Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes
The historical painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, friend of John Keats and Charles Lamb, who kept a close if disillusioned eye on London freaks and fashions from his studio near Baker Street, noted grimly in his diary for 6 June 1825: ‘No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species, unless he has been up in an air-balloon.’
Of course, not everyone was so disillusioned. A remarkable balloon is featured in Jane Loudon’s extraordinary science fiction novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-First Century (1827). It was written when Loudon was aged twenty, ‘a strange, wild novel’, as she herself called it, full of totally unexpected technical inventions, such as ‘steam percussion bridges’, heated streets, mobile homes on rails, smokeless chemical fuels, electric hats (for ladies), and most spectacularly a full-size balloon made from a nugget of highly concentrated Indiarubber. Small enough to be stored in a desk drawer, such a ‘portable’ balloon once inflated is large enough carry three people from Britain to Egypt.24
Loudon’s description of an aerial balloon carnival is brilliantly prophetic of modern balloon fiestas, especially the more psychedelic American ones: ‘The air was thronged with balloons, and the crowd increased at every moment. These aerial machines, loaded with spectators till they were in danger of breaking down, glittered in the sun, and presented every possible variety of shape and colour. In fact, every balloon in London or the vicinity had been put into requisition, and enormous sums paid, in some cases, merely for the privilege of hanging to the cords which attached to the cars, whilst the innumerable multitudes that thus loaded the air, amused themselves by scattering flowers upon the heads of those who rode beneath.’ The fantastic balloon shapes include, for more sportive individuals, ‘aerial horses, inflated with inflammable gas’, and for the more languid, ‘aerial sledges’ which can be flown from a supine position.25
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Airy Kingdoms
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By the end of the 1820s the early pioneering days were over, and the dream of some universal form of global air transport by navigable balloons had faded across Europe.
Indeed, quite another form of revolutionary transport system was starting to emerge, in the shape of the railway network. The opening of the twenty-six miles of the Stockton to Darlington line in 1825 heralded an era of universal railway building. Five years later, the first genuine passenger service opened between Manchester and Liverpool. From then on, the heavy engineering of the Victorian steam engine, establishing powerful new notions of speed, reliability and a regular ‘time-table’ came to dominate the whole concept of travel.
These weighty considerations were, of course, the exact opposite of what a hydrogen balloon could provide. Victorian ballooning would eventually become the antithesis of the Victorian railway. It would be seen as poetic as against prosaic; as natural rather than man-made. The Victorian railway would mean iron, steam, noise, power and speed, as Turner envisaged in his painting. It would bring ‘railway time’, and a form of mass transport which was both a vital means and a literary symbol of industrialisation. By contrast, ballooning would come to be seen as essentially bucolic, even pastoral. It was silent, decorative, exclusive, and refreshingly unreliable: a means to mysterious adventure rather than a mode of mundane travel.1 fn11
So, at this very time of the railway boom, a new kind of flying was starting to capture people’s imagination. It was marked by the emergence of what might be called the ‘recreational’ balloon. These were increasingly large, sophisticated and well-equipped aerostats, designed to take several paying passengers, and with luck to make a profit for their owners. Though they were commercial propositions, they retained an ineffable romance. They often had ‘royal’ in their names, in deference to the new young Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837.
They were recreational balloons in several senses, constructed and flown by a new breed of balloon businessmen and entertainers, aerial entrepreneurs who regarded themselves as skilled professionals as well as artists of the air. Crucial to their commercial success was the discovery that coal gas, cheap and reliable and easily available from the urban ‘mains’, could be substituted for expensive and unstable hydrogen. Their most memorable flights would also be over urban landscapes.
Drifting silently above London or Paris, or any of the industrialised centres of northern Europe, they granted their passengers a new and instructive kind of panorama. They revealed the extraordinary and largely unsuspected metamorphosis of these cities, with their new industries and their hugely increased populations. What they found spread out below them had never been seen before in history. It was both magnificent and monstrous: an endless panorama of factories, slums, churches, railway lines, smoke, smog, gas lighting, boulevards, parks, wharfs, and the continuous amazing exhalation of city sounds and smells. Above all, what they saw from ‘the angel’s perspective’ was the evident and growing divisions between wealth and poverty, between West End and East End, between blaze and glimmer.
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The most celebrated British balloonist of this second generation was Charles Green (1785–1870). He was famed for his 526 successful ascents, and his absolute sang-froid in emergency. An annual Charles Green Silver Salver is awarded to this day by the British Balloon and Airship Club for the most impressive technical flight of the year. Green’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery presents him like a plain, good natured farmer. He sits stiffly at a window, with his famous striped Royal Nassau balloon hanging in the sky above his right shoulder. His image is rendered with the solidity and simplicity of an English pub sign. Yet his character was far from straightforward: a curious mixture of earth and air, of ballast and inflammable gas, of the worldly and the visionary.
Everyone agreed that the stocky and rubicund Green was jovial and easy-going on the ground. Yet he became strangely fierce and commanding in the air, a veritable martinet. This kind of Janus-like character can sometimes be found among amateur yachtsmen – twinkling and expansive in the club bar, but fiery authoritarians at the helm. It has perhaps something to do with the loneliness and stress of command. In ordinary company, a contemporary journalist found Green ‘garrulous, and delighting all with his intelligence, his enterprise, his enthusiasm and his courtesy’. But once installed in the aerial kingdom of his balloon basket, he became ‘taciturn, and almost irritable’, rarely speaking, but always ready to ‘roar out’ commands at crucial moments of manoeuvring or landing. Apart from his balloon logbooks, he left few, if any, written accounts of his own flights. Yet he inspired others to do so, and many of the classic descriptions of Victorian ballooning, especially over London, by John Poole (1838), Albert Smith (1847) and Henry Mayhew (1852), were written after memorable voyages with Charles Green.4
Green came from a family of fruit merchants, based in Goswell Street on the edge of the City of London. This was, and still is, a bustling district of small businesses and shops, modest houses and working cafés. It is where Dickens’s Pickwick Papers begins, with Mr Pickwick leaning out of his lodging windows onto Goswell Street and greeting ‘that punctual servant of all work, the sun’ on a cheerful morning in 1827. How or when Green became fascinated by ballooning remains a mystery. Fruit and veg do not seem an obvious source of aerial longings. He would only say that ballooning started as a hobby, after he had been trying to improve the gas lighting in the family shop. Possibly the idea for using mains coal gas to inflate a balloon came to him during these experiments.5
Born in 1785, Green was working full-time in his father’s shop from the age of fifteen, and little is known about his earliest flights until 1821, when he was approaching forty. It would seem that he began ballooning when he was already a successful businessman, perhaps as a kind of sport, and was determined to find a way around the huge expense of hydrogen. He made his first ascent using coal gas, from the newly installed Piccadilly mains, launching from Green Park in London on 19 July 1821. But Green must already have had some reputation as a balloonist, for the launch was part