By the late 1860s, a younger generation of Parisian aeronauts had begun to form a loose group of enthusiasts around the Godard brothers and the Société Aérostatique et Météorologique de France, originally founded in 1852. They were a new intellectual breed, quite unlike the previous showmen and barnstormers. They regarded the Godards as the balloon professionals, Nadar as the balloon publicist, and Henri Giffard as the master of the tethered balloon. But what they themselves dreamed of was free, beautiful flight in the upper air.
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They were amateurs in the true sense. Most of them had academic or scientific backgrounds, some had considerable private wealth, and several had strong republican sympathies. Among these younger aeronauts who regularly flew with each other were Camille Flammarion, the brothers Gaston and Albert Tissandier, and Jules Duruof, all in their twenties. Another was the republican journalist Wilfrid de Fonvielle, the man who came back with news of Charles Green in London, and who liked to ask, wherever his balloon landed, ‘Are we still in France?’1
These men were strongly aware of the great balloon tradition, and the details of its history, about which many of them later wrote. They also contributed numerous balloon stories and articles to the French newspapers. Their later memoirs show how much they admired the feats of English aeronauts like Charles Green, James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell. Nevertheless, they regarded ballooning as almost exclusively French, and in this sense a ‘patriotic’ science. They had particular sympathy for Nadar, who despite his disasters, and without being a scientific aeronaut, had raised the profile of French ballooning throughout Europe, and even in America. They came to regard the skies overhead in a new way, as national territory, peculiarly and historically French, and probably republican too. These feelings were to prove highly significant when the French Second Empire met its sudden crisis in 1870.
A leader among the group was Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), brother to the great literary publisher Ernest Flammarion. Camille was both the poet and the scientist of the band, a charismatic and eccentric figure, with a wild bramble of hair, a romantic heart and strong republican sympathies. Unlike his brother, he had little time for French imperial ambitions, writing angrily: ‘In France alone 250 times as much money is spent in the art of destroying the human species as is expended on education and science. That is why the projects and experiments of honest men remain so long in the state of dreams.’2
For Flammarion, ballooning was one of these neglected dreams. He said he first fell in love with ballooning at the age of sixteen, ‘young and full of passion for discovery and adventures’. Like Nadar and many others, he recalled a balloon-conversion experience. He was out walking early one ‘pure blue morning’ in the Jardins du Luxembourg, when suddenly a dazzlingly beautiful balloon appeared over the treetops and flew low over his head. He could hear the two passengers – a man and a pretty woman – talking and laughing together. They leant over the basket and waved at him, then sailed silently away over Paris, and his heart went away with them. ‘I would have given the world to be in the car of that balloon; and long afterwards I could think of nothing but a journey into the atmosphere.’3
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As a young man, Flammarion trained first as a priest (which always left a certain mystical turn to his view of the world) then as an engraver, and finally as a mathematician and astronomer at the Paris Observatoire. All these métiers left their mark on his subsequent work. At the Observatoire he was regarded as unduly flamboyant, and had to leave when, aged twenty, ‘enflamed with the fiery ardour of a teenager’, as he put it, he published a controversial two-franc, fifty-four-page pamphlet, On the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds.4 He joined the staff of a new scientific magazine called Cosmos, and like Jules Verne adopted the new career of science journalist. He produced expanded versions of his pamphlet, vigorously arguing the case for a universe teeming with extra-terrestrial life, and referring to beliefs held by Indian, Chinese, Arab and Greek philosophers, as well as to modern astronomy. It became a best-selling book which ran to thirty-five impressions.5
Flammarion soon made his name both as a prolific popular-science writer and as the founder and first president of the Société Astronomique de France. His wide-ranging interests took in everything from ballooning to speculative cosmology and science fiction. He wrote novels, short stories and scientific treatises, eventually publishing over fifty books (virtually launching his brother’s firm single-handed), and from his royalties set up his own spectacular domed observatory at a château just south of Paris, at Juvisy-sur-Orge, to which he would invite students and fellow enthusiasts. Inscribed in letters of gold over the entrance gate were the words Ad Veritatem per Scientiam – ‘To Truth through Science’.6
It explains a lot about Flammarion that he was an early proponent of the existence of an alien civilisation on the planet Mars, and that he was sure it would be ‘much more intelligent’ than that on earth. In his collection Real and Imaginary Worlds (1865), published when he was only twenty-three, he wrote brilliantly about extra-terrestrial life, reincarnation, psychical research, and even the end of the world. Although he was always fascinated by the wilder shores of scientific research, he would eventually subdue these heterodox interests to write two classics of largely conventional popular science, L’Astronomie populaire (1880) and L’Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire (1888). The English-language edition of the latter had a long, admiring Preface by none other than James Glaisher FRS, though Glaisher edited out many of what he called ‘Flammarion’s rhapsodies’.7 Both books became Flammarion company best-sellers, and Flammarion was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for what was indulgently termed ‘haute vulgarisation de l’astronomie’.
