Falling Upwards

by Richard Holmes

  Just before dawn they were over Holland, and mildly worried about floating out over the North Sea. But the wind veered to a more south-easterly direction, carrying them inland into Germany in the direction of Hanover. It also stiffened considerably, though this was not evident at four thousand feet, and when the sun came up the passengers took a tranquil breakfast of coffee and croissants on the sundeck. After some discussion, the Godards decided to attempt a landing in the open countryside before they reached Hanover. Nadar later claimed that he had serious reservations about this, and wanted to continue much further east, according to the original plan; waiting till the wind dropped, and at least crossing the Rhine.

  As they valved gas and descended, it became clear how alarmingly fast Le Géant was travelling over the ground. It was a situation very similar to that experienced by Wise on the foreshore of Lake Ontario, though with a quite different outcome. Unused to the aerodynamic properties of the enormous balloon, the Godards had released too much gas, and left themselves too little ballast to recover height. They found themselves committed to a very rough landing near the village of Nimbourg. The passengers were instructed to come up from the cabin, and brace themselves around the sides of the sundeck, holding on tightly to the special leather hand-grips. They let down both the enormous grapnel irons, and hoped for the best.

  The huge balloon brushed the ground and rebounded. It instantly ripped off both its grapnel anchors, and began careering over the open farmland at an estimated speed of thirty miles an hour. This might not sound very fast, but for Nadar and his passengers it was like being attached to a wild animal that had gone completely berserk.

  It is worth remembering at this point that the balloon was nearly two hundred feet tall. As it was still partially inflated – the Godards had not supplied a rip-panel – it continually bounced fifty feet into the air and came crashing back down in a series of giant leapfrogs. When trees got in its path it simply tore off huge branches and lunged on. Everyone on board was paralysed with shock. From below them in the cabin came the sound of smashing crockery, furniture and equipment. One side of the sundeck was ripped off, so the passengers tried clinging to the balloon rigging above their heads. In the confusion, Nadar lost hold of the valving line. Jules Godard made three attempts to climb into the hoop to retrieve it. Meanwhile the nightmare journey continued.

  In a narrative development that Verne would have appreciated, the balloon was now blown into the path of an approaching express train. They were travelling at right angles to the track; the alert train driver spotted the monster bounding towards him across the fields from the west, and correctly calculated that to avoid a fatal collision, he must slow down rather than accelerate. He applied the emergency brakes, and halted the train in time for the balloon to bounce across the tracks directly in front of the engine. They were so close to the driver’s cab that through the cloud of steam they could hear him yell a warning in German. Nadar worked out that he was shouting ‘Mind the wires! Mind the wires!’20

  Indeed, the balloon basket was now hurtling towards a line of telegraph wires running parallel to the railway track. Nadar glimpsed them approaching at head height, and a single grotesque thought flashed through his mind: ‘Four electric wires – four guillotines!’ He grabbed Madame Nadar.

  We lower our heads, crouching down … By fantastic good luck at that precise moment we skim back towards the ground. The wires strike just above us, at the level of the balloon hoop and the small gabion fastenings. Only one or two of the leading balloon cables are cut by these slashing razors, which are immediately torn up and dragged along behind us – like the flying tail of a crazed comet …21

  To Nadar’s amazement, the force of the balloon uprooted the two telegraph poles on either side of them, and the whole hissing tangle of wires and poles was dragged along for several seconds. Having shed them, Le Géant continued its terrible, headlong course for a further ten miles, continually leaping into the air and then smashing the gondola onto the ground. One by one the passengers jumped or were thrown out, until only Nadar and his wife remained, clinging to each other and curled up in a foetal position in a corner of the sundeck, their hands locked onto the remaining pieces of wickerwork.

  Le Géant, now reduced to a long flailing tangle of ropes and silken canopy, finally tore into a dense thicket of woodland, and was shredded between its branches. The wreckage came to rest in a clump of trees, the battered gondola lying on its side, bodies and pieces of wickerwork strewn in a long trail behind it. It had travelled four hundred miles in fourteen hours, at speeds ranging between twenty and sixty miles per hour. Every one of its passengers was injured, although inexplicably none was dead.

