It was early morning on March 21, 1999, when Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones touched down in the Egyptian desert. They had been airborne for 19 days, 21 hours, and 55 minutes, during which time they’d covered 25,361 miles. They had also become the first men to circumnavigate the globe by balloon, powered by nothing more than high-altitude winds.
During the epic journey, Breitling Orbiter 3, their giant 180-foot-high silver helium and hot-air balloon, had reached heights of 37,000 feet and speeds of over 160 knots. Piccard and Jones were suspended underneath in a gondola constructed from Kevlar and carbon fiber, which provided good protection, but was far from comfortable. The red gondola was about the size of a camper van and they were cooped up in this for nearly three weeks. The two men, cold and cramped, slept in shifts and subsisted on dry food, all the while chipping off the ice that kept forming around sensitive electrics inside.
Their success shattered all previous ballooning records. But in doing so, it also demonstrated, like every notable balloon flight that preceded it, the balloon’s inherent problems as a flying machine. After all, Piccard and Jones had not known when they were leaving Switzerland that they were on their way to Egypt. And even supposing that had been their plan, going around the world to get there was almost certainly not the best route.
It was in 1782, while watching the sparks rise from an open fire, that Joseph Montgolfier wondered whether the same force might somehow be harnessed to deliver soldiers behind the walls of an enemy fortress. This thought led him to conduct experiments with a lightweight, box-like balloon made of silk and thin wood, filled with hot air generated by burning paper. Watching from the ground, he described its ascent into the air as “one of the most astonishing sights in the world.” A month later, in December 1782, he and his brother Étienne flew a bigger (still unmanned) device across a distance of over a mile.
Breitling Orbiter 3.
There was no stopping them now. In June the following year the public demonstration of a large, recognizably balloon-shaped craft made of sackcloth and paper attracted the interest of King Louis XVI. He suggested sending a pair of criminals up in a balloon (it was this sort of thing that would get him and his wife, Marie Antoinette, guillotined a few years later) but wiser heads prevailed: a sheep, a cockerel, and a duck were eventually selected for a demonstration flight in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles.
With the menagerie returned safely to Earth, the Montgolfiers began work on a balloon designed to carry people. The brothers built their new 75-foot-high balloon in collaboration with a wallpaper manufacturer. That’s probably why it looks as if it could have been a giant lampshade from the king’s bedroom. It was decorated in blue, gold, and crimson with zodiac signs, fleurs-de-lys, eagles, and stylized suns featuring the king’s face. On November 21, it was launched from the outskirts of Paris. On board were a doctor, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, and an infantry officer, the Marquis d’Arlandes. Twenty-five minutes later they landed 5 miles away.
The effect of this first successful manned flight was electrifying. In flying for the first time, the Montgolfier brothers and their passengers had made real what had previously been the stuff of myth and dreams. For most, that alone was enough. But not all were impressed. Benjamin Franklin, the American polymath and statesman, then US ambassador to France, witnessed one of the Montgolfiers’ contemporaries send an unmanned hydrogen balloon into the air. “Interesting,” he heard a member of the crowd comment, “but what use is it?”
“What use,” Franklin responded, “is a newborn baby?”
In truth, though, the man whom Franklin so elegantly put down had a point. Balloons had their limitations. A year after the first flight a pair of aeronauts—as balloon pilots were known—crossed the English Channel. Just. Flying from Dover, to reach France they had to throw overboard everything that wasn’t pinned down, including their brandy and even their trousers. So aeronauts had some control over whether they went up or down, but everything else was in the lap of the gods.
For another century, however, if you wanted to fly, there was no alternative to the balloon. Pleasure flights for paying passengers became popular. The military experimented with the use of balloons for observation, and they were used for scientific purposes too.
James Glaisher liked clubs. A fellow of the Royal Society, he was also president of the Royal Microscopical Society and the Photographic Society of Great Britain. But it was the club he founded in 1850 that was closest to his heart, and it was experiments on behalf of the Royal Meteorological Society that made him famous. And nearly killed him.
