Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes
airborne hardware store. The total payload or lifting capacity of the eighty-foot Vauxhall – including the men, the equipment, the supplies and the sand ballast – was just under three thousand pounds, the equivalent of about fifteen robust men (or a modern rugby team with their boots on).
3
Watched by an enormous crowd, they launched from the Cremorne section of the Vauxhall Gardens at 1.30 p.m. on 1 November 1836, with approximately three hours of daylight in hand. They sailed rapidly eastwards across London, down the Thames, over Rochester, diagonally across north Kent towards Canterbury and the North Foreland. This line of flight would take them over the Goodwin Sands, out across the North Sea towards the Baltic, and possibly even Scandinavia. It was much too far north for Green’s liking.
Green immediately impressed his crew with a quietly confident demonstration of balloon navigation. If they gained height, he announced, they would turn south. He briskly ordered Mason to release half a sack of ballast, and they watched silently as the whole horizon appeared to revolve beneath them, turning slowly and ‘majestically’ northwards at Green’s command. At first confused, Mason gradually realised that the Vauxhall had entered an upper airstream and was flying due south towards Dover. ‘Nothing could exceed the beauty of this manoeuvre,’ he thought.11
They sailed over the first twinkling lights of Dover port at exactly 4.48 p.m., ‘almost vertically over the Castle’.12 It was precisely the point from which Blanchard and Jeffries had begun their historic flight almost fifty-one years before. They crossed the Channel just before dusk, overflying Calais at three thousand feet, and then dropping to recover the easterly airstream. As the last light failed, Green calculated their average land speed so far at twenty-five miles per hour, with the probability that it would increase over the flat expanses of Flanders and Belgium. They were now on a compass course of approximately 100 degrees, a fraction south of due east, headed in the general direction of Brussels, Liège, Cologne, Frankfurt, Prague, Moscow … So the balloon disappeared into the gathering penumbra of Continental Europe.
Their next act was to sit down to a huge meal of cold meats and wine, spread on the central work bench of their basket, and accompanied with ‘other liquors’. Mason noted that the champagne was unmanageable at any altitude, as due to the lower pressure it simply shot frothing out of the bottle, revealing what he called its ‘natural tendency to flying’.13 Perhaps under the influence of these refreshments, the landscapes of northern France seen after dusk, with isolated points of candlelight ‘burning late’ in the villages below, seemed infinitely romantic and mysterious. Equally, the bigger towns, now lit by gaslight, glowed on the horizon like unearthly sources of energy and activity. Their reflected radiance bloomed yellow and purple in the thickened atmosphere above the balloon: a first indication of urban pollution.
By midnight they had been airborne for nearly twelve hours, already something of a record. They were now flying towards the flaring lights of some huge industrial complex, distinctly set on the banks of a large river running north and south. They identified this as the river Meuse, and realised that they must have long since passed south of Brussels. The town was too big to be either Charleroi or Maastricht, and the only possibility remained Liège. They were astonished that such an ancient city should be surrounded by so much modern industry. Approached by air, and at night, this became dramatically evident.
Nestling in the valley of the river Meuse, with its historic churches and ancient markets, Liège was once the tranquil centre of the traditional textile trade of northern France. But as part of the newly independent Belgium it been transformed into one of the largest centres of heavy industry in the coalmining belt of northern Europe. With a population of nearly a hundred thousand labourers, it supported a growing number of huge ironworks and foundries, which were worked in shifts without ceasing twenty-four hours a day. Its commercial port was the third largest river port in Europe, with direct river and canal connections to Antwerp, Rotterdam and Aachen. Massive supplies of coal, iron ore and other raw materials were constantly shipped in by barge, while a steady stream of metal goods, guns and engineering parts were hurried away south-eastwards into France and south-westwards into Germany.
The balloonists, silently approaching through the night and flying very low, were transfixed by the unearthly glare of the fiery foundries moving swiftly towards them out of the darkness. The ancient centre of the city itself, set peacefully round the great oxbow curve of the Meuse, ‘the theatres and squares, the markets and public buildings’, slid quietly beneath them. But the surrounding districts ‘appeared to blaze with innumerable fires … to the full extent of all our visible horizon’.14
As they floated over this industrial inferno, they were gradually overwhelmed by the thunderous machine noise, the choking industrial smells, and the haunting sound of men below still working on the night shifts. There was disembodied shouting, coughing, swearing, metallic banging and sometimes, weirdly, sharp echoing bursts of laughter. They were being granted a unique, nightmare vision of the new industrial future, a world of ever-extending ironworks where every street was ‘marked out by its particular line of fires’. It was what Mason called the strangest glimpse of a ‘Cyclopean region’.
Mason’s disturbing account of passing over Liège later became famous in aeronautical circles. The French aeronaut Camille Flammarion recalled it as he made the same night flight over the symbolic city thirty years later. But for Flammarion, the experience was subtly different. He pointed enthusiastically to the industrial lights as they approached: ‘See, mon ami! See how beautiful this is! Do not dream of days gone by …’ The vision of manmade power and productivity deeply impressed him: ‘The Belgian towns, lit up by gaslight and the flames issuing from the smoky summits of the blast furnaces seemed to us silent aerial navigators the most dazzling spectacle. The deep sound of the Meuse, as it flowed along its course, was orchestrated by the sharper noises from the workshops, whose mysterious flames and dark smoke rose in the distance all around us.’15
But the English balloonists were shaken. Uncharacteristically distracted, Green mistakenly let their expensive coffee-brewing device fall overboard. Mason recorded this unusual error dispassionately. Having opened it over the side of the basket to shake out the expended materials, ‘Mr Green unfortunately let it slip from his hand’.16 Even less in character, Green then started to play a curious trick on the unsuspecting foundry workers below.
He lit a blazing white Bengal light, and lowered it on a rope until it was skimming ‘nearly over their heads’. He then urged Mason to shout down through the speaking trumpet ‘alternately in French and German’, as if some supernatural power was visiting them from on high. The ironworkers were being visited by the gods of the air.
Mason complacently imagined how this aeronautical trick must have ‘struck terror’ into even the boldest hearts and wisest heads of the ‘honest artizans’ beneath: ‘Catching alone the rays of the light that preceded from the artificial fire-work that was suspended close beneath us, the balloon, the only part of the machine visible to them, presented the aspect of a huge ball of fire, slowly and steadily traversing the sky, at such a distance as to preclude the possibility of it being mistaken for any of the ordinary productions of Nature …’17
As the Bengal light went out, they completed this supernatural effect by emptying half a bag of ballast sand directly onto the upturned faces a hundred feet below. Then the balloon sailed silently and invisibly away, leaving behind the puzzled tribe of Belgian foundry workers staring uncomprehendingly upwards, as these mysterious superior intelligences disappeared. ‘Lost in astonishment, and drawn together by their mutual fears,’ Mason concluded, ‘they stood no doubt looking up at the object of their terrors.’18 So the gods were also treating the ironworkers as if they were some primitive tribe.
Mason’s account of the voyage, Aeronautica, has several illustrations, views and cloudscapes, among them a very strange, dramatic one entitled ‘Balloon over Liège at Night’, taken from an imaginary point outside the basket looking across at the crew. Their faces are