The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Banks said the Royal Society would keep a watching brief, while remaining closely informed of developments in ‘the new Art of Flying’ by its corresponding Fellows such as Franklin and the English Ambassador to Paris, the Duke of Dorset.21 Yet Banks himself, still the Romantic explorer, was secretly intrigued and excited. He alerted Henry Cavendish and commissioned his confidant and Secretary, Charles Blagden — a decided francophile — to keep a close eye on developments. Banks also noticed that his sister Sophia had begun to keep an album of balloon cuttings. It included an early street ballad, ‘The Ballooniad’, which eloquently complained: ‘Ye Men of Science! How ye stood aloof/Nor gave of all your Knowledge one kind proof.’22

  English opinion was generally divided about ballomania. Samuel Johnson had written a ‘Dissertation on the Art of Flying’ in Chapter 6 of Rasselas in 1759. His approach was satirical — his Flying Artist flaps his wings and falls off a cliff into a lake — but he recognised the power of flight over the human imagination: ‘How easily shall we trace the Nile through all its passages; pass over to distant regions and examine the face of Nature, from one extremity of the Earth to the other.’23 Yet when Johnson was asked his opinion by a female correspondent, he at first described the balloon in as deflating a manner as he could muster.

  Happy are you, Madam, that have ease and leisure to want intelligence of air balloons. Their existence is, I believe, indubitable, but I know not that they can possibly be of any use. The construction is this. The chemical philosophers have discovered a body (which I have forgotten, but will enquire) which dissolved by an acid emits a vapour lighter than the atmospherical air. This vapour is caught, among other means, by tying a bladder compressed upon the bottle in which the dissolution is performed; the vapour rising swells the bladder, and fills it. The bladder is then tied and removed, and another applied, till as much of this light air is collected, as is wanted. Then a large spherical case is made (and very large it must be) of the lightest matter that can be found, secured by some method like that of oiling silk against all passage of air. Into this are emptied all the bladders of light air, and if there be light air enough, it mounts into the clouds, upon the same principle as a bottle filled with water, will sink in water, but a bottle filled with aether would float. It rises till it comes to air of equal tenuity with its own, if wind or water does not spoil it on the way. Such, Madam, is an air balloon.24

  William Herschel’s friend William Watson witnessed one of Pilâtre’s preparatory unmanned test flights at Versailles in October 1783. Even though the great wallowing Montgolfier canopy had got caught in some nearby trees, Watson was thrilled by the prospect of regular manned flight, and wrote enthusiastically to the earthbound astronomer, proposing a joint ascent as soon as possible. ‘Don’t you expect to fly soon? I expect to make many a pleasant flight to Datchet. I forgot to say the machine was 70 foot high and 46 wide.’ Herschel immediately thought of the possible use of balloons as observation platforms, carrying telescopes into the clear upper air. It was a development which would eventually lead to the launch of the great orbiting Hubble Telescope in 1997.25

  Surprisingly, balloons did not appeal to the gothic novelist Horace Walpole, though perhaps at sixty-six he was a little old for such perilous novelties. He thought balloons might be sinister: ‘Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race — as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.’ It was an ominous prophecy.26

  Some considered that there might be an arms race in balloon technology. Franklin could see that balloons might easily be adapted for military purposes. Reconnaissance was the obvious one: ‘elevating an Engineer to take a view of an Enemy’s army, Works etc. or conveying Intelligence into, or out of, a besieged Town’. Much more menacing, however, especially for the British Isles, was the possibility that they could support an airborne invasion army from France. ‘Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each’, Franklin calculated, could carry a force of 10,000 troops rapidly into the field, crossing rivers, hills or even seas with speed and impunity. ‘They could not cost more than five Ships of the Line … Ten thousand Men descending from the Clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a [regular] Force could be brought together to repel them.’27

  Nevertheless, neither Benjamin Franklin, nor Dr Johnson, nor Horace Walpole could prevent the balloon craze reaching England by summer 1784. Small unmanned gas balloons began to sprout everywhere in the summer sky. Herschel saw them over the Thames Valley, Parson Woodford saw them in Suffolk. Gilbert White wrote a beautiful description of seeing an early manned balloon drifting serenely over his beech wood one idyllic October evening at Selborne in Hampshire: ‘From the green bank at the S.W. end of my house saw a dark blue speck at a most prodigious height…In a few minutes it was over the maypole; and then over the fox on my great parlour chimney; and in ten minutes behind my great walnut tree. The machine looked mostly of a dark blue colour; but sometimes reflected the rays of the sun, and appeared a bright yellow. With a telescope I could discern the boat, and the ropes that supported it. To my eye this vast balloon appeared no bigger than a tea-urn.’