  News reports were telegraphed to journals all over the world, including La Vie Parisienne, the Illustrated London News and the newly founded New York Times. The Scientific American carried a gripping (but slightly inaccurate) stop-press item: ‘Second voyage of the Géant. Seventeen hours and two hundred and fifty leagues. Landing near Nieubourg in Hanover. Balloon dragged for several hours. Nadar suffered fractures to both legs, his wife a deep wound to the thorax.’22

  Paradoxically, this was just the kind of story that Nadar could turn into brilliant publicity. The moment he and his wife got back to Paris (by train) he began working on his Mémoires du Géant (1864). His detailed description of the crash-landing occupied no less than thirty-two pages, and ends with the dramatic admission that at first he thought he had been responsible for his wife’s death. In fact she was slightly concussed, and cut under the chin, but not otherwise hurt.23 He wrote the book while recovering from his own leg injuries, which were more severe, and took several months to heal. For good measure, he also brought a lawsuit against the pilot, Jules Godard, for incompetent balloon management. Surprisingly, none of the other passengers brought a lawsuit against Nadar.

  Nadar saw that in narrative terms, the climactic moment was the encounter with the express train. Accordingly, he commissioned his brother Adrien to compose a semi-documentary drawing of this, carefully assembling all the elements into a single image of imminent peril. The viewpoint is dramatically from above, as if from another balloon. The dark shape of the Géant, bent over sideways and grotesquely distorted by the howling wind, almost fills the picture. It looks like some blind, maddened creature rushing across the fields, casting a huge shadow, and terrifying a flock of sheep and a pair of horses. The gondola drags along helplessly in its wake, leaving behind a trail of shattered trees. In front of it the steam engine, tiny by comparison with the huge balloon, thunders down the track under a flattened plume of steam. The near-fatal telegraph wires are just visible in the balloon’s path.

  Nadar carefully copyrighted this image, which appeared in journals all over Europe during the winter of 1863. He also used it as the frontispiece to his book when it was published eight months later, in the spring of 1864. It had become the symbol – the logo – of the flight. He had the balloon and basket repaired and refitted, and over the next four years Le Géant made further demonstration ascents from Brussels, The Hague, Hanover, Meaux and Lyons. When it flew from Amsterdam, the publicity posters were distributed as far afield as Geneva and Marseille.24 Nadar had broken with the Godard brothers, and instead employed Camille d’Artois as his pilot. There were no further aerial dramas. Despite the understandable objections of Madame Nadar, he went up again himself from the Hippodrome at Lyons on 2 July 1865.

  3

  What Nadar now decided to do was ingenious. He would use the story of the Géant to demonstrate that ballooning was superannuated as a concept. A lighter-than-air machine would publicise the heavier-than-air cause. Indefatigable, Nadar set out to write a different kind of campaigning tract, Le Droit au vol, ‘The Right to Flight’. This made the case for the ‘aero-locomotive’ as against the balloon. The title also neatly implied that flight had somehow become one of the Rights of Man. He coopted George Sand to write the Preface. She did so with a flourish, but later wrote to him privately, on 28 Septe
mber 1865: ‘Dear Nadar, I must beg you to renounce these terrible balloon-antics that worry your friends far more than you realise. I beg you to go back to photographic portraiture! Mine for example …’

  Le Droit au vol promoted Nadar’s new conviction that flight would only reach its full potential when a true ‘aircraft’, powered by an engine, was invented. Such an aircraft or airship, powered by a steam, electric or even gas engine, would necessarily be heavier than air, and would at long last provide the fully navigable vehicle that balloonists had been seeking for over a hundred years. Just like an ocean-going ship, an airborne ship could be steered by rudders working against the airflow. Thus it would become a ‘dirigible’ – a new word that conveniently worked in both French and English. In fact, with rudders and elevators, it could be steered in three dimensions. Exactly what this machine would look like, no one yet knew. But it would not look like Le Géant.