Flammarion believed that astronomy was good for the soul. It might also bring universal peace and harmony. He promulgated such idealistic views with characteristic panache:
What thoughtful spirit could look at brilliant Jupiter with its four attendant satellites, or splendid Saturn encircled by its mysterious ring, or a double star glowing scarlet and sapphire in the infinity of night, and not be filled with a sense of wonder? Yes, indeed, if humankind – from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women – if they knew what profound inner pleasure awaits those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace.8
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L’Atmosphère was powerfully inspired by Flammarion’s balloon experiences. While studiously surveying all ‘the great global phenomena of nature’ and the latest meteorological research on such scientific topics as wind, rain and air pressure, the book also succeeded in projecting a certain otherworldliness. Flammarion would later tell a story of how the manuscript of the ‘Wind’ chapter was blown off his desk and out of his window one stormy night, only to land inexplicably at the printer’s office the next day.
The book became celebrated for printing as its frontispiece a large mystic image showing the place ‘where earth and heaven meet’, Flammarion’s poetic conception of Glaisher’s rather more prosaic ‘upper air’. This was a coloured engraving of striking beauty, made to look like a medieval woodcut, showing a pilgrim clambering from the warm, sunlit earth into the great icy-blue vault of the stars. Later this became known as ‘The Flammarion Pilgrim’, and was thought to symbolise man’s eternal desire to explore ever upwards, into the upper air and beyond the stars. It had of course a particular appeal for aeronauts: Excelsior!
To enhance the mystery, Flammarion kept the name of the artist anonymous, although the image was quite possibly his own design. He accompanied it with a visionary commentary, which gives a good impression of his highly-coloured style and polyvalent approach, mixing science with history and mysticism. It was one of his better ‘rhapsodies’.
Whether the sky be clear or cloudy, it always seems to us to have the shape of an elliptic arch; far from having the form of a circular arch, it always seems flattened and depressed above our heads, and gradually to become farther removed toward the horizon. Our ancestors imagined that this blue vault was really what the eye would lead them to believe it to be; but, as Voltaire remarks, this is about as reasonable as if a silkworm took his web for the limits of the universe. The Greek astronomers represented it as formed of a solid crystal substance; and so recently as Copernicus, a large number of astronomers thought it was as solid as plate-glass.
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Flammarion connected these early scientific conceptions with traditional literary and religious beliefs:
The Latin poets placed the divinities of Olympus and the stately mythological court upon this vault, above the planets and the fixed stars. Previous to the knowledge that the earth was moving in space, and that space is everywhere, theologians had installed the Trinity in the empyrean, the glorified body of Jesus, that of the Virgin Mary, the angelic hierarchy, the saints, and all the heavenly host … A naïve missionary of the Middle Ages even tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met, and that he discovered a certain point where they were not joined together and where, by stooping his shoulders, he passed under the roof of the heavens.9
For Flammarion, ballooning was an idealistic and healing pursuit, which might indeed ‘pass under the roof of heaven’. In what he, like Nadar and Fonvielle (not to mention Hugo), regarded as the corrupt and materialistic atmosphere of the French Second Empire, he felt a longing for the ‘freshness and democracy’ of the upper air. Typically, he celebrated his honeymoon in August 1874 by taking his young bride on an overnight balloon flight from Paris, landing at Spa, over the Belgian border, near Liège. ‘What more natural,’ he told the American magazine McClure’s, ‘than for an astronomer and his wife to fly away like a couple of lovebirds?’10
To him, although balloons were essentially a French discovery, and despite the historic support of Arago, their original promise had been shamefully neglected under the imperial regime. So ballooning had become almost a patriotic duty. It was vital to press on with the exploration of ‘the vast atmospheric ocean at the bottom of which we live’.11
Flammarion saw this in the light of both science and of history:
This splendid and marvellous means of locomotion was once hailed as an infallible method of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the earth’s atmosphere … The illustrious Benjamin Franklin foresaw the meteorological importance of a balloon. Whilst passing through Paris he spoke to several members of the Académie des Sciences on the scientific future for aerostation. This future was then supposed to be near at hand; but even now, in the seventieth year of this century, who can say we have remotely realised it?’12
Flammarion joined the Société Aérostatique in 1867, and undertook about thirty ascents, in various borrowed or hired balloons, between then and 1880. Some were made with Nadar, some with the Godard brothers, and some with his friends Fonvielle and Tissandier. They became more scientific and experimental as he progressed. His very first was launched, with a certain symbolism, from the Paris Hippodrome on Ascension Day, 1867. This was the Roman Catholic feast of the Ascent of the Risen Christ into Heaven, actually a moveable feast, on the fortieth day after Easter, but usually in late May.13
