The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  “Ha! Well, the range was a little extreme, as I thought. Still—”

  He hangs it up in the rigging by a pair of clips provided for the purpose. He is not quite satisfied with it, yet he is satisfied with it. Just doing something requiring this quantity of apparatus, and this degree of specialized knowledge, is a satisfaction to Waldemer. Like many or most Americans—undoubtedly the reason for the success of that remarkable nation—he feels obliged to be doing something at all times. A sigh or two of satisfaction, a glance around the horizon, and he is squinting into the theodolite which Theodor has left mounted on the instrument ring. He puts the canvas cover back on the instrument.

  “I make out our course to be north by east a half east.”

  “Very good.”

  “Hard to tell now though, because the guide ropes are out of the water and you can’t sight along them. The sun has come up out of the mist and is warming the gas, and that’s made us rise. We could use that handful of ballast we threw away now.

  This is self-evident.

  “Hallo, it’s eight o’clock. About time for a little breakfast, I think. I’d be glad to fix it.”

  He is right on all counts. The sun has climbed out of the hazy ring around the horizon and is glowing more warmly now, with a kind of swimming on the surface if you look at it directly. Penetrated by this energy, the Prinzess swells and rises. The three guide ropes, which were previously streaming behind us in the sea, now hang directly down with their ends clear of the water. We can no longer estimate our course by the snaky trails they leave in the water, and from now on we must depend on the sun compass. Waldemer is correct as well about the time, which he has derived from his reliable pocket watch, manufactured in Massachusetts. It is true that it is about time for breakfast, and even more true that he would be glad to fix it. He is always happy to do anything of immediate and practical benefit to himself and others, especially if it involves the use of any sort of mechanical apparatus. Breakfast not only involves the primus stove—a simple but admirable machine in its own right—but the contrivance which Waldemer has invented to prevent the stove from igniting the hydrogen in the immense silken bag over our heads. First the coffee pot is filled with water and charged with the proper amount of coffee. Then it is set on the stove and held in place by a clamp, and the whole affair is lowered below the gondola on a rope some ten metres long. Waldemer carefully jerks away at two strings, one attached below to a patent English stove lighter and the other to the lever controlling the fuel. Finally, after a number of failures there is a yellow flicker underneath, along with the odour of burning kerosene. The flame turns blue; the stove is operating properly.

  “Ahah,” sighs Waldemer. He is pleased with himself. I smile too and am happy for him that the stove lighter has worked properly. He is really a splendid fellow, a hero of our time. Even though he is a journalist by profession, his true mission in life is to preside over his stove lighters, firearms, and all the other clever mechanical devices that an overbred civilization has come to regard as necessities. He is an emblem of our century, and even more of the century to come, the era of self-propelled carriages that will eventually do away with legs. He prefers tinned roast beef to a cow, not because it tastes better, but because the manner of its containment in the tin is ingenious. He is free from sentiment about nature. An animal to him is something to be looked at through a gun sight, something that falls down and turns into meat when the exquisite mechanism of the trigger is actuated. He has no hostility to animals, he simply regards them as somewhat inferior machines, smelly, you know, and prone to brucellosis and other mechanical maladjustments. Waldemer is an old companion of my adventures. He is necessary to me because without him I am only something more than half a man; I am incapable of taking an interest in a stove lighter. Together we are at least a man and a third. Machines are not perfect of course and neither is Waldemer. Occasionally things do not work out as he plans. This is fortunate, because if he were as infallible as machines are in the dreams of their designers he would not be human and I would not care for him as I do. Machines turn; their wheels turn, and with each turn of the wheel a minute atom of substance is worn away and the machine is no longer the same. Besides, there are—imponderables. This Waldemer has never understood. Sometimes a machine of this sort, believed to be perfect but actually possessing a soul, will turn on its maker with a quiet treachery far more dangerous than that of any animal. But—

  In a reverie I imagine that it was my ancestor who invented fire and Waldemer’s who invented the wheel.

  The first glimpse I ever had of him was emblematic of the whole man: he overtook me one summer day on a country road in Pennsylvania, borne along on a bicycle, that ingenious device that man has contrived as an extension of his locomotor apparatus. A bicycle is interesting to a mathematician. It deals with the well-known difficulty with legs, that there are only two of them. One being constantly brought forward into position for the next step, the weight of the body is left on the remaining one, a precarious condition which results in lurching and inefficient motion. For this reason nature has evolved the horse and other four-legged animals, so that a sufficient number of legs will always be where they are needed without an undue effort. But the wheel is vastly superior to the quadruped. By a well-known mathematical principle, the number of legs is increased until it approaches infinity; analogically speaking, the polygon is extended to the circle. Now there is always a leg—that is to say a mathematically infinite point of the wheel—under the progressing body. The rider can relax his own legs at will, for short periods, and it is not even necessary for him to mind very carefully what he is doing. The wheel in its dumb perseverance will take care of the physics for him. His progress is assured, and he can add momentum or subtract it as he pleases by working the pedals or the brake in turn. Regarded purely as a locomoting animal, he has converted himself into a greatly improved one by combining himself with the product of his thought. Thus Waldemer, appearing behind me on the outskirts of Harrisburg on that bucolic summer day, waved cheerily, braked on the dusty road, and fell flat in front of me along with his machine.