  Nadar turned to the most controversial and celebrated writer in France to back his cause. Victor Hugo was a loyal friend from the days of the Panthéon Nadar, and Nadar wrote to him requesting some form of public statement in support of Le Droit au vol. Would Hugo underwrite his vision of the future of flight? Hugo had after all had such aerial visions himself, describing the astonishing view of medieval Paris ‘as seen from the air’ in the second chapter of his great novel Notre-Dame de Paris, entitled ‘Paris à vol d’oiseau’ (‘A bird’s-eye view of Paris’).25 He had also recently featured in a flattering cartoon, published by the Journal amusant, showing him ascending heavenwards for earnest discussions with God, in a balloon marked ‘Mankind’.

  Hugo was controversial because he was a declared republican enemy of the Second Empire and all its works. To prove his ‘eternal’ opposition he was living in self-imposed exile from France in his famous clifftop residence, Hauteville House, on what he called the ‘foam-lashed rock’ of Guernsey. This exile had only increased his huge public following and readership back in France. Hugo was himself a past-master of publicity. His was exactly the name that Nadar needed.

  Hugo wrote back one of those letters addressed simply to ‘Nadar, Paris’.26 He congratulated Nadar on his personal bravery during his balloon adventures – ‘What courage, intrepidity, audacity!’ Le Géant was, certainly, a typically monstrous product of imperial flamboyance and exaggeration, but ‘the risk you took was magnificent! And the risk is the true example!’ He did not mention the risk run by Madame Nadar and the other passengers.

  Hugo announced that he would willingly put on his ‘prophetic wings’ for his reckless old friend. The concept of Flight was democratic, it was progressive, it was ‘universal’. The long open Letter on Flight which followed was, in effect, the text of a brilliant popular tract specifically designed for Nadar to print and distribute under the auspices of L’Aéronaute. It was addressed, in a modest gesture typical of Hugo, ‘To the Whole World’.

  Its theme was radical, and its grandstand manner was crafted to appeal to the broadest possible readership. Like a modern tabloid editor, Hugo skilfully invented catchy slogans, coined neat catchphrases, and spun sensational headlines. His letter became a publicity brochure, a masterly piece of advertising copy for the art and science of flying. As he put it: ‘Let us deliver mankind from the ancient, universal tyranny! What ancient, universal tyranny, you cry. Why, the ancient, universal tyranny of gravity!’27

  Hugo began on a patriotic note, recalling the self-sacrifice of all the previous French aeronauts, from Pilâtre de Rozier onwards. Ballooning was indeed a specifically French gift to the world, and no foreign aeronauts – not even Charles Green – were mentioned. It was the French who had opened a new world, a new direction of travel. Rousing phrases were piled one upon the other. ‘The iron bolt has been drawn back from the blue abysm.’ The ‘vertical journey’ had become possible. Mankind would take possession of the ‘fourth of the ancient elements’, and be ‘master of the upper air’. Man would be a bird, an eagle, a ‘thinking Eagle with a Soul’.28

  It was the heroic Nadar, wrote Hugo, who had conclusively demonstrated that the aerostat, the ‘lighter than air’ machine, could never fulfil the immense promise of flight. The terrible crash of the Géant in Hanover had proved once and for all that the aerostat was fundamentally flawed as a concept.

  Today the balloon has been judged, and found wanting … To be torn from the ground like a dead leaf, to be swept along helplessly in a whirlwind, this is not true flying. And how do we achieve true flight? With wings! … For the dream of flight to become the fact of aviation, we have only to accomplish a small and relatively simple technical break-through: to construct the first true ship of the air [le premier navire] …

  Whoever you are, reading this declaration, lift up your heads! What do you see above you? You see clouds and you see birds. Well then, these are the two fundamental systems of aviation in operation. The choice is right in front of your eyes. The cloud is the balloon. The bird is – the helicopter!29

