My cluster of balloon stories appears to end here, down on the lonely winter ice, in gathering cold and darkness, with only death and failure, and falling hopelessly to earth. It might seem very far from those sunlit freedoms of the upper air, the glorious hope and ‘hilarity’ with which the whole dream began. The Eagle’s story certainly makes for a tragic conclusion. In its own way it might appear a strange modern replay of the original Icarus myth, with polar frost replacing solar heat, in Nature’s revenge for mankind’s eternal hubris.
I for one, surely a hardened biographer, have never been able to get Nils and Anna’s heartbreaking story out of my head. Anna, incidentally, left Sweden for America, and although she eventually married, she left instructions that her heart should be buried separately with Nils’s remains when they were found.1 Indeed, the experience of the lovers and spouses of balloonists, those who remained on the ground, ‘with their hearts in their mouths’, has yet to be investigated and told.
But of course Andrée’s expedition was very far from being the dead end to the overall ballooning story. Viewed from a proper aerial perspective, something revolutionary had been achieved. Over the brief hundred or so years between 1780 and 1900, through the extraordinary courage and recklessness of such men and women, the momentous idea of manned flight itself was at last established, after a hundred thousand years of human evolution. To fly, to inhabit the upper air, to claim our beautiful airy kingdom, could no longer be dismissed as a greedy human aberration, an unnatural trespass upon forbidden territory. It had become instead a proper dimension for the exercise of scientific genius and imagination, a new stage in our planetary evolution; and, one might hope, in our planetary self-knowledge. There truly was, as Félix Nadar put it with his exceptional gift for encapsulating and promoting new concepts, Le Droit au vol – ‘The Right to Fly’.
The mechanical business of flight itself was certainly now handed over, via the airship, to the heavier-than-air machine, and within the next hundred years, to the rocket, the satellite, and ‘ultimately’ to the spaceship. Though neither the Apollo programme nor the current Mars missions are themselves the end, either. There will undoubtedly be further extensions in the forms of interplanetary – if not intergalactic – travel within the next hundred years or so; provided we do not burst our fragile planetary balloon in the meantime.
But the history of balloons has taken a different, and in some ways more subtle and provocative, path. Extreme ballooning, champagne ballooning, was itself only a phase, and dwindled away in the interwar years. But since the 1960s, ballooning has been reborn with the growing popularity of hot-air ballooning, and, it must be said, with its comparative cheapness and safety. Charles Green and the Tissandier brothers would certainly have approved of this development. It has emerged as a breathless form of tourist attraction, flying regularly over historic sites at dawn or dusk; and has become a major international sport, far outpacing the original Victorian ‘recreational’ coal-gas balloons; and like many modern sports transforming the old ideas of national rivalry.
Balloon fiestas in America have become as popular as book festivals in England; Colorado matches Cheltenham. Both attract increasingly large and knowledgeable crowds, and produce an infectious atmosphere of carnival. Indeed, it strikes me that there are several similarities. For example, the idea of the ‘book launch’ and the ‘balloon launch’ (events which Guy de Maupassant was perhaps the first to combine), with all their associated elements of excitement and possible disaster, have many factors in common. Perhaps balloons attract a more sportive, though not necessarily a more youthful, following than books; though both sets of devotees are impressively expert and enthusiastic.
On the other hand, ballooning requires no translation services, and major events take place annually all over Europe, and now increasingly in Africa and India. It might be said, even as Victor Hugo claimed, that the free balloon implies free airspace, an absence of hard borders, and therefore is democratic in its assumptions. Geo can belong to Demos, as François Arago pronounced with a flourish. There are now numerous international balloon fiestas all around the world, as at Velikie Luki, Russia; Rajasthan, India; or Lisburn, Ireland.2
Balloons are still used for many modern scientific observations, both peaceful and warlike. There are high-altitude weather balloons. There are balloons for surveying archaeological sites: ‘buried’ towns, or lost medieval villages, or Iron Age forts. There are military drone balloons, used for example by the US Army in Afghanistan. There are balloons or blimps used for advertising, such as the famous Michelin balloon, or Airabelle herself, who simply advertises milk. There are even modern tethered balloons used to study our environmental impact on the globe, such as those employing low-level automatic cameras over coral reefs.3
There is still a fascination with balloon records and ‘firsts’, often quixotically promoted as scientific research. In 1932, Professor Auguste Piccard, launching from a site near Zurich, rose to 53,149 feet in a pioneering form of pressurised gondola. Subsequent altitude and free-fall (jumping from balloons) records continue to be pursued. Colonel Joe Kittinger jumped from a balloon nineteen miles up over Florida in 1960. Most recently, in October 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from 127,852 feet, in a specially pressurised spacesuit, adding to the drama by having the whole event broadcast on live television and over the internet. He remained in free fall for over four minutes. One wonders what Jacques Garnerin would have made of that.
Horizontal records also continue to be challenged. The first crossing of the Atlantic by balloon took place, as we have seen, in 1978. The first non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, by Breitling Orbiter 3, succeeded, after many perils and disappointments, in 1999; the bright-red kevlar pressure-cabin gondola is preserved in the Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. The first crossing of Mount Everest by balloon was achieved by Leo Dickinson in 2009, and produced the most awe-inspiring photographs.
But it should be clear by now that this book is not a conventional history of ballooning. In a sense, it is not really about balloons at all. It is about what balloons gave rise to. It is about the spirit of discovery itself, the extraordinary human drama it produces; and to this there is no end. It also explores how a single, counter-intuitive scientific discovery – that hydrogen can be weighed against atmospheric air – can have such huge social and imaginative impact. In this, it is about the meeting of chemistry, physics, engineering and the imagination.
My own lifelong fascination with balloons still puzzles me, ever since that original, childhood flight of fancy. I have written this book partly to find out why this is so. As indicated in some of my footnotes (and footnotes should be like little baskets of helpful provisions slung below the main machine), I have made a few hot-air balloon ascents myself. But this has always been as a passenger, never as a pilot. I think it is the idea, the upwards possibility, as much as the actual activity that attracts me. My heart leaps up when I behold a dragon in the sky.
I have mentioned some of my most memorable flights in France, America and Australia. But I also fondly recall the characteristic romance of a beautiful late-September flight, in the dusk over my home county of Norfolk, when the earth darkened below us, and the stars began to come out overhead; and we slipped down to land in a sweetly perfumed field. A field that turned out to be occupied by a large herd of shadowy, but distinctly inhospitable, prize Norfolk pigs.