In 1862, he and a fellow aeronaut, Henry Tracey Coxwell, took off from Wolverhampton in a gas balloon to conduct research into atmospheric temperature and pressure. On the way up, Glaisher passed out from oxygen deprivation. Coxwell, suffering from frostbitten hands, was unable to operate the gas valve to initiate their descent. The two men continued to climb until Coxwell managed to use his teeth to release the gas and ensure their survival. They had reached an altitude of 39,000 feet—that’s over 7 miles.
Glaisher and Coxwell’s research flight played to the balloon’s strengths. The two Britons needed only to go up and down. It was not the same for the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée, who decided he was going to ride a balloon to the North Pole from the Arctic island of Svalbard. With the principal scientific aims of taking meteorological observations and mapping the region using aerial photography, Andrée’s first attempt in 1896 was scuppered when northerly winds confined his hydrogen balloon Örnen (Eagle) to the hangar. The following year the winds were more favorable, and on July 11, 1897, Andrée and his two-man crew launched from Svalbard, full of hope and ambition.
It was 101/2 hours before the balloon first hit the ice, and 3 days until it was permanently grounded on the frozen ocean, 170 miles from land. Three months later, after trying in vain to trek back to safety across the moving pack ice on a diet of seals, walruses, and polar bears, Andrée and his men were dead.
James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell prepare to take off from Wolverhampton gasworks on their near-fatal flight to an altitude of 39,000 feet.
Although balloons remain of enormous value to meteorologists and weather forecasters to this day, by the end of the nineteenth century it had become clear that it was unnecessary for passengers to venture into harm’s way in the name of science. It didn’t mean there weren’t those who were still good at it, though. In the 1950s and 1960s a record-breaking series of balloon flights took men to the threshold of space.
By the summer of 1957 it was clear that outer space was where mankind was heading, even though Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit was still a few years away. When the US military, using manned balloons, began research into the effects of altitude and cosmic rays on the human body, its pilots were the first men to see the curvature of Earth. The records they set over the decade that followed still stand. In 1961, two US Navy officers, Commander Malcolm Ross and Lieutenant Commander Victor Prather, flew to a height of 113,740 feet. A year earlier, Captain Joe Kittinger of the US Air Force had jumped from a balloon at an altitude of over 103,000 feet, which remains the longest freefall ever undertaken. During the descent, he plunged toward Earth at close to the speed of sound. He was wearing a version of the spacesuit NASA used for its astronauts, but Kittinger’s jump gave it a much more severe test than any spaceflight. When Alan Shepard, the first American to ride a rocket into space, was asked if he would be prepared to attempt a reprise of Kittinger’s jump, his response was unequivocal. “Hell, no,” he said, “absolutely not.”
For all Kittinger and his contemporaries’ extraordinary achievements, the shortcomings of balloons as flying machines meant the future lay with civilian enthusiasts. The introduction of lightweight synthetic fabrics and safe, reliable propane gas burners meant that from the early 1960s onward ballooning became an increasingly popular leisure activity. Colorful globes with wicker baskets slung underneath have become a familiar sight floating low in the sky at dawn and dusk.
Unused and ignored by the military and by commercial aviation—both of whom needed to know where they were traveling to and when they might get there—balloons offered a few lucky twentieth-century adventurers a chance to carve their names into the record books. In 1978, a helium balloon called Double Eagle II became the first to cross the Atlantic. Six years later, Captain Joe Kittinger became the first to do the same journey solo. In 1981, two of the Double Eagle II crew conquered the Pacific with a flight between Japan and California. Ten years after that, the biggest hot-air balloon ever built, Virgin Pacific Flyer, carried the British tycoon Richard Branson and Swedish balloonist Per Lindstrand from Japan to northern Canada, a new distance record of 6,761 miles. Then American businessman Steve Fossett crossed the Pacific on his own in 1995, four years before Piccard and Jones flew their balloon around the world for the first time in Breitling Orbiter 3—and, in doing so, pulled off what was described as “the last great aviation challenge of the twentieth century.”
Captain Joe Kittinger leaves the capsule on his record-breaking 1961 freefall parachute jump. That appears to be tape holding together some of his equipment.