Flammarion was initially under the tuition of Eugène Godard, ‘Aeronaut to the Empire’ as he delicately put it, and used the balloon belonging to the Société Aérostatique. Ironically, this was originally constructed on the orders of the Emperor Napoleon III, as part of his imperial war adventures in north Italy. When these martial ambitions totally failed (a warning of things to come), the balloon was demobbed, so to speak, and sold off cheap to the Société. Flammarion made clear his anti-imperial sympathies by heading his account of the ascent with verses written by the exiled Victor Hugo:
Où va-t-il ce navire? Il va du jour vêtu,
A l’avenir divin et pur, à la vertu,
A la science qu’on voit luire…14
Whither sails this ship? It sails with daylight clothed,
Towards the Future, pristine and divine; towards the Good,
Towards the shining light of Science seen afar…
Flammarion based his experiments on the scientific programme originally set out by François Arago, but also ‘after perusing the results obtained by Gay-Lussac, Robertson and Glaisher’. While criticising balloon showmen and publicists, he recalled that Arago had prophesied that ‘beautiful discoveries will reward those who make scientific excursions in balloons’. Flammarion himself regarded with particular awe the British ascents: ‘For the finest and most productive series of scientific expeditions into the atmosphere we are indebted to James Glaisher, Fellow of the Royal Society, the results of which are published in the volumes of the British Association.’15 *
In an early essay written in 1867, ‘A Sketch of Scientific Ballooning’, Flammarion set out his hopes for what he called the ‘application of balloons’ to meteorological investigations:
This marvellous world of air, so mild and yet so strong, where tempests, whirlwinds, snow, and hail are elaborated, was henceforth opened to the inhabitants of the terrestrial soil. Its secrets would be disclosed, the movements of the atmospheric world would be counted, measured and determined as scrupulously as astronomers can determine those of celestial bodies; and man, once placed in possession of this terrestrial mechanism, would be able to predict rains and storms, drought and heat, luxuriant crops and famines, as surely as he can predict eclipses, and thus ensure an ever-smiling and fertile earth!17
* Glaisher’s high-altitude ascents continued to be admired by French aeronauts and meteorologists for the rest of the century. They soon aimed to rival and supersede his discoveries, as with the ill-fated Zénith team of 1875. Eventually, the term ‘stratosphere’ (‘sphere of layers’) was introduced to redefine Glaisher’s ‘upper air’ by Léon Teisserenc de Bort, head of the Central Meteorological Bureau in Paris, but not until 1899. Experimenting at similar heights to Glaisher, he sent up over two hundred balloons from his estate at Versailles, though all of these were unmanned, and automatically parachuted back their instruments. With these de Bort confirmed that above approximately six to eight miles the temperature, which drops steadily from sea level to that altitude, remained constant, or even began to increase. This surprising data indicated the existence of a new zone, or skin, of atmosphere (a vague term originally adapted from the Greek, ‘the sphere of surrounding vapours’). In fact Glaisher had already submitted examples of these unexpected temperature gradients, though he had not specifically named the new layer. In 1902 de Bort suggested that the atmosphere was in effect divided into two shells or skins. He named the lower skin, containing breathable air and all active life, the ‘troposphere’ (the ‘sphere of changes’ – a phrase adapted from Glaisher). It was soon realised that all clouds, winds and pressure systems were largely confined to this troposphere. Thus the possibility of genuine long-range weather forecasting, on the basis of developing cyclones and anti-cyclones within this relatively narrow band, became a real possibility. But above all it was realised, as Glaisher and Coxwell had first demonstrated, how thin and fragile this vital band of planetary life really was.16
Flammarion’s own declared scientific objectives were gloriously ambitious. Like Glaisher, he felt that only ballooning could supply the mass of data necessary to make genuine ‘predictions of weather’ possible, and thereby develop ‘a true meteorological science worthy of comparison with her eldest sister Astronomy’. He planned to establish ‘the various strata of the air’, and the nature of atmospheric ‘gradients’ in terms of temperature, electricity and barometric pressures, and to gather all sorts of information and analytical measurements, though his list was a little vague and poetic compared to Glaisher’s.
He intended to investigate the following: ‘the moisture of the atmosphere, solar radiation, meteoric phenomena, the forms of clouds, the colour of the sky, the scintillations of the stars, the chemical composition of the air at various altitudes, the laws of sight and sound in these high regions etc. etc.’ He also believed that it would be possible to compile complete maps of the consistent wind currents at various altitudes, depending on the geographical location, the time of day, and the seasons of the year, rather like three-dimensional maritime tide-tables of coastal waters.18
His instrumentation – basically various forms of barometer and thermometer – was amateurish in comparison to Glaisher’s sophisticated aerial laboratory. At night, for example, to view his instruments, instead of a Davy lamp as used by Glaisher, Flammarion ingeniously employed a little glass jar which he had stocked with glow worms.19 He obviously took pleasure in such an eccentric arrangement, poetry mixing with meteorology. Reading his elegant accounts, it is difficult to believe that the thrill of flying was not just as important for Flammarion as gathering data for the Société Aérostatique.