  White’s initial moment of excitement and pure wonder soon altered to a more reflective mood, as the great balloon drifted southwards across Hampshire: ‘I was wonderfully struck at first with the phenomenon; and, like Milton’s “belated peasant,” felt my heart rebound with fear and joy at the same time. After a while I surveyed the machine with more composure, without that awe and concern for my two fellow-creatures, lost, in appearance, in the boundless depths of the atmosphere! (for we supposed then that two were embarked on this astonishing voyage). At last, seeing with what steady composure they moved, I began to consider them as secure as a group of storks or cranes, intent on the business of emigration.’28

  Unmanned and then manned ascents took place in almost every large city in the kingdom — London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh. Dr Johnson’s friend the musicologist Dr Charles Burney, father of the novelist Fanny, had a typical reaction: ‘I tell my grandchildren they will live to see a regular Balloon Stage [coach] established to all parts of the Universe that have ever been heard of.’29

  The Morning Herald asked its readers to ‘laugh this new French folly out of existence as soon as possible’. But the normally conservative Gentleman’s Magazine described ballooning as ‘the most magnificent and most astonishing discovery made — perhaps since the Creation’.30 Horace Walpole thought it as puerile as schoolboy kite-flying, but then ordered his servants to alert him whenever a balloon flew by, and rushed out into his garden to cheer and wave. ‘How posterity will laugh at us one way or the other! If half a dozen break their necks, and Balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use. If it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.’31

  5

  The man who popularised ballooning in Britain more than any other was a twenty-five-year-old Italian, Vincent Lunardi (1759-1806), a young man on the staff of the Neapolitan Legation in London.

  Lacking official sponsorship, Lunardi’s first remarkable achievement was to launch a successful public subscription. He had his gorgeous red-and-white-striped balloon put on display for several weeks before the launch, hung from the roof of the Lyceum Theatre near The Strand, and charged an ambitious entrance fee. Two shillings and sixpence would purchase a single visit; one guinea would purchase four visits and a front-row seat during the actual launch. Over 20,000 people were said to have visited it, though after payment for balloon equipment, inflation materials and hire of the Lyceum, Lunardi claimed to be penniless.

  As interest grew, ballooning quickly
became fashionable, and there was talk of an unofficial British Balloon Club, headed by the Prince of Wales and the ultra-progressive Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Several members of the Royal Society also subscribed, and significantly the subscription was headed by none other than Joseph Banks, though in his private capacity. (A guinea entrance ticket is preserved in the Banks Collection, marked number 34.) His sister, the independent-minded Sophia Banks, also admitted to mild ballomania.32 She made a collection of balloon prints and letters about ballooning, including several from Franklin and Joseph Priestley.33

  Lunardi’s second achievement was to invent for the English the figure of the Romantic aeronaut. Lunardi was a natural showman. He was foreign, of course, but not French. Small, mercurial, and absurdly handsome in the new, almost feminine style, with a fresh face and long, unpowdered hair, he moved lightly and bubbled with infectious enthusiasm. He was a man for whom the adjective ‘intrepid’ seemed specially invented. He had his portrait painted with his pet dog and cat, both of which he then took on his flight, a sporting gesture calculated to appeal to the English. (Though not, as it turned out, to Horace Walpole.34) He was also an incorrigible flirt and ladies’ man, as the English naturally expected of an Italian. He once mildly shocked a salon of supporters by proposing a toast to himself: ‘I give you me, Lunardi — whom all the ladies love.’

  His first historic ascent was made from the Artillery Grounds, Moorfields, London, on 15 September 1784. It captured the nation’s imagination almost as completely as had the ascents in France. After delays that almost led to rioting, 150,000 people watched the launch at 2 p.m., just two hours late. Led by the Prince of Wales, the gentlemen in the reserved one-guinea seats rose to their feet, and stood gazing upwards in astonished silence. Then they solemnly doffed their hats.

  Lunardi drifted north-westwards across London and into Hertfordshire, eating legs of chicken and drinking champagne, and occasionally trying to ‘row’ his balloon with a pair of aerial oars. One of the oars broke and dropped overboard, starting a rumour that he had jumped out to his death. It was said that the King broke off a cabinet meeting with his Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, to watch ‘poor’ Lunardi float overhead, while a jury in north London hastily brought in a not-guilty verdict so it could run out of the courthouse to watch.

  After some time Lunardi’s little cat appeared to be suffering from the cold, and he claimed to have briefly ‘paddled’ his balloon back to earth at North Mimms (now on the M1 motorway). He gallantly handed the shivering animal to a young woman in a field, before releasing ballast and re-ascending. This is a mysterious claim, as unlike Dr Charles, Lunardi had not designed his first hydrogen balloon with a release valve at the top of the canopy, so he could not descend at will (and certainly not by rowing). He had however designed a system of throwing out handfuls of feathers, to tell if the balloon was rising or sinking, and perhaps he had simply lost gas.

  Farm labourers harvesting in the fields recalled him shouting through his silver speaking-trumpet. They answered: ‘Lunardi, come down!’ He threw out several letters, tied with long streamers, one of which was tactfully addressed to ‘Sir Joseph Banks, Soho Square, London’.

