two horses 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.
Banks was very conscious that the discovery of a lighter-than-air gas had actually been achieved by two English chemists, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley. They had called it 'inflammable air' because of its light-ness and explosive properties. Priestley's Experiments on Different Kinds of Air had been translated in France in 1768. All the experiments had then been repeated and refined by their rival, the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, in Paris. He had measured the buoyancy of this gaz' (a word not yet coined in English) more accurately, and renamed it `hydrogen. But no one had manufactured it on a large scale, or realised its dramatic practical applications. The Montgolfier brothers were commercial paper manufacturers from Annonay, near Lyons, in the Ardeche. They were an effective business team. Joseph was the shrewd entrepreneur, and Etienne was the madcap inventor. They were interested in chemistry for commercial reasons. They had followed Priestley's and Lavoisier's work, and had speculated about putting lighter-than-air gas into paper containers. As early as 1782, Joseph had humorously suggested the theoretical possibility of flying an entire French army into Gibraltar, and seizing it from the English. The troops would fly suspended beneath hundreds of huge paper bags. Lavoisier's 'hydrogen' was produced by passing sulphuric acid over iron filings. It was one-thirteenth of the weight of common air, and con-sequently could produce a powerful lift if sufficiently concentrated in a light container (Cavendish had used soap bubbles). But it was slow and dangerous to produce, potentially explosive, and easily escaped from con-tainers made of silk or animal bladders. Hot air, on the other hand, was easily produced by any kind of controlled fire, and could be temporarily contained in inflated silk or paper. It produced a short-term lift, as heat agitates the air molecules, making them move apart and become more buoyant than the surrounding cooler, denser air (and at best about half its weight). This lift was however less powerful than that of hydrogen, was easily dissipated, and consequently required much bigger balloons to sustain the same power of ascent, or carry the same payload. Joseph Montgolfier later said he had tried Lavoisier's gaz' unsuccessfully, but discovered the principle of hot air by watching his wife's che-mise inflating when she hung it over the hearth to dry. He made several small experimental 'aerostats, finally adopting a pear-shaped balloon, with a wide neck that could be lowered over a fire. The Montgolfiers described it memorably as 'putting a cloud in a paper bag'. On 5 June 1783, they successfully launched their first large paper balloon in open country outside Annonay. It was probably intended as a piece of advertising for their paper business, and it was a dazzling sight. When inflated, their balloon stood thirty foot high, 110 feet in circumference, and took eight men to hold it down. It was crudely constructed of painted silk sections backed with coarse paper and simply buttoned together. In fact it contained no hydrogen gas at all, but simply 22,000 cubic feet of hot air collected from braziers burning straw and damp wool. French hot air proved to have enormous lifting power. When released it rose gracefully to an estimated 6,000 feet, barely visible, and remained aloft for ten minutes.' Perhaps most significant of all, it drew an enormous crowd of onlookers. This ability of the balloon to attract attention and pull large numbers of people has always remained part of its mystique, and an important part of its history. Montgolfier had discovered a scientific principle quite as interesting as that of aerial buoyancy. With ballooning, science had found a powerful new formula: chemistry plus showmanship equalled crowds plus wonder plus money. Reports of the flight travelled through-out France, and the Montgolfiers were soon invited to give official demonstrations, first at Versailles and then in Paris. The Marquis de Condorcet, the head of the Academie des Sciences, appointed a commit-tee to investigate the invention and consider sponsoring its development. It assembled France's leading men of science, including Lavoisier and Claude Berthollet.8 Now there was the feeling of urgency, even of a race. People began contacting the Montgolfiers, applying to the Academie, or publicly vol-unteering to be 'the first aerial traveller in the world.