Flammarion had a wonderfully fresh eye, and he constantly picked out and delighted in unusual phenomena. As he put it, ‘It seemed rational to “go and see” for myself what is being done in these higher regions.’ Once, while aloft, he noted a strange cloud of dust over Paris, ‘whitened by the rays of the sun’, and thought at first that it was ordinary city pollution. Then he realised it was kicked up by the exceptional crowds visiting the National Exhibition, far below. As he put it, the democratic air ‘bore witness to the excitement and pleasures of ordinary people’: running feet, dancing horses’ hooves, and flying carriage wheels over the gravillon. Another time, over green fields in the evening, with the sun low and behind him, he saw the balloon shadow ‘completely surrounded by a yellowish white aureole, such as is seen painted round the heads of saints’. The air beatified the balloon with a halo.20
He delighted when he entered a thick cloud with a particularly high hygrometer reading, and suddenly found himself in the middle of a concert hall in which ‘excellent orchestral music’ was playing. It turned out that the dense, humid atmosphere was especially suitable for collecting the sounds from a village band playing in the central square of Boulainvilliers, a little country town lying invisible 3,280 feet below.21
He noticed the different colours of river waters, due to different soils, and how they did not always immediately intermingle on meeting: ‘The water of the Marne, which is yellow now as it was in the time of Julius Caesar, does not mix with the green waters of the Seine, which flows to the left of its current; nor with the blue water of the canal which flows to the right.’ The result became a single tricolour of river water which flowed for several kilometres, yellow in the centre and green and blue on either side. ‘If travelling in balloons were commoner than it is at present,’ he remarked pointedly, ‘what facilities it would confer on topography and surveying in general!’22
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Flammarion carefully observed other creatures in the air, besides birds or his own carrier pigeons. He glimpsed moths, beetles, spiders, but especially butterflies: ‘Butterflies hover round the car of the balloon. Until today I imagined that those little things passed their short existence among the flowers of the fields, and that they never rose to any great height in the air. But in fact they rise higher than any of the birds of our forests, and soar to many thousands of metres above the ground … And another thing strikes me: they do not appear to be frightened by the balloon as birds are. Why is this?’23 *
Sheep, horses and ducks, and sometimes the small children tending them, were also frightened by the balloon. The old superstitious cry of ‘It’s a Devil!’ was still occasionally heard when Flammarion crossed remoter countryside, much to his embarrassment. But on the whole the balloon was favourably regarded almost everywhere in the provinces. He and his companions frequently heard church bells rung to greet them as they passed over villages, and saw local mayors putting on their official sashes and running out to salute them from the steps of the mairie.25
Railway trains signalled to them ‘by a joyous whistle from the locomotive’ as they flew above the tracks, to which the crew replied with merry – but faintly mocking – waving of flags. ‘What dust and what an infernal noise they make,’ Flammarion reflected of steam engines. ‘After all, how slowly they go in comparison with the rapidity of our smooth and silent course through the pure air!’ Most satisfactory of all, as they passed over large country estates, lordly invitations were frequently shouted up to them: ‘Ahoy, Monsieur! Do land here if you can, and come to dinner at the château!’26
At night Flammarion revelled in the extraordinary brilliancy of the stars. On one occasion Jupiter seemed far brighter than the moon – it was ‘the sceptre of the night’. On another, the clarity of the craters and mountains on the moon’s surface, even without a telescope, was hypnotic, and reminded him of Tycho Brahe’s ‘naked eye’ observations centuries ago in Scandinavia. Indeed, he could see and worship the ‘radiating mountain’ named after Tycho himself.27
At the same time, like John Wise in America, he could tell what kind of ground they were flying over in the darkness, simply by listening carefully: ‘The frogs indicated peat bog and morasses; the dogs were evidence of villages; absolute silence told us we were passing over hills or deep forests.’ Smells and scents could give similar information: crops, pine trees, cattle fields, duckponds, even rooftops (chimneys), all yielded up their distinctive identifying ‘perfumes’. These night flights, frankly more impressionistic than scientific, cast the most sustained magic. One lasted eleven and a half hours, and covered over three hundred miles from Paris to Larochefoucauld in the Limousin. They landed in a country lane just before dawn: ‘We sank slowly down like a lazy bird,’ overwhelmed by the sweet smell of vines and cornfields all around them.28
For all his mathematical training at the Observatoire, Flammarion seems to have spent little time on data. He had a poetic and philosophical turn of mind, largely lacking from Glaisher’s meticulous reports. At six-thirty one perfect summer evening on 10 June 1867 he was floating at exactly 10,827 feet above the river Loire, south of the forest of Orléans. He was slightly higher, he noted characteristically, than Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods. The air was perfectly clear, the sky perfectly blue. All the central district of his beloved France was spread out beneath him, like a magnificently painted geographical map of many colours. It was ‘the most magical panorama which fantastic dreams could evoke’. All was rich, glowing, peaceful. He could even see back as far as the geometric alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens, where his love affair with ballooning had begun.29