  Only a little less cheerful, he extricated himself from the bicycle, slapped the dust from his clothing, and introduced himself. He was about thirty in those days, a stocky young man with a handsome head, horizontal eyebrows, and a soft but bushy mustache shaped like the handlebars of his bicycle. He resembled exactly one of those clean-cut heroes in the American dime novels I had read as a boy in Stockholm, those who smile but only with a little wrinkle-of-takinglife-seriously between their brows, and this was prescient, because it was exactly one of those boys’ adventures that he and I were setting out on together. He was irrepressibly good-natured and there was no question whatsoever about his intelligence. He had just begun work as the central Pennsylvania correspondent of the New York Herald, and he regarded his encounter with me as his first opportunity (he was fond of the word opportunity, quintessentially American as he was) to move from his small-town origins into the realm of world events. After he had explained the circumstances, he helped me onto the handlebars of his machine, and together we went on down the road in search of Woodlawn State College and Professor Eggert.

  Cuthman Eggert was at that time a leading authority on aerostatics. I had come to him ostensibly out of curiosity, but at a deeper level no doubt because some demon inside me sensed that balloons were to play a part in my destiny. I had known he was interested in the problem of dirigibility because of his papers, which I had read in the library of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and he in turn had taken note of my own publications on aeromagnetics. We corresponded, exchanged opinions, and agreed to meet—I because what I was interested in lay up in the sky too high to be reached with ladders, and he because he hoped, perhaps, that my knowledge of magnetic phenomena might be of some use to him in solving the problem of the dirigibility of aerostats. He proved to be a humourless man with a bony frame, a little smaller than ordinary size, intensely
devoted to his researches and scarcely aware of the practicalities of daily life around him. He had no small talk. He proposed an ascension for that very afternoon, and together we went out to his apparatus, which he kept in a shed at the edge of the college hockey field. His balloon—the only one of the three he owned that was currently in working order—was a rather small one, capable of lifting about a hundred and fifty kilograms, including the basket. It was made of a single layer of ordinary silk, varnished after stitching, and no doubt leaked abominably. His methods of gas production were also primitive, although conventional for those days. He was obliged to produce his hydrogen on the spot by adding iron filings to a large earthenware flask of muriatic acid, and then to remove all traces of acid and other moisture from the product by passing it through a system of filters. The gas was then piped to the filling tube of the balloon, which had to be held in position by the three of us as it swelled and gradually assumed form. The whole process took a matter of three or four hours, broken by intervals in which it was necessary for Professor Eggert to uncap the flask and add more acid and filings. At last the balloon stood up like a soufflé with the basket underneath it, the whole prevented from rising only by the weight of a couple of bags of sand. The hockey players on the field, when they saw that preparations were imminent, stopped to watch us.

  Then occurred an extraordinary and, as one looks back on it, quite childish confusion. It became clear only at this point that the balloon would carry only two persons, and the Professor had not thought out the practical arrangements to the point of deciding who these two were to be. He invited me to climb in, and climbed in himself, leaving Waldemer standing on the grassy field, still polite, still cheerful, but holding the basket firmly with one hand. Waldemer pointed out that he had come all the way out from Harrisburg on commission from his newspaper to describe the sensations of a balloon ascension and would suffer a monetary loss if prevented from doing so. This seemed reasonable to me and I climbed out. Waldemer mounted into the basket, whereupon the Professor climbed out and stood on the ground beside me; not out of any kind of displeasure or petulance, but simply because it seemed to him better, until these practical questions had been settled, for everyone to get out and discuss the matter calmly with both feet on the ground. Waldemer, however, was not easily persuaded to come down. Cheerfully, doggedly, and intelligently, reinforcing his position with logic, he clung to the basket of this celestial bicycle, which was soon to solve for him another of the anatomical flaws of man, his lack of wings. His well-modeled chin was set and it was clear he was not going to get down. What benefit could this ascension or any other ascension possibly have for mankind unless mankind became aware of it? And how could mankind become aware of it unless modern journalism disseminated its notice over the world? If this ascension was worth undertaking, it was only in that it might become part of the annals of man’s progress, and the custodians of these annals were those who converted ephemeral events into the permanency of print, i.e., himself, Waldemer, the other employees of the New York Herald, and their colleagues throughout the nation and the world.

  It might be thought that Professor Eggert gave in to him out of weariness, but this was not so. In the end Professor Eggert was persuaded by his argument. In spite of his abstruseness, his scientific reclusiveness, he was not insensible to the benefits and even the necessity of publicity. He invited me to climb in, I took my place beside Waldemer, and Waldemer pulled the cord of the bursting valve in the belief that it was the rope that released the ballast. The silk bag gave a gasp, doubled inward at the centre like a man who has been stabbed with a dagger, and quite slowly began to sink down over us. The hockey players gave mock cheers. We had plenty of time to get out of the basket and join Professor Eggert before the balloon lay like a heap of discarded clothing at our feet.

