Robur the Conqueror. Jules Verne

      When Jules Verne takes to the air, we have every reason to anticipate something special. Robur-le-conquérant (Robur the Conqueror, 1886) is one of the phenomenally influential French novelist’s most iconic works, with its enigmatic central figure and especially its magnificent imaginary aircraft, the Albatross. Though the novel took its impetus from a now-obscure debate that pitted lighter-against heavier-than-air flight technology, it still thrills and perplexes in equal measure. Much ink has been spilled over the book’s faults, merits, and multiple themes, but this much is immediately clear: it is a playful, argumentative, often compellingly ambiguous exploration—from the distant past to what was then the near future—of humankind’s quest to conquer the sky.

      France had been deeply interested in flight since 1783, when aeronautical history was made twice: the brothers Joseph-Michel (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745–1799) developed the hot-air balloon or Montgolfière, and Jacques Charles (1746–1823) invented the gas balloon or Charlière. Balloon mania swept France, continuing unabated through the mid-nineteenth century.¹ The so-called conquest of the air, the discovery of a practical way to steer balloons, seemed imminent and technologically vital. As Henri Zukowski has pointed out, the dream of controlling a balloon became synonymous with controlling space itself.²

      But could a balloon be controlled? Verne, then an unknown twenty-three-year-old writer, implied doubts about that possibility in his second published story, “Un Voyage en ballon” (“A Voyage in a Balloon,” 1851), where a character who claims to have invented a steering mechanism is quickly revealed to be insane.³ By 1863, Verne was emphatic: “I don’t believe … that we’ll manage to steer a balloon. I’m acquainted with all the methods attempted or proposed; not one of them works, not one of them is feasible…. We’d need to come up with a motor that’s both amazingly strong and unbelievably light! And if we did, we wouldn’t be able to withstand air currents of any significance!”⁴ So speaks Samuel Fergusson, hero of Verne’s first published novel, Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). With this book’s publication in January 1863, Verne began his legendary collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), launching a series of grippingly plotted and abundantly well-researched novels that would soon be collectively titled the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages).

      As both the short story and the novel suggest, Verne’s interest in balloons was complex. On the one hand, his fascination with the mysterious and the wondrous—his Romantic side, with a capital R—made him as excited as anybody about the possibilities of flight. On the other, his equally strong pull toward the rational and the scientific led him to realize that balloons could not, and probably would never be able to, live up to the idealized expectations being set for them.⁵

      Verne was not alone. Just a few months after Five Weeks was published, three people equally excited about the boundless potential of flight, and equally convinced about the impracticality of balloons, joined forces to advocate for other means to the sky. The viscount Gustave de Ponton d’Amécourt (1825–1888) and the writer Gabriel de La Landelle (1812–1886) believed the future belonged to heavier-than-air flying machines driven by propellers; the two of them coined the words hélicoptère and aviation, respectively. On July 6, 1863, they teamed up officially with the polymathic photographer-journalist-balloonist-showman Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar, to launch a Société d’encouragement pour la locomotion aérienne au moyen d’appareils plus lourds que l’air (Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-Than-Air Machines). Verne, one of the earliest to join, was made one of the finance directors. He fulfilled the post diligently and came regularly to meetings.⁶

      Nadar, a dyed-in-the-wool rabblerouser, went into high gear to promote the Society and popularize his colleagues’ plans for proto-helicopters. First he published an iconoclastic “Manifeste de l’Auto-locomotion aérienne” (“Manifesto of Aerial Autolocomotion,” La Presse, August 7, 1863), casting heavier-than-air researchers as underdog heroes fighting a pompous, pretentious establishment obsessed with balloons. The battle imagery caught on; soon, inspired by a joke from the “Manifesto,” journalists were referring to Nadar and his colleagues as les chevaliers de La Sainte Hélice (the Knights of the Holy Propeller). Nadar continued the publicity blitz by launching the illustrated magazine L’Aéronaute, complete with cover art by the eminent Gustave Doré. In the most memorable publicity stunt of all, Nadar raised funds for aircraft experimentation by commissioning