In a sort of trance, he rose from his seat in front of the instruments, grasped the edge of the balloon basket with both hands, and leaning out as far as he could, gazed downwards into ‘the immense abyss’. But the thoughts that came to Flammarion now were not what he expected, on that idyllic summer evening above France, ‘in the midst of these blue heavens’:
Down below, at 10,000 and odd feet beneath me, exist the universal radiations of life and activity; plants, animals, and men are breathing in the lower strata of this vast aerial ocean, whilst here above animation is already on the decline. Here we may contemplate Nature, but we repose no longer on her bosom. Absolute silence reigns supreme in all its sad majesty. Our voices have no echo. We are surrounded by a vast desert. The silence that reigns in these high regions of the air is so oppressive that we cannot help asking ourselves if we are still alive. But death does not reign here; we are impressed only by absence of life. We appear to appertain no longer to the world below … This absolute silence is truly impressive; it is the prelude to that which reigns in the interplanetary space in the midst of which other worlds revolve. The sky here has a tint which we never saw before … Planetary space is absolutely black.30
* The short answer is that they are too busy migrating. Modern studies of airborne insects have continued with tethered ‘sampling’ balloons, and most recently with a special type of ‘vertical’ radar. Occasional high-altitude bird and insect flights occur close to the stratosphere. But what has been discovered most recently are massive, seasonal ‘airflow populations’ of migrating insects up to about nine thousand feet. These include moths, ladybirds, lacewings, locusts, hoverflies and ground beetles, as well as Flammarion’s fearless butterflies; and they may travel hundreds of miles. The numbers involved are astonishing, and give a wholly new idea of the richness (and hence vulnerability) of the troposphere. According to one study, a conservative estimate of the ‘total bioflow’ over a one-kilometre stretch of the southern English countryside is an astounding three billion insects per month. This is the equivalent to approximately ‘one metric ton of insect biomass’ regularly flying overhead, an idea at which Baron Munchausen would have rejoiced. The statistics are significant as they also throw light on other vital atmospheric phenomena. These include the study of bird migration patterns (especially those of swifts and swallows, which eat insects on the wing), the methods of insect navigation by magnetic field or even stars, and the impact of air pollution. As Flammarion also noticed, with fellow feeling, butterflies are more like balloonists than birds, because (above a certain height, say three hundred feet) they depend utterly on the wind currents for their heroic journeyings.24
Flammarion’s fellow aeronaut, Gaston Tissandier (1843–99), appeared to be an altogether more conventional and earthbound character. His background was academic, and his manner deceptively restrained, sober, even pedantic. He would eventually become the greatest nineteenth-century French historian of ballooning, and his huge, meticulous collection of balloon pictures, letters, articles, books, documents and other memorabilia would form the major aeronautical archive in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. But all this was deceptive. Beneath the calm professorial exterior, with his neat pedagogic beard, beat the heart of a wild, chaotic and dauntless balloon enthusiast.
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Born in Paris in 1843, Tissandier studied chemistry at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and graduated from the Sorbonne. A brilliant young chemist, dedicated and serious-minded, he was appointed Director of the Laboratoire National d’Essai et d’Analyse in 1864, at the early age of twenty-one, and began lecturing to teenage students at the Association Polytechnique. Five years later, when already embarked on his ballooning adventures, he published a successful popular textbook for them, Traité élémentaire de chimie (1869).
The formative balloon experience came relatively late to the young professor, and was at first insidious rather than dramatic in its effects. He happened to witness one of Nadar’s later Paris launches in autumn 1866: ‘It was the Géant that drew me definitively into what I may term my aerial vocation. I shall never forget the ascent of that magnificent aerostat from the Champ de Mars, accompanied by the little Imperial. I have still before my eyes that mighty balloon awaiting the signal to rise into the air and soar through the clouds like an eagle … I still see the Géant rising magnificently: a shower of sand falls from the wickerwork car, and the balloon is soon lost to sight in a thick cloud of vapour. Around me arms are uplifted on all sides, shouts of excitement fill the air, hearts beat fast, and everyone returns home thinking of nothing but those aeronauts.’31 Anyway, Gaston certainly did, although his teaching duties allowed him no immediate chance to pursue that unexpectedly tantalising vision into the ‘thick clouds of vapour’ above his head.
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Two years later, in August 1868, while on a sedate seaside holiday with his parents and his elder brother Albert (1839–1906) in Calais, Tissandier spotted a ‘great red placard’ advertising a local balloon launch, scheduled for the next afternoon, in the place d’Armes. It instantly reawakened all his suppressed ‘aerostatic tendencies’.32 His account of what followed suggests something of the restless, impetuous spirit that secretly possessed the young chemistry professor at that time, as well as the continuing power of balloons to fascinate and intoxicate dreamers like him.
