Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air
‘Nominally a history of the hot air balloon, Falling Upwards is really a history of hope and fantasy—and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight.’ —The New Republic, Best Books of 2013CHOSEN AS BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN ** Guardian ** New Statesman ** Daily Telegraph ** New Republic ****TIME Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013** **The New Republic Best Books of 2013** **Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)*From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to test the air, to brave generals floating over enemy lines to watch troop movements, this wonderful book offers a seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography and the metaphysics of flight. It is a masterly portrait of human endeavour, recklessness, vision and hope.In this heart-lifting book, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell.It is not a conventional history of ballooning. In a sense it is not really about balloons at all. It is about what balloons gave rise to. It is about the spirit of discovery itself and the extraordinary human drama it produces.From the dramatic and exhilarating early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar to the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher who rose seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology; and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work.
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RICHARD HOLMES
Falling Upwards
How We Took to the Air
To Eleanor Tremain and John Lightbody
with love and balloons
Voices Overhead
‘A Cloud in a paper bag’
JOSEPH MONTGOLFIER, 1782
‘Someone asked me – what’s the use of a balloon?
I replied – what’s the use of a new-born baby’
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1783
‘Practical flying we may leave to our rivals the French.
Theoretical flying we may claim for ourselves’
SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1784
‘I would make it death for a man to be convicted of flying, the moment he could be caught’
WILLIAM COWPER, 1794
‘O Thou who plumed with strong desire
Would float above the Earth – beware!
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire –
Night is coming!’
P.B. SHELLEY, 1818
‘There’s something in a flying horse,
There’s something in a huge balloon’
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1819
‘No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species, unless he has been up in an air-balloon’
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON, 1825
‘Your balloon voyage so occupied my mind that I dreamt of it!’
J.M.W. TURNER, 1836
‘Beautiful invention, mounting heavenward – so beautifully, so unguidably! Emblem of our Age, of Hope itself’
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1837
‘How should I manage all my business if I were obliged to marry – I never should know French, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon’
CHARLES DARWIN, 1838
‘To look down upon the whole of London as the birds of the air look down upon it, and see it dwindled into a mere rubbish heap’
HENRY MAYHEW, 1852
‘Chance people on the bridges peering over the parapets, into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in misty clouds’
CHARLES DICKENS, 1852
‘The basket was about two feet high, four feet long … to me it seemed fragile indeed … the gaps in the wicker work in the sides and the bottom seemed immense and the further we receded from the earth, the larger they seemed to become’
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER, 1862
‘Poetry has described some famous descents into the subterranean world … But we have just had an ascent such as the world has never heard of or dreamed of’
THE TIMES, 1863
‘Next to the climbers of the Alpine Club, in order of utter uselessness are the people who go up in balloons, and who come down to tell us of the temperature, the air-currents, the shape of the clouds, and amount of atmospheric pressure in a region where nobody wants to go, nor has the slightest interest to hear about’
BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE, October 1864
‘Dear Nadar, I must beg you to renounce these terrible balloon-antics!’
GEORGE SAND, 1865
‘I am an Ancient Mariner of the Upper Atmosphere’
CHARLES GREEN, 1868
‘Paris is surrounded, blockaded, blotted out from the rest of the world! – and yet by means of a simple balloon, a mere bubble of air, Paris is back in communication with the rest of the world!’
VICTOR HUGO, 1870
‘It has already done for us that which no other power ever accomplished: it has gratified the desire natural to us all to view the earth in a new aspect’
JAMES GLAISHER, 1872
‘The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared’
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1878
‘Is it not a little strange to be floating here above the Polar Sea?
To be the first that have floated here in a balloon! How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed?’
SALOMON ANDRÉE, 1897
‘Between my boots and the now distant earth there was nothing.
I wriggled my feet and laughed. I was walking on air …
I really was walking on air!’
DOLLY SHEPHERD, 1904
‘To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet is like nothing else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to man. No flying machine can ever better it.
It is to pass extraordinarily out of human things’
H.G. WELLS, 1908
‘The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth’
CHINESE PROVERB
1
The Falling Dream
1
My own falling dream began at a village fête in Norfolk. I was four years old. My uncle, a tall and usually silent RAF pilot, had bought a red party balloon from a charity stall, and tied it to the top button of my aertex shirt. This was my first balloon, and it seemed to have a mind of its own. It was inflated with helium, which is a gas fourteen times lighter than air, though I did not understand this at the time. It pulled mysteriously and insistently at my button. ‘Maybe you will fly,’ my uncle remarked. He led me up a grassy bank so we could look over the whole fête. Below me stretched the little tents, the stalls, the show ring with its bales of straw and small dancing horses. Above me bobbed the big red balloon, gleaming and beautiful, blotting out the sun. It bounced off the top of my head, making a strange springy sound, full of distance. It tugged me impatiently towards the sky, and I began to feel unsteady on my feet. I felt that I was falling – upwards. Then my uncle let go of my hand, and my dream began.
