The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

Young William Herschel (locket)

  A locket given to Caroline Herschel c.1760, when her beloved brother William was twenty-two, and about to settle in England. With the kind permission of John Herschel-Shorland.

  Young Caroline Herschel (silhouette) Silhouette made c.1768, when Caroline was eighteen, shortly before she joined William in England.

  Sir William Herschel

  Herschel, now knighted, powdered and famous after the discovery of Uranus in 1781. Portrait by Lemuel Francis Abbott, 1785.

  William and Caroline Herschel

  A genteel Victorian image of the Herschels at work, with Caroline administering a sustaining cup of tea. Coloured lithograph, 1890.

  Engraved frontispiece to John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy (1811). Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, shows her pupil the new planet.

  The constellations of Perseus and Andromeda

  From John Flamsteed’s Celestial Atlas (1729). The Andromeda nebula or galaxy is located at the goddess’s right thigh.

  Close-up of Herschel’s seven-foot reflector telescope. The brass tube on the top is the wide-field ‘sighting’ scope, and the viewing aperture on the side can take lenses of different magnifications. Whipple Museum, Cambridge. Photograph by Richard Holmes.

  Herschel’s seven-foot reflector telescope The telescope with which Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. Main reflector mirror in the base, viewing aperture on the side at the top. Note the ingenious portable and adjustable support frame. Royal Astronomical Society. Drawing by Sir William Watson.

  Sir Joseph Banks holding an astronomical painting of the moon

  A celebration of the friendship between Banks and Herschel, who had advised the artist John Russell on details of the lunar features.

  An astronomical moon globe

  Such a beautiful scientific instrument could also serve as decorative furniture. Selenographia Moon Globe by John Russell, London, 1797.

  Detail from the original manuscript of John Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816) ‘… like some Watcher of the Skies/when a new Planet swims into his ken…’ Keats later changed ‘wond’ring eyes’ to ‘eagle eyes’.

  Detail from Herschel’s Astronomical Observation Journal for Tuesday, 13 March 1781

  The ‘curious either Nebulous Star or perhaps a Comet’ was in fact the new planet Uranus.

  The planet Uranus

  Hubble Space Telescope image of Uranus, showing its ring system and six of its moons. Photograph taken in August 2003.

  William Herschel’s forty-foot reflector telescope

  The engraving was first published as an illustration to Herschel’s celebrated paper, ‘Description of a Forty Foot Reflecting Telescope’, in Philosophical Transactions (1795), the journal of the Royal Society.

  Sir William Herschel

  Herschel the Romantic sage of science under the starry sky he had changed forever. Stipple engraving by James Godby, after Friedrich Rehberg, 1814.

  Immediately after Lunardi’s flight of 15 September, Johnson was amused, and then irritated, to receive no fewer than three long letters or ‘Histories’ recounting the details of the ‘Flying Man in the great Balloon’. He wrote ironically to Sir Joshua Reynolds that he would have been content with just one. ‘Do not write about the Balloon, whatever else you may think proper to say.’42 He was glad that the British were now doing as well in flying matters as their French neighbours, though he continued to be critical of the unscientific approach. ‘Lunardi, I find, forgot his barometer and therefore cannot report to what height he ascended.’43

  On further reflection, he feared that ballooning would not fulfil its first promise, putting his finger with unerring Johnsonian logic on its two apparent shortcomings: ‘In amusement, mere amusement I am afraid it must end, for I do not find that [a balloon’s] course can be directed, so as that it should serve any purpose of communication; and it can give no new intelligence of the state of the air at different heights, till they have ascended above the height of mountains, which they seem never likely to do.’44

  A week later, as his last illness drew upon him (dropsy and heart failure, which made him obese and fearfully breathless), Johnson added wistfully: ‘To make new balloons is to repeat the jest again. We now know a method of mounting in the air, and I think, are not likely to know more … I had rather now find a medicine that can ease an asthma.’45 But this was not to be his last word on the subject.