The balloon to be launched was the Neptune, piloted by the controversial amateur aeronaut Jules Duruof (1842–99). The ascent was to celebrate the annual Fête de l’Empereur, Napoleon’s birthday on 15 August, the very day when the autumn weather was meant to declare its intentions. Its declared intentions over Calais were evidently stormy that year. This suited Duruof, still in his twenties, who had already made a reputation for madcap flights and disastrous landings, mostly on the north coast of France, or in the sea beyond it. He was even said to have once ‘purposely’ exploded his balloon, to create a sensation with a seaside crowd.33 He was regarded by many as an irresponsible, bad-weather balloonist, a ‘hooligan’ of the clouds, who took too many risks, and accordingly had a faithful popular following.
Tissandier had never even heard of Duruof before, but quietly slipped round to his rooms at the Hôtel Dunkerque, and introduced himself. After ‘a quarter of an hour’s animated conversation’, they were ‘the best friends in the world’, and Tissandier had been offered the third place in the Neptune’s basket. ‘I was transported with joy on leaving him.’
Tissandier’s family were appalled, and spent the rest of the day trying to talk him out of it. ‘This part of the world, they said, is particularly fatal to balloons and aeronauts. Pilâtre de Rozier lost his life not far from here, and Deschamps was nearly killed on the same coast; the wind is always violent and uncertain along the shore, and it is pure folly on the part of anyone to undertake such an adventure.’34 But Tissandier held firm to his resolution, although he secretly purchased ‘lifebelts and floaters’ from the Calais Humane Society, which dealt with drowned holiday-makers and suicides.
All night Tissandier lay awake, tossing and turning with ‘extraordinary dreams’ of mocking crowds, bursting balloons, and falling into the sea. Pale-faced and exhausted, he staggered out like a condemned man next morning at 5 o’clock to the place d’Armes. Here he found a howling wind, a blinding rainstorm and a roaring sea, with Jules Duruof in high good humour: ‘Don’t worry, I had a disaster launching from this spot last time, but this time intend to take my revenge on the weather – we’ll make our ascent whatever happens.’35
By midday the Neptune was inflated, but it was almost uncontrollable in the wind blowing across the square: ‘The soldiers who lent a hand at the ropes were continually pulled off their feet and suspended like bunches of grapes in the air.’ An incredulous crowd gathered to watch the proceedings, the best entertainment to be had in Calais on a wet holiday afternoon.36
Duruof sent up a small trial balloon, ‘its course followed by a thousand eyes’. It fled horizontally across the square, gaining no height, and struck the bell tower of one of the town houses opposite. Then it bounced off the roof, and shot straight across the promenade and out over the North Sea, quickly disappearing into a line of black thunderclouds. Tissandier turned to look at Duruof. He was still ‘calm and resolute’, with a faintly quizzical expression on his face. At 4 p.m. a municipal band in the shelter of the arcades struck up.37
Still wearing their rain-soaked clothes, the aeronauts – now only two of them – climbed into the basket, Tissandier shivering slightly, and launched. The cobbles of the square dropped away, and the bell tower seemed to tilt over and rush towards them. Some lines from Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds flitted into Tissandier’s scholarly brain as he prepared to die: ‘So let us scale the snow-capped mountains, keeping calm heads, losing no breath!’38 Then suddenly the entire square disappeared and they were out over the sea.
From that moment, the flight took on a dreamlike quality. Duruof had adopted a typically maverick method of launching. Knowing that the soldiers could hold the Neptune down, he had offloaded a mass of ballast just before he ordered the release. The balloon was then so buoyant that it shot upwards almost vertically, ‘like a cork from a champagne bottle’, easily clearing the fatal bell tower, and rising in a few minutes to 5,900 feet, well clear of the immediate rainclouds and into a calm, peaceful, sunlit zone with a temperature of 59.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Tissandier could glimpse Calais rapidly receding, with ‘a mass of microscopic spectators running along the jetties like a family of ants’, among whom were his anxious parents.
The balloon was heading in a generally northern direction out over the Channel. In a kind of trance, Tissandier observed the sea ‘like a vast field of emerald’ below, and beautiful ‘violet-coloured’ cirrus clouds infinitely high overhead. Duruof was ‘plunged in thought’ as he watched the turning compass. ‘We are making for the coast of England,’ he first announced. Then a little later he corrected himself with a wry smile. They had turned north-east, and were heading straight out over the North Sea on a bearing which would take them, in ‘undisturbed serenity’, all the way to Scandinavia. Tissandier tried hard not to panic.39
After some time, Duruof asked Tissandier to take note of the wind direction at different heights. At their comparatively high altitude it was blowing steadily north-east; but several thousand feet below the troop of cumulus clouds were moving in exactly the opposite direction, south-west. Duruof had identified a classic ‘box’ (as so often used by the American balloonists), which offered a guaranteed return ticket to Calais, along what sailors called the reciprocal bearing. ‘We can continue our excursion over the sea as long as we want,’ he said, ‘and return to shore whenever we like.’