  After two and a half hours, Lunardi finally descended near Ware in Hertfordshire. He tried to land by securing a grappling anchor, but bumped heavily and inelegantly across the fields. With no release valve, he could not deflate the balloon, and his situation became perilous. He called out to some nearby farm workers to help him secure the balloon. But seeing him bounding over hedges and fences, they shouted out that he was riding ‘the Devil’s horse’, and refused to approach. Then happily he spotted a young woman among the group. Graciously raising his hat, he begged for her assistance. Ignoring her terrified menfolk, she gathered up her skirts and darted forward, seized the edge of the errant basket, and saved both balloon and aeronaut. Lunardi climbed out and embraced her tenderly. She was a strong girl, he recalled: ‘Elizabeth Brett, a very pretty milkmaid…So I owed my deliverance to the spirit and generosity of a young female.’35

  A stone monument was raised at this landing place, at Long Mead (field or farm) in the parish of Standon, just outside Ware. It still exists on what is now the village green.

  Let Posterity know, And knowing be astonished! That on the 15th day of September 1784, Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany, the First Aerial Traveller in Britain, Mounting from the Artillery Ground in London, and traversing the Regions of the Air, For two hours and fifteen minutes, on this Spot revisited the Earth. On this rude Monument, for [future] Ages be recorded that Wondrous Enterprize, successfully achieved by the powers of Chymistry and the Fortitude of Man, that improvement in Science which the Great Author of all Knowledge … hath generously permitted.

  Immediately on Lunardi’s return to London, a curiously modern publicity machine began to roll. He sold exclusive rights to his story, and an in-depth interview, to the Morning Post. It was headlined ‘Lunardi’s Aerial Excursion’.36 He was guest of honour at the Mansion House, and gave lectures in various public halls. Newspaper articles, popular songs (many ribald) and fashion accessories followed. Cups, snuffboxes and brooches were especially popular, but the Lunardi ladies’ garter was the succès de scandale. Lunardi was introduced to the King, and invited to dine by the Duchess of Devonshire — he tactfully arrived wearing the duchess’s own jockey colours of blue and chocolate,37 and was soon a favourite in her progressive Whig circle. He was given a watch by the Prince of Wales, and had a bronze medallion struck with his profile on one side and his balloon on the other. The Windsor stagecoach was renamed ‘The Lunardi’. A master of publicity, he arranged to have a new and bigger striped balloon hung on display at the Pantheon, London, throughout the winter season of 1784, promising further aerial adventures in 1785. The effect of sudden celebrity was as heady as the actual ascent. Lunardi wrote wildly to his Italian guardian: ‘I am the idol of the whole nation … All the country adores me, every newspaper honours me in prose and verse … Tomorrow I shall put two thousand crowns in the Bank of England.’38

  Among the more serious opinion-formers, many like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Burney and the MP William Windham (all members of Dr Johnson’s Club) were impressed by Lunardi’s achievement. Burney wrote a charmingly over-enthusiastic letter to his son Charles junior on 24 September. ‘If I had wit enough, or energy of mind sufficient to be mad about anything now it would be about Balloons. I think them the most wild, Romantic, pretty playthings for grown Gentlemen that have ever been invented, and that the subject, as well as the thing, lifts one to the Clouds, whenever one talks of it.’39

  Others were less dazzled. Banks wrote privately that Lunardi was ‘a charlatan’. Horace Walpole was wittily underwhelmed by the whole thing: ‘I cannot fill my Paper as the [newspapers] do, with air balloons; which, though ranked with the invention of Navigation, appear to me as childish as the flying of kites by schoolboys. I have not stirred a step to see one; consequently, have not paid a guinea for gazing at one, which I might have seen by looking up into the air. An Italian, one Lunardi, is the first Airgonaut that has mounted into the Clouds in this country. So far from respecting him as a Jason, I was very angry with him: he had full right to venture his own neck, but none to risk the poor cat’s.’40

  In the end Dr Johnson himself became strangely fascinated by ballooning, though critical of the surrounding showmanship and the lack of scientific rigour. He wrote several letters on the subject in autumn 1784. Two days before Lunardi’s flight, he was advising a friend that it was not worth paying for a place in the launch enclosure at the Artillery Ground (Lunardi was charging a guinea a seat), because ‘in less than a minute they who gaze at a mile’s distance will see all that can be seen’. But he took a surprising and critical interest in technical matters. He thought (rightly) that Lunardi’s aerial oars would prove useless in directing flight or altering altitude. About the wings, I am of your mind they cannot at all assist it, nor I think regulate its motion.’41
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br />   Joseph Banks

  An exuberant portrait painted shortly after Banks’s triumphant return from the Pacific. Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1771-73.

  Chart of the island Otaheite, by Lieut. J. Cook, 1769 Matavi bay and Point Venus on the northern shore; and beyond it the island of Eimeo (Moorea), where Banks observed the transit of Venus.

  Sketch of Sydney Parkinson, from the frontispiece to his Journal (1773) Parkinson was only nineteen when he died on the voyage home from Tahiti.

  A Woman and a Boy, Natives of Otaheite in the Dress of the Country Engraving after Parkinson by T. Chambers, from Sydney Parkinson, Journal of a Voyage in the South Seas (1773).

  Omai, Banks, and Solander (seated)

  Honoured guest or valuable human specimen? Painting by William Parry, c.1775-76.

  Dorothea Hugessen, Lady Banks. By Joseph Collyer the Younger, after John Russell, c.1790.

  Captain James Cook. Portrait by John Webber, 1776, shortly before Cook’s last voyage.