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balloon, which began wallowing dangerously on its moorings, to the whistles and suggestive jeers of the crowd. Lunardi made a rapid, though perhaps surprising, decision. Realising that Mrs Sage was the star attraction, after a hasty conference with Mr Biggin, he himself sprang from the gondola, allowing the balloon to make a safe launch with its reduced payload of two. He apparently had no qualms about leaving the control of the balloon (and Mrs Sage) in Mr Biggin's sole care. Unfortunately, in his haste to depart, Lunardi failed to do up the lacings of the gondola's door. As the balloon sailed away over Piccadilly, the crowd were treated to the provoking sight of the beau-tiful Mrs Sage on all fours in the open entrance of the gondola. The crowd assumed that she had fainted, and was perhaps receiving some kind of intimate first-aid from Mr Biggin. In fact she was coolly re-threading the lacings to make the gondola safe again. As she later cheerfully admitted, she felt largely responsible for the launching difficulties, as she had omitted to inform Lunardi that she made up '200 pounds of human weight' (over fourteen stone), and he had been far too gallant to enquire. Finally getting to her feet as the balloon floated over Green Park, Mrs Sage trod on Lunardi's barometer and broke it, thus depriving Mr Biggin of any instrument with which to measure their height. Nevertheless, in due course the two of them were lunching peacefully off sparkling Italian wine and cold chicken, occasionally calling to people below through a speaking-trumpet.47 The flight followed the line of the Thames westwards, at one point passing through a snowstorm (surprising for mid-June, remarked Mr Biggin nonchalantly), and landed heavily near Harrow on the Hill, smashing through a hedge and dragging across an unharvested hayfield. The infuriated farmer began threatening Mr Biggin and abusing Mrs Sage — she later described him succinctly as 'a savage. But the hon-our of the 'first female aeronaut' was unexpectedly saved by the young gentlemen of Harrow School, who rushed out across the fields to greet her, put together a cash collection to pacify the farmer, and carried her bodily (she had hurt 'a tendon in her foot') and in triumph to the local tavern, where everyone evidently got gloriously drunk. Later there was much speculation at Mr Biggin's London club as to whether he had been the first man to board a female aeronaut in flight. Gallantly, Mr Biggin refused to comment. The members of Brooks's Club were said to be laying bets on who should first have 'an amorous encounter' in a balloon.
The cry Tunardi, come down!' now became a kind of catchphrase, with a suggestive double-entendre implied. Mrs Sage herself felt she had achieved true celebrity, writing modestly to a friend: 'I suppose when I go out I shall be as much looked at as if a native of the Aerial Regions had come down to pay an earthly visit.' She added that the views were magnificent, and that at no point had she needed to open her bottle of smelling salts.
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The early heroic period of ballooning, between 1783 and 1800, appeared to come to a dead end. Individual balloonists went on flying, but not for long. Dr Jeffries returned to Boston in 1789. Lunardi died poverty-stricken in Lisbon in July 1806. Blanchard collapsed with a heart attack after a forced landing in Holland in 1809, and died a few weeks later while apparently attempting to parachute from his new balloon. A few cele-bratory ascents continued in Paris, notably by the showman Jacques Garnerin and by Blanchard's eccentric young wife Sophia, who spe-cialised in aerial firework displays. But she too was killed in 1819, when her balloon was ignited by fireworks. It must have looked as if balloon-ing was, scientifically speaking, a cul de sac. Though the hydrogen balloon or Charlier triumphed (temporarily) over the hot-air balloon or Montgolfier, the inability to navigate either form of aerostat appeared to destroy all hopes of finding any immediate technological applications. Balloons simply remained beautiful, expen-sive and dangerous toys, although the high ascents achieved by the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac and others did promise hoped-for advances in meteorology. Gay-Lussac ascended to 23,000 feet above Paris in 1804, establishing the limit at which human beings can breathe. The mysteries of barometric pressure, the function of clouds, the generation of winds and weather systems, were increasingly fascinating. Interest in meteorology, a nascent science, grew and produced the beautiful cloud classifications of Luke Howard and the valuable wind-scale system of Francis Beaufort. Howard (1772-1864), a Quaker and the first professional meteorologist, published his great study and classifica-tion of atmospheric phenomena, On the Modification of Clouds, in 1804. He first proposed the four basic cloud-types, using Latin terms in imita-tion of Linnaean cataloguing. These were cumulus (heaped cloud), stratus (layer cloud), cirrus (long-hair or high mare's-tail cloud) and nimbus (raincloud), with various combinations such as cumulo-nimbus (the classic heaped-up rain-carrying clouds of an English summer). All are still in use, with additional combinations such as cirro-stratus (high, thin, fine-weather clouds).