  The idea of the helicopter or ‘helice’, as proposed by Hugo, was taken from both Nadar and Verne writing in L’Aéronaute. It was an idea gaining wide acceptance in the 1860s. Hugo popularised the fundamental distinction between the floating balloon (the cloud) and the driven airship (the bird). But how was the airship to be driven? How would its wings actually work? One solution was some form of spinning ‘airscrew’ or ‘propeller’ powered by an aerial engine. Like wings, but far more efficiently, the angled blades or paddles of such a device would have purchase on the air, and would drive or drag the craft through it, exactly like a marine propeller driving a ship through water. One possible design was Ponton’s ‘helicopter’, photographed by Nadar in 1863.

  The two airscrews were apparently designed to produce both horizontal movement and vertical lift, though the parasol-parachute suggests some uncertainty about their efficacy. There is no indication of what engine might power this machine, but it clearly abandons the age-old chimera of ‘flapping’ wings, and is a step towards the propeller-powered ‘airship’.fn22

  Navigable flight, continued Hugo in his Letter on Flight, would be of huge scientific and social importance once it was achieved. In praise of this hypothetical future, Hugo let out all his rhetorical sails:

  It will bring the immediate, absolute, instantaneous, universal and perpetual abolition of all frontiers, everywhere … The old Gordian knot of gravity will finally be untied … Armies will vanish, and with them the horrors of war, the exploitation of nations, the subjugations of populations. It will bring an immense and totally peaceful revolution. It will bring a sudden golden dawn, a brisk flinging open of the ancient cage door of history, a flooding in of light. It will mean the liberation of all mankind.30

  There was much more in this wild, heroic vein. The absurd error, or perhaps the glorious naïveté, of Hugo’s prophecies is striking. His vision of the ‘universal peace and freedom’ arising directly from the conquest of the air has a kind of innocence about it, which goes back historically to the ‘ballomania’ of the 1780s, and the declarations of poets like Erasmus Darwin and Percy Shelley. Yet perhaps we are now too quick to view these dreams of ‘liberating all mankind’ as entirely misplaced. The fact remains that air travel and transportation, as well as satellites, are the sine qua non of our global civilisation; and space flight may yet become the final means of its salvation. It would be interesting to read Hugo on the Apollo space missions of the 1960s, and the current Mars-landing programmes.

  At any rate, Hugo now had the bit between his teeth. He unblushingly compared Nadar’s pioneering balloon flight to Hanover with Christopher Columbus’s sea voyage to discover America. Nadar’s public bravery – rather less obviously – was likened to the moral courage of Voltaire and the religious iconoclasm of Luther. If Nadar could be accused of self-promotion, of seeking publicity, of ‘making a noise’ with his balloon adventures, then so could those other master spirits. Yet they were each fighting for a worthy cause. With this thought, Hugo became fully airborne:


  People accuse you, Nadar, of ‘just seeking to make a noise’. That is the age-old sneer! The sneer of silence against speech, dumbness against expression, castration against fecundity, nihilism against creativity, envy against the masterpiece, egoism against the generous act, the tin-whistle against the sounding horn, the abortion against the new born child … But I say the noise you make with Le Géant is A GOOD NOISE.31

  Hugo closed his Letter on Flight on a more personal note, recalling a memorable exchange he had once had with the great French scientist François Arago (1786–1853). The outstanding astronomer and physicist of his generation, a staunch republican and a supporter of the earliest French scientific balloon ascents, Arago had died ten years previously, and was now widely regarded in France as something of a scientific visionary and secular saint. He had already been canonised by having craters on both the moon and Mars named after him, and was looked upon as a man who had seen the future.

  According to Hugo’s story, the poet and the scientist were walking one evening in the Luxembourg Gardens, along the path known, symbolically enough, as l’allée de l’Observatoire. It had been an official festival day and public holiday, and they were deep in speculative discussion. A large balloon passed unexpectedly overhead, having just taken off from the Champ de Mars. Its full, round, pregnant shape, touched with gold by the setting sun, was ‘truly majestic’, and filled them both with a moment of silent awe.