  6

  There were other excitements. The actress Mrs Sage, renowned for her Junoesque figure, left a vivid account of being the ‘First Aerial female’ after an eventful ascent in Lunardi’s balloon in June 1785. The launch was made from Hyde Park, attended by a huge and increasingly raucous crowd. Mrs Sage, in a low-cut silk dress presumably designed to reduce wind resistance, was to be accompanied by Lunardi and the dashing Mr George Biggin, a young and wealthy Old Etonian. The gondola was draped in heavy swags of silk, and had a specially designed lace-up door which allowed its occupants to be seen more clearly, as if they were installed in a luxurious aerial salon.46 But the combined weight of the fixtures and fittings, and the three passengers, proved too much for the balloon, which began wallowing dangerously on its moorings, to the whistles and suggestive jeers of the crowd.

  Lunardi made a rapid, though perhaps surprising, decision. Realising that Mrs Sage was the star attraction, after a hasty conference with Mr Biggin, he himself sprang from the gondola, allowing the balloon to make a safe launch with its reduced payload of two. He apparently had no qualms about leaving the control of the balloon (and Mrs Sage) in Mr Biggin’s sole care. Unfortunately, in his haste to depart, Lunardi failed to do up the lacings of the gondola’s door. As the balloon sailed away over Piccadilly, the crowd were treated to the provoking sight of the beautiful Mrs Sage on all fours in the open entrance of the gondola. The crowd assumed that she had fainted, and was perhaps receiving some kind of intimate first-aid from Mr Biggin.

  In fact she was coolly re-threading the lacings to make the gondola safe again. As she later cheerfully admitted, she felt largely responsible for the launching difficulties, as she had omitted to inform Lunardi that she made up ‘200 pounds of human weight’ (over fourteen stone), and he had been far too gallant to enquire. Finally getting to her feet as the balloon floated over Green Park, Mrs Sage trod on Lunardi’s barometer and broke it, thus depriving Mr Biggin of any instrument with which to measure their height. Nevertheless, in due course the two of them were lunching peacefully off sparkling Italian wine and cold chicken, occasionally calling to people below through a speaking-trumpet.47

  The flight followed the line of the Thames westwards, at one point passing through a snowstorm (surprising for mid-June, remarked Mr Biggin nonchalantly), and landed heavily near Harrow on the Hill, smashing through a hedge and dragging across an unharvested hayfield. The infuriated farmer began threatening Mr Biggin and abusing Mrs Sage — she later described him succinctly as ‘a savage’. But the honour of the ‘first female aeronaut’ was unexpectedly saved by the young gentlemen of Harrow School, who rushed out across the fields to greet her, put together a cash collection to pacify the farmer, and carried her bodily (she had hurt ‘a tendon in her foot’) and in triumph to the local tavern, where everyone evidently got gloriously drunk. Later there was much speculation at Mr Biggin’s London club as to whether he had been the first man to board a female aeronaut in flight. Gallantly, Mr Biggin refused to comment. The members of Brooks’s Club were said to be laying bets on who should first have ‘an amorous encounter’ in a balloon. The cry ‘Lunardi, come down!’ now became a kind of catchphrase, with a suggestive double-entendre implied.48

  Mrs Sage herself felt she had achieved true celebrity, writing modestly to a friend: ‘I suppose when I go out I shall be as much looked at as if a native of the Aerial Regions had come down to pay an earthly visit.’ She added that the views were magnificent, and that at no point had she needed to open her bottle of smelling salts.49

 
; Clearly such ascents remained hugely popular, and even inspirational. But they were also recklessly dangerous, and without any obvious justification beyond entertainment and novelty. It is not surprising that Lunardi’s demonstrations were severely criticised by Tiberius Cavallo, FRS, as scientifically useless.50

  Mockery took other forms. In 1784 the young writer Elizabeth Inchbald (aged thirty-one) managed to get her first play produced at the Haymarket Theatre. It was entitled A Mogul Tale, or the Descent of the Balloon. The same year, William Blake wrote and engraved ‘An Island in the Moon’, a satirical fragment in prose and verse, mocking ideas of flight and pouring scorn on self-deluded ‘philosophers’, including ‘Inflammable Gas’ Joseph Priestley. One of his later illustrations shows a spindly ladder leaning against the face of the moon with the caption, ‘I want, I want.’