Tissandier was astonished and relieved by this new promise of aeronautical magic. They continued ‘towards Scandinavia’ for about an hour (in fact a modest distance of about twenty miles), then valved and dropped very low, to four hundred feet. By the end of the second hour they were skimming in over the breakers and sailing back directly over Calais. Here Tissandier had the satisfaction of spotting his brother Albert on the jetty, waving admiringly – and perhaps enviously. For him too it was a memorable flight.40
Despite the cheers of the holiday crowd, and pressing invitations to descend – or rather precisely because of these – Duruof coolly threw out more ballast and sailed on towards Boulogne. At sunset, using a guide rope and a grapnel, they managed to make a perilous but beautifully timed landing on the rocky beach just below the lighthouse at Cap Gris Nez. The lighthouse-keeper ran out to greet them in such a hurry that he forgot to put on his shoes, and cut his feet on the shingle. The next day they solemnly walked up to visit Pilâtre de Rozier’s tomb, and pay their aeronautical respects. ‘I shall never forget the humble stone that marks the spot,’ wrote Tissandier. He telegraphed his brother Albert with news of their safe arrival. He had confirmed his ‘aerial vocation’.41
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Albert Tissandier soon came to share his younger brother’s fascination with ballooning, but was characteristically more circumspect. Trained as an architect, photographer and illustrator, he represented the artistic side of the family. For him ballooning was essentially a source of visual images. He would often accompany Gaston on his future ascents, and they would make great play of their friendly rivalry: science competing with art. For the next two years the Tissandier brothers learned everything they could about balloons. Gaston wrote up scientific notes, while Albert worked on his pictorial technique, combining drawings with photography.
They met up with the journalist Wilfrid de Fonvielle, who had returned from interviewing Charles Green in London to take up a teaching post at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and was full of outrageous aeronautical tales. Over dinner they ‘spoke much about the scientific use of balloons, and the numerous experiments which might be made in them’. Fonvielle pointed out what brilliant newspaper stories balloons could provide. Every flight was a potential drama: ‘the launch, the flight, the landing!’ Moreover, they could be given a subtle anti-imperial slant – ‘the freedom of the skies, the irrelevance of borders, the democracy of the air, and so on’. To prove it, he immediately dashed off – ‘whilst over dinner’ – a vivid account of Gaston’s Calais–Cap Gris Nez adventure, and sold it the very next day to the radical paper La Liberté.42 From then on Fonvielle and the Tissandiers became a band of ballooning brothers.
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Between autumn 1868 and summer 1870 this three-man team – often accompanied by one of the Godards, or Jules Duruof, as their instructors – undertook a regular series of ascents from Paris. The more hazards they encountered, the better stories they came back with. They experienced violent snowstorms above Normandy, blinding fog over the North Sea, a freezing night in a captive balloon (with Glaisher) above London, a gale-force flight over Belgium, a long-distance trip into Germany, a burst balloon, and innumerable crash-landings.43 They also made a logistical discovery that would soon turn out to have unsuspected significance: that because of the prevailing winds, the most efficient place from which to launch a balloon in Paris was the gasworks at La Villette, on the north-eastern outskirts of the city.
They broke several balloon records, including the most sustained ‘platform’ flight, which ironically turned out to be forty-eight hours spent almost stationary in the air between Paris and Compiègne. But in 1869 they also established the fastest average balloon speed: ninety miles per hour, achieved during a thirty-five-minute trip ‘dragged along by the force of a furious gale’ beyond Meaux into the flatlands of Flanders. They landed ‘covered in bruises and more or less stunned’. But a quick calculation showed that no train had ever matched that ‘astonishing celerity’.44
In spring 1870 Gaston began publishing a landmark series of monthly articles in the mass-circulation journal Le Magasin pittoresque, entitled ‘Histoire d’un ballon’.45 These soon attracted a broad popular readership, who identified with the spirit of adventure, and the celebration of the French countryside over which Gaston and his companions flew, as much as with the ballooning itself. Though Gaston provides a short history of ballooning, and various miscellaneous scientific observations in passing (on snowflakes, high-flying spiders, cloud structures and light diffraction), the central interest remains the aerial adventure and the unfolding vision of France, la Patrie.
Much space is given to one particularly refractory, but much-loved, balloon, called L’Hirondelle (‘the Swallow’). She becomes a sort of mischievous character in the narrative, and is perhaps the spirit of Liberty herself. She takes them on various hair-raising flights over the remotest countryside, la France profonde, and out to the surrounding coastline. The unheard-of names of the tiny villages where they often land at dusk come to resemble a pastoral or patriotic litany. Once they even touch down in French Algeria. At the same time the high cloudscapes above, the ‘Alhambra palaces’ of the upper air, become a sort of sublime extension of national dreams and longings.*
All this was wonderfully illustrated by Albert Tissandier. Beginning with precise technical drawings (for example, of the exact workings of a balloon barometer or a sprung venting valve), he soon found his true subject in extraordinary panoramic pictures of the balloon in the clouds.
