Up, Up, and Away

Falling Upwards, a history of ballooning by Richard Holmes, deals with an enchanting subject, and Holmes writes the history enchantingly.

The story is populated by daredevils. Like Sophie Blanchard, who put on ballooning shows for Napoleon and after Napoleon fell, until her balloon caught fire on July 6, 1819 and plummeted to the roof of number 16, rue de Provence. A witness of the event wrote, “From my own windows I saw the ascent. For a few minutes the balloon was concealed by clouds. Presently it reappeared, and there was seen a momentary sheet of flame. There was a dreadful pause. In a few seconds, the poor creature, enveloped and entangled in the netting of her machine, fell with a frightful crash upon the slanting roof of a house in the Rue de Provence (not a hundred yards from where I was standing), and thence into the street, and Madame Blanchard was taken up a shattered corpse” (quoted, p. 45).

Or Padre Baloneiro, Father Adelir Antonio de Carli, who took off from Paranagua Brazil in April 2008 lifted by 1000 helium-filled party balloons over the Atlantic. He ascended 19,000 feet, far enough for his breath to form “glittering ice crystals in the ever-thinning air” (4). That evening he lost contact with the ground, and a few days later some balloons were found, along with his buoyancy chair. His lower torso and legs were found sixty miles off the Brazilian coast in early July (5).

Not all the stories end in spectacular deaths. There is also ingenuity. In 1835, Charles Green, one of the great English balloonists, invented the “trail rope” as a ballast system in his balloon: “Made of heavy manila cordate, the trail rope was winched out of the basket and simply left to drag along the ground several hundred feet below. Whenever the balloon dropped closer to the ground, more trail robe – and hence more ballast weight – was transferred from the balloon basket to the earth. Thus lightened, the balloon would rise again to a new point of balance” (57). Despite a crash landing, two families escaped Eastern Europe for the West by balloon in 1979. 

For Holmes, the history of ballooning is not only about ballooning. It’s also about literature, art, and advanced technology: “Balloons contributed to the sciences and the arts that first suggested that we are all guests aboard a unified, living world. The nature of the upper air, the forecasting of weather, the evolutions of geology, the development of international communications, the power of propaganda, the creations of science fiction, even the development of extra-terrestrial travel itself, are an integral part of balloon history” (3).