  Lunardi used a Union Jack design on all his later balloons, and attracted increasingly large crowds to his launches. In 1785 he took his displays as far north as Edinburgh. But he often had trouble with crowd control, and rowdy disturbances became an important element in the balloon craze. It was dangerous to delay departure beyond the promised hour, even if the balloon was not sufficiently inflated or the wind was adverse. When the newspapers reported a successful launch, it often simply meant that the balloon had lifted off on time and no one in the crowd had been killed.

  Lunardi’s reputation was badly damaged the following year, when on 23 August at Newcastle a young man, Ralph Heron, was caught in one of the restraining ropes, lifted some hundred feet into the air, and then fell to his death. The impact drove his legs into a flowerbed as far as his knees, and ruptured his internal organs, which burst out onto the ground. He was due to be married the next day.♣

  7

  In 1786 Lunardi published An Account of Five Aerial Voyages in Britain, in the form of witty, picaresque, self-vaunting letters to his guardian. He had made ballooning fashionable, and started English people thinking about the possibilities of flight, and the new world above the earth. But many, like Banks, still dismissed him as a charlatan, while others wondered why no home-grown British aeronaut had yet taken to the skies.51

  There were in fact several eccentric amateurs and exhibitionists, but the first serious English pioneer came from a university city, and was largely supported by students. James Sadler (1753-1828) was a baker and confectioner in Oxford’s High Street, popular with undergraduates, and also well known as an amateur chemist and inventor. The back room of his bakery was really a laboratory. Sadler had read the work of Cavendish, and followed the news of the Montgolfiers and the French balloon craze of 1783. In spring 1784 he began launching small unmanned balloons, both hydrogen and hot-air type, from the fields around Oxford. He soon attracted financial backing among the undergraduates, and in July 1784 opened a subscription for ‘a large Aerial Machine’. In fact he built two: a large hot-air Montgolfier which stood over fifty feet high, and a smaller hydrogen balloon, now known as a ‘Charlier’.

  Unlike the daredevil Lunardi, Sadler was a family man — happily married with two sons and two daughters. At thirty-one he was modest, quietly spoken, undemonstrative, and his wife could never explain why the dangerous passion for aerostation had seized upon him. Puzzled, but not a little proud, she referred to him as ‘the Phenomenon’.52

  On 4 October 1784 he made the second ascent in England (after Lunardi’s), from Christchurch Meadows in the large Montgolfier, which was reported in Jackson’s Oxford Journal. This ascent was comparatively brief and uneventful, lasting for some thirty minutes, travelling about six miles northwards in the direction of Woodstock. Sadler made a much more dramatic flight in his second ascent, on 12 November. This time he used his hydrogen balloon, and launched before a large crowd from the Physic Garden, with a number of scientific instruments in his boat-shaped basket. By now the soft autumn weather had turned to more wintry and blustery conditions.

  The balloon rose rapidly, and it soon became apparent that its speed over the ground was alarmingly swift. Sadler flew southwards towards Aylesbury, travelling at nearly sixty miles per hour (ground speed) in a brisk wind. There was no time to take any scientific readings. After seventeen minutes the balloon envelope tore, and Sadler was forced to hurl out all his ballast and most of his instruments to prevent an immediate crash-landing. The balloon came down in ploughed fields, dragging Sadler a considerable distance along the ground, destroying the rest of his equipment and most of the balloon. Sadler returned to Oxford with torn clothes and many bruises. But he immediately announced that the hydrogen balloon was the superior aerostat, and planned to construct a much bigger one, capable of sustained flight for twelve hours. With this new balloon he intended to fly across the Channel before Christmas.53

  Sadler seems to have rekindled the old and ailing Dr Johnson’s interest in ballooning, despite his disappointments with Lunardi. While on his last visit to Oxford in October, Johnson sent his black servant Frank to observe Sadler’s first launch and report back, being too ill and breathless to go himself. One of the very last notes written in his own hand, dated 17 November 1784, to his old friend Edmund Hector, recalls this: ‘I did not reach Oxford till Friday morning, and then I sent Francis to see the Balloon fly, but could not go myself.’ It ends with what may be Johnson’s last joke about flying. ‘I staid at Oxford till Tuesday, and then came back in the common vehicle easily to London.’54 Less than a month later he was dead.