  Of iron filings there was a copious abundance, since central Pennsylvania is freckled with iron mills, but muriatic acid was expensive. I was forced to resort to my own pocketbook to buy another demijohn, which had to be brought out from Harrisburg in a wagon. In any case, the ascension was postponed until the next day, when everything in fact worked faultlessly and Waldemer and I soared for an hour over various neat farms divided into rectangles, landing finally in a rye field. Professor Eggert followed us in a shay drawn by an intelligent mare that had learned a good deal about the movements of balloons and was able to trace out their landing places with hardly any guidance from the reins. Waldemer proved to be a valuable and useful assistant on that occasion. He soon learned to tell the bursting cord from the ballast rope, and we made many ascensions together over the Pennsylvania hills. Eventually we surpassed in our knowledge the bony and devoted Professor Eggert who was our teacher and learned things about balloons that even he didn’t know. In fact, although erudite and assiduous, Professor Eggert was in the final analysis somewhat deficient in imagination. His obsession was the discovery of a means for the direction of motion of gas-suspended aerostats, to free them from the whimsy of the winds. He had tried vanes of various sorts, and here he was excruciatingly close to the solution, although he didn’t know it himself and this approach was generally scoffed at by theoreticians of the time. Giving up vanes as a bad job, he turned to pedal-actuated airscrews and to devices emitting jets of gas. I have no opinion on these expedients, although it is possible that they may prove workable at some time in the future. Some of his experiments were highly perilous, and while ready to trust his own life to these untested devices, he was unwilling to risk the lives of others, and frequently used animals as subjects in his researches. This led him into the complicated and exasperating difficulties of training cats to actuate gas valves and so on, a distraction which in my opinion interfered with the more important course of his discoveries. During my association with him, his thinking processes became completely stuck on the possibility of using aeromagnetism for steering purposes. He knew from my publications and others that electromagnetic lines of force curved symmetrically around the earth from pole to pole like a graceful feminine garment, and also that these fields were related in some elusive way to the electrostatic forces that produced lightning, St. Elmo’s Fire, and other paraphenomena of the atmosphere. I had many discussions with him on this matter. He argued that since the magnetic field consisted of lines of force, or at least was commonly spoken of in that way, there must be a force involved, and if a force existed, then there must in theory also exist the possibility of harnessing it for a useful purpose such as steering a balloon. I tried to convince him that the so-called lines of force lacked absolutely the power of pulling any object either north or south, and at the most they were capable of aligning elongated ferrous objects into a position parallel with themselves, as they did with a compass needle. But he contended, first of all, that if a compass needle is twisted, then a force has been applied to twist it, and this same force might at least in theory be used to twist a balloon. I pointed out that twisting a balloon was not the same thing as sending it off in a direction contrary to the wind, that he might twist the balloon until it spun like a top and it would still drift exactly with the wind in accordance with a dumb and inevitable law. Yet he could not give up the idea that the solution of dirigibility lay concealed somehow in the problem of turning the balloon at various angles to the wind. Here again—as my subsequent discoveries proved—he was prescient but insufficiently imaginative. He did, during the time I knew him, reach the point of sending up magnetized iron bars in balloons, on one occasion adding a barnyard fowl which he had trained to operate a mechanism locking the bars into place when the alignment was correct. Unfortunately, this experiment took place in the late fall on the verge of a storm, and a westerly gale blew the apparatus, as far as anyone could tell, toward the Atlantic coast and out to sea. It is possible that in an earlier age, the age of Franklin and Lavoisier, let us say, Eggert might have achieved a name for himself in the scientific world. But in the nineteenth century technology moved too quickly for him, and he was unable to surmount the pro
blem of specialization that is the genius and the curse of our epoch. I felt a great sympathy for him, and I owed him a great debt and still owe him one for the tutorship he generously and quite selflessly offered me in aerostatics. Where is Professor Eggert now? Probably still at his state college, sending up ducks, kittens, and lady students in the antiquated airships of twenty years ago, and pursuing them over the countryside in his shay.

  “Major, what are you thinking about so quietly there? Always falling into thought, you are. It’s your Scandihoovian mysticism.” This is his American form of humour, a badinage consisting mainly of jolly and bluff insults. “A metaphysical lot, you Swedes. Look at Swedenborg. You have too much time to think in the winter, that’s your trouble. Take the Norwegians. They have the same climate, but they spend the winter sliding around their hills on skis. They never think a bit. Look at ‘em, bursting with health.”

  Actuating the string attached to the fuel valve so that the stove hanging below goes out, he pulls in the rope hand over hand and retrieves a perfectly brewed pot of coffee. This he pours into cups of a thick unbreakable variety selected by himself, and passes them to us, along with slices of coarse bread and butter.

  “Ah.” He exhales contentedly. “Is the breakfast all right, Major?”

  In actual fact I drink the coffee but find I have little appetite for the bread and butter. Not noticing this, he spreads his own bread thickly with butter and falls to. “Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” he comments in another widely applicable phrase of his. Still chewing, he gropes in his clothing for a handkerchief, removes a few crumbs from his mustache, and continues with the meal. Now and then he washes the bread down with a swallow of steaming coffee that produces another sound of satisfaction.