Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes
for and most generously financed, his five-month ‘national tour’ remained largely along the east coast, visiting Boston, New York, and Washington. He got as far north as the Niagara Falls, no further west than Kentucky, and no further south than Missouri and a thoroughly unpleasant ride in a steam paddleboat down the Mississippi. Subsequently he complained about most of it in his American Notes (1842).
No one was sure where a trans-American balloon flight should start from, or in which direction it should go. But it had huge symbolic power as an idea. There was no real equivalent challenge in Europe. Such a flight would celebrate the land as one vast, rolling entity. It would in a sense both discover America, and knit it together. It would also be a potential money-spinner.
No aeronaut was crazy enough to suggest starting in California, still part of Mexico and not yet part of the Union. The thought of attempting to fly across the Rockies was simply suicidal. A balloon was rumoured to have crossed the Alleghenies in West Virginia, but large parts of the mid-western states were still settler and cowboy country, with the barest township amenities. In practice any launch site required at least three things: a local source of coal gas or the means to produce hydrogen gas; a local newspaper that could whip up interest and funding; and a telegraph link which could carry the news and generate publicity. It would also help to have a populace who were wealthy enough and educated enough (or at least sufficiently gullible) to subscribe good money.
2
The experience of the great professional French aeronaut Eugène Godard, who began his first American tour in 1854, suggests the possibilities of American ballooning up to that date. Godard, then aged twenty-seven, and already a regular star of the Paris Hippodrome, arrived in New York with a complete and glittering aeronautical roadshow. His suite of five balloons included his flagship, an impressive 106,000-cubic-foot aerostat, gloriously decorated and diplomatically named the Transatlantic. He hired a publicity agent to advertise them as ‘The Most Beautiful Balloons in America’. He himself was billed as ‘Member of the Parisian Academy of Arts and Sciences’, and ‘Chief Aeronaut to the Austrian Army’, both largely invented designations.
His crew consisted of his fearless wife, and a small team doubling up as aerial trapeze artists, spangled female acrobats, and daredevil parachutists. The aerial horseriding, particularly relished on the American plains, was performed with appropriate sang-froid by Madame Godard, while the comic rope or ‘lasso’ act (with breathtaking slips and catches) was executed with Gallic style by Monsieur Godard himself. Their first tour went as far south as New Orleans, then up the Mississippi Valley, via St Louis and on to Cincinnati, then known as ‘the Metropolis of the West’, though really the capital of the mid-west. Here, significantly, the Cincinnati Gazette appointed Mr J.C. Bellman as its first official ‘Balloon Editor’. Godard found he could earn good money not merely by charging a twenty-five-cent admission fee to his launches, but from taking on board paying passengers, who could enjoy the heady novelty of wining and dining at several thousand feet.1
The newspaper link was the crucial one. Balloons supplied wonderful copy, combining opportunities for lyrical descriptive writing with dramatic incidents and the satisfactory suspense of near-disasters. In fact, a complete disaster was the best copy of all. Bellman accompanied Godard on several of his showpiece ascents, including one long-distance flight to Hamilton, Ohio, which produced a memorable article with much emphasis laid on ‘alfresco repasts of cold duck and turkey’ at fifteen thousand feet, and the tossing overboard of empty champagne bottles. Actually Godard refilled them with water, so Bellman could time their explosive impact after a fall of exactly three minutes twenty-five seconds, a piece of ‘science’ that somehow fascinated his readers.2
On a later flight they encountered a prairie storm, and crash-landed in a tree near Caesar’s Creek, Waynesville, fifty miles from Cincinnati. One of the paying passengers broke three ribs, and Bellman was badly cut and bruised, but this produced even better journalistic copy. Later Godard’s family show went north to Boston (where he earned $3,000 for a single ascent); west again to Columbus, Ohio; and south to New Orleans. He was even rumoured to have made an ascent from Cuba.
But the cost of replacing broken equipment was high, and by the end of 1857 Godard was virtually penniless, and considering joining the New Orleans Minstrel Show. However, before he finally left America in 1858, he took part in a widely advertised balloon derby against an American balloon, the Leviathan, piloted by ‘Professor’ John Steiner. Forty thousand people paid to attend the launch. A thrilling collision between the two balloons occurred at fifteen thousand feet above Cincinnati, a kind of aerial joust with both pilots behaving with chivalric gallantry. The balloons somehow survived, and flew on for over two hundred miles beyond Dayton, Ohio. Eventually (and perhaps tactfully) Godard lost the race, but he had recovered his reputation and largely recouped his fortunes.3 Back in Paris by 1859, with the glamour of his American tour to add lustre to his name, he had soon established the most celebrated balloon-family dynasty in France, sharing his legendary status with his younger siblings Eugénie, Auguste, Jules and Louis.
As the popularity of aerial shows, parachute stunts and balloon races (not to mention the spangled French-style artistes) spread throughout the mid-west in the 1850s, the unique American challenge of the truly long-distance flight also began to emerge.4 Thanks in part to Godard, Cincinnati was now established as an ideal jumping-off point for such attempts. Its geographical position seemed ideal. A west wind blowing out of the prairies of Kansas or Iowa would carry a balloon virtually due east to Washington, a distance of four hundred miles. Admittedly the Allegheny Mountains lay in between, and the Atlantic seaboard beyond. Equally, if the eastward wind trajectory turned north, it would swing a balloon in an ever increasing arc towards New York (560 miles), then Buffalo on the Great Lakes (six hundred miles), or even to Montreal, Canada (980 miles). On the other hand, if the wind turned southwards, the arc would swing towards Richmond, Virginia (five hundred miles), then Charleston, South Carolina (630 miles), and eventually Florida (810 miles).
3
From the shifting population of local American balloonists and barnstormers, three men were to make their mark by the late 1850s in a way that would soon make the Godard-style circus look flashy and old-fashioned. They were a different breed from such itinerant showmen: men of book-learning, business and scientific aspirations. They could lecture and write, as well as fly. They often adopted the courtesy title of ‘Professor’, and wore bow ties even when in a balloon basket.
All three also had names that looked suitably memorable on a publicity poster: John Wise, John LaMountain and Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe. These became the great triumvirate of the Golden Age of American ballooning; and naturally, they became the most celebrated rivals too. Their inspiration was the long-distance European flights of Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Charles Green. But they were even more haunted by the entirely fictitious Atlantic crossing of Poe’s ‘great balloon hoax’.
Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1808, John Wise, as his name usefully suggested, was the oldest and most experienced of the three. In fact he had invented the name. He was from German immigrant stock, originally Johan Weiss. His father was a musical instrument-maker, and he himself was brought up with Lutheran sobriety – encouraged to study music and mathematics, to be bilingual in German and English, and to work hard. An early desire to study theology was transformed into a fascination with the visible cosmos: ‘I would spend hours in the night lying upon a straw-heap looking at the stars and moon, and the arrival of a comet gave me rapturous joy. It was this kind of natural bent that first led me to indulge in aerial projects.’ This began, as it had with Franklin, with kites, then tissue-paper parachutes, then small Montgolfier fire balloons.5
He was apprenticed for five years to a cabinetmaker in Philadelphia, and began to specialise in the delicate craft of piano-making. In his spare time he read scientific journals, studied ‘pneumatics and hydrostatics’, and continued to dream of flying.6
Philadelphia still gloried in the name of Franklin, and still proudly remembered the symbolic flight of Jean-Pierre Blanchard, from the yard of the Walnut Street prison, in 1794. Supported by his father, Wise made his first