Albert captured the peaceful, visionary atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century ballooning better than any other artist. Drawing on the great tradition of French landscape painting – which was just about to metamorphose into Impressionism – he invented something quite new: the extended aerial ‘cloudscape’. These are not views from the balloon, but breathtaking panoramas from some imaginary viewpoint outside it.
Using a brilliant combination of fine engraving and photography, Albert Tissandier invented a new kind of sublime. Great oceanic stretches of iridescent clouds are dramatised by sunlight or moonlight. They are like enormous stage sets, upon which a single balloon – usually seen at a great distance – appears as the only actor, the only human point of reference and of visual scale. Varied meteorological effects – snow, fog, rain, sunset or sunrise beams – suggest a kind of transformed, celestial upper world. It is secular, even pagan; but shot through with feelings of infinite longing or melancholy or loneliness or hope. It is the dream world of the mariners of the upper atmosphere.
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Fig. 1. — Baromètre métallique compensé, pour les hauteurs de 6000 mètres. — Extérieur et intérieur.
This lyrical, visionary age of French ballooning was to be transformed by the terrible catastrophe of the coming Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. But just before its outbreak, these young and idealistic aeronauts came together to produce the greatest book of nineteenth-century ballooning ever published: Travels in the Air. It was, symbolically, a collaborative work, involving four authors. What’s more, it was that rare thing, a Franco-British publishing project. Optimistic in tone, progressive in outlook, it was innocent of any reference to the recent conflict in America, and the coming conflict in France. Indeed, it could be said to have its collective head magnificently in the clouds.
The moving spirit was Camille Flammarion, who contacted James Glaisher in London and got him to agree to a collaboration. There is some suggestion that there was also an attempt to coopt Charles Green, but he was now too ill to write any kind of memoir. The first version, entirely in French and under Flammarion’s editorship, appeared under the title Voyages aériens in 1870. Parts I and II consisted of long autobiographical pieces by Glaisher (translated) and Flammarion, including their nicely contrasted histories of ‘scientific ballooning’ in Europe, as seen respectively from an English and a French perspective. Part III added racier, miscellaneous accounts by Gaston Tissandier and Fonvielle, often co-signing their contributions.47
The revised and expanded English version, Travels in the Air, was published in London by Richard Bentley in 1871. This historic volume was given a distinctive appearance by a set of 118 magnificent aerial illustrations, largely by Albert Tissandier. It presents its overall editor as James Glaisher FRS, who has evidently exercised some editorial discretion.
The different styles of the aeronauts become particularly noticeable. Glaisher’s dry ‘English’ description of his high-altitude flights contrasts strikingly with the light-hearted ‘Gallic’ touch of Tissandier’s lively narratives, much emphasised by the nimble translation, while Fonvielle’s witty, irreverent reminiscences (including his rides in the creaking Le Géant and his visit to the equally creaking Green) have an almost music-hall flavour in English. Each is attractive in its own way, yet none achieves quite the solemn poetry of Flammarion’s observations of the upper air, equally effective in either French or English.
The tone of the whole collection was uplifting and visionary:
This book, we sincerely hope, will mark an epoch in the history of aerostatics, for it is the first time that a series of aerial scenes have been published as observed by the aeronauts themselves. It is also the first time that artists have gone up in balloons … reproducing these incomparable panoramas, these magnificent scenes, before which the Alps themselves grow small, earthly sunsets are eclipsed in splendour, and the oceans themselves are drowned in an ocean of light still more vast…48
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The Franco-British entente was not without its tensions. While Glaisher recognised Flammarion’s distinction as a scientist, and regarded Gaston Tissandier as ‘agreeable, active and intelligent’, this was not the case with Wilfrid de Fonvielle. In a marginal note on his editorial copy, Glaisher described Fonvielle as ‘a Red republican’, and ‘over-excitable’. His balloon writing was ‘flippant and in bad taste’, and Glaisher did not approve of him contributing to leftist newspapers like La Liberté. In return, Fonvielle clearly thought Glaisher was a snob and an imperialist (quite unlike the amiable Green), and chastised him for slow editorial work and not replying to his letters.
But these vague political irritations largely dissolved once they were in print together, and airborne in history. It is clear that they were all immensely proud of the book. In retrospect – after the earthly catastrophe of 1870 – it took on a sort of dreamy, utopian afterglow. The oceans of the upper air would never again seem so free, so boundless, so sublime.49
* They planned eventually to fly right around the Mediterranean, an aerial version of the Grand Tour, starting in Morocco. It is possible that this trip was inspired by Jean Bruno’s Les Aventures de Paul enlevé par un ballon (1858). However, L’Hirondelle was suddenly and shockingly incinerated when one of the launch crew casually lit his pipe next to the hydrogen generator. Though no one was hurt, this sudden conflagration in the summer of 1869 was an ill omen: ‘Your beautiful balloon canopy, your generator, your storage hangar, your basket, all gone up in flames! – nothing but a heap of cinders!’ The image of a burning balloon over Paris – which goes right back to Sophie Blanchard – would soon become a political symbol of great power.46
