Читать книгу Falling Upwards - Richard Holmes - Страница 12

The theme of escape, either literally from some form of imprisonment, or symbolically from the troubles of the earth itself, constantly recurs in the history of ballooning. When Dr Alexander Charles made the first ever flight by a true hydrogen balloon, two hundred years before the escape of the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, on 1 December 1783, it was the feeling of absolute and almost metaphysical freedom that overcame him.

Flying with an engineering assistant, Monsieur Robert, Dr Charles launched from the Jardin des Tuileries in central Paris, and travelled over twenty miles north-west to the country town of Nesles. His balloon was a mere thirty feet high, but was equipped with a proper wicker basket, a venting valve, and sacks of ballast to adjust its height and control its descent. His departure was witnessed by nearly half a million people, among them the American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin. After they had landed safely at Nesles, Monsieur Robert disembarked, but Dr Charles remained in the basket. He then achieved the first ever solo ascent, rapidly rising in the lightened balloon to a magnificent ten thousand feet. From this vantage point he saw the sun set for a second time on the same day. It was a revelation.

Dr Charles’s brilliant account of this ascent was widely published in both Britain and France, and catches a euphoric tone which never quite disappears from subsequent balloon accounts. He had laid in supplies for an aerial journey of many hours – fur coats, cold chicken and champagne. But what he actually tasted was that existential substance:

Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off. I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles and persecutions for ever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical rapture … I exclaimed to my companion Monsieur Robert – ‘I’m finished with the Earth. From now on our place is in the sky! … Such utter calm. Such immensity! Such an astonishing view … Seeing all these wonders, what fool could wish to hold back the progress of science!’ ¹²

Benjamin Franklin watched the launch through a telescope from the window of his carriage. Afterwards he remarked, ‘Someone asked me – what’s the use of a balloon? I replied – what’s the use of a new-born baby.’

The same sense of escaping into an utterly new world is displayed by Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaedia, or Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester in 1785. This is his account of a single flight made on 8 September 1785, flying northwards above the river Mersey, from Chester to Warrington in Lancashire. It must be one of the most remarkable books about the experience of ballooning ever written. It also included flight maps, and the first aerial drawings ever made from a balloon basket.

Baldwin was one early pioneer of the existential attitude to ballooning, in which the idea that the ‘Prospect’ itself – the free ascent, the magnificent views, the whole ‘aerial experience’ – was the real point of flight. He believed that ‘previous Balloon-Voyagers have been particularly defective in their Descriptions of aerial Scenes and Prospects’. Consequently he took with him a battery of recording equipment: a variety of pens and red lead pencils, special ‘Ass Skin Patent Pocketbooks’, paints and brushes, drawing blocks and perspective glasses, telescopes and compasses. Airopaedia contained the first ever paintings of the view from a balloon basket, an analytic diagram of the corkscrew flight path projected over a land map, and a whole chapter given up simply to describing the astonishing colours and structures of cloud formations.

Baldwin also notices how the balloon responded to air currents arising from the earth beneath. His careful flight-mapping shows how it was constantly drawn downwards to follow the cool, curving airflows above the meanderings of the river. Similarly, the heady act of leaning directly over the side of the basket to paint, observe and measure makes him sensitive to shifts in shade and colour and perspective on the ground below.

One typical observation reads: ‘The river Dee appeared of a red colour; the city [Chester] very diminutive; and the town [Warrington] entirely blue. The whole appeared a perfect plane, the highest buildings having no apparent height, but reduced all to the same level, and the whole terrestrial prospect appeared like a coloured map.’¹³

Baldwin also writes wonderfully well about clouds, and the prismatic effects of light. He clearly perceives a whole new world opening out around him, and expresses a euphoric emotional reaction. Indeed, to keep these feelings within bounds, he writes of himself throughout his flight in the third person: ‘A Tear of pure Delight flashed in his Eye! of pure and exquisite Delight and Rapture!’ For him, ballooning instinctively combined both scientific discovery and aesthetic pleasure. But perhaps it should provide more? He could imagine the time when ‘aerostatic ships make the Circuit of the Globe’.¹⁴