  Yet there remained a striking posthumous gesture. Johnson seems to have heard of the disastrous loss of instruments during Sadler’s second Oxford ascent of 12 November. Accordingly he presented (or probably bequeathed) to Sadler an enormously expensive barometer, to be used as a precision altimeter on future flights. It was said to be worth 200 guineas, and though Sadler was often tempted to sell it to raise funds, he kept it for over twenty-five years, and always took it on subsequent ascents. Strangely, Boswell nowhere mentions Johnson’s touching act of support and encouragement in his Life. It was also surely a symbolic gesture from the dying Johnson, who was struggling with his own huge, dropsical, earthbound body.55

  8

  By the end of 1784, the second year of the great balloon craze, no fewer than 181 manned ascents had been recorded, mostly in France and England. There was no sign that the craze was diminishing. On the contrary, it was now being exploited by an intrepid French aeronaut, Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809), who had earlier challenged Pilâtre and the Montgolfiers in Paris. Learning from Dr Charles’s success with hydrogen, he had abandoned his aerial tricycle and constructed his own balloons, and made a number of successful short flights in France. He quickly grasped that a key question with balloons was whether or not they could be navigated.

  Blanchard conceived of the balloon as essentially a form of aerial ship, moving through the medium of air as a ship moves through water. It must therefore be capable of being steered, if not directly against the wind, then through several points of the compass across it. There were only two ways to achieve this: either the aeronaut could exploit the wind currents themselves at different altitudes, hoping to find (and perhaps map) ones which blew regularly in different directions, on the analogy of ocean tides and continental currents; or else by providing the balloon with its own independent steering and propulsive instruments.

  Blanchard chose to concentrate on the latter. He began experimenting with various ingenious forms of guiding equipment: aerial oars, aerial rudders, sets of flapping wings made of silk stretched across a wicker frame, and most astutely the moulinet. This was an early form of hand-cranked propeller, with eight-foot blades also made of stretched silk. Blanchard’s theory was as follows. He believed that he could first stabilise his balloon at a fixed height by balancing ballast against hydrogen; and once having achieved this critical ‘point of equilibrium’, he could then control both its direction and its altitude mechanically with his hand-operated equipment.

  In the autumn of 1784 Blanchard came over to London, believing like many entrepreneurs
that he could more easily get private financing there than in France. He built a medium-sized hydrogen balloon and made several successful ascents over the Home Counties (it was one of these that migrated over the head of Gilbert White). One of his first backers was a member of the Royal Society, Dr Sheldon, who paid for a flight with scientific instruments. However, when the balloon struggled to rise above the London rooftops, Blanchard abruptly threw most of these expensive items overboard. This was wholly characteristic of his highhanded attitude to the ‘art of aerostation’. He was a prima donna of the air, brilliant, volatile, temperamental, but also utterly fearless.

  Like Lunardi, Blanchard was invited to dine with the Duchess of Devonshire, and arranged for a special ascent of a balloon carrying her colours. He met Joseph Banks and several members of the unofficial British Balloon Club. His most significant encounter, however, was with a wealthy and adventurous American physician, Dr John Jeffries. Jeffries, forty years old, was born in Boston. He had qualified both at Harvard and St Andrews, ran a successful practice in Cavendish Square, and had served as a military surgeon on the British side in the American War of Independence. Anxious to be elected an FRS, he had attended the necessary breakfast with Sir Joseph Banks, and was a keen member of the unofficial British Balloon Club.56

  Jeffries regarded balloon ascents as potentially a part of a major scientific project to discover the secrets of flight, the nature of the upper air, and the formation of weather. After Dr Charles in Paris, he was the first truly trained scientific mind to risk an actual balloon flight. He set out his scientific aims in a paper for Banks, and undertook to write up his ascents for the Royal Society.