For the exercises, Zeppelin was temporarily allotted command of a cavalry division, the preliminary step to promotion to general. On the surface, all seemed so placid that even when his friend General von Heuduck mentioned cryptically to Zeppelin in a conversation that “you must have an enemy in high places in Berlin,” the count thought nothing of it.
After three days in the field, Zeppelin was highly recommended by Lieutenant General von Götze as an officer who “expounded correct cavalry principles….His conduct on and off duty is faultless. I consider him in every respect qualified for a divisional command.”
In any other situation, such praise would have been more than sufficient for promotion, but instead General von Kleist, the (Prussian) inspector of cavalry, summoned Zeppelin and humiliated him with a caustic dressing-down before his fellow officers. He would never, he was told, be given a division.
It was a horrifyingly embarrassing and shabby way to end a thirty-year army career; even worse, perhaps, was that when an officer was purged in such a manner he was rendered unfit for military, political, or diplomatic service anywhere else but in his home state—and even then he would be the subject of innuendo and smears. The king of Württemberg accepted Zeppelin’s resignation with a heavy heart and, to ease the shame, bestowed the rank of general upon him, but only in an honorary capacity. At least it came with a general’s pension.
Initially, Zeppelin naively believed that Kleist had mistaken “my pliancy for weakness and my quiet way with subordinates for lack of firmness.” It was not until February 23, 1891, that he discovered the truth. Gustav von Steinheil, Württemberg’s war minister, confessed that he had been told by Berlin before the war games that Zeppelin was finished. Kleist’s theatrics had served only as a pretext to force a dishonorable departure. At last the shocked Zeppelin understood the damage he’d inflicted on himself with his memorandum; he could only “take comfort in the thought that I am the victim of convictions openly expressed for the good of the empire.”
Zeppelin was fifty-two years old when he left the army in November 1890. As he licked his wounds in forced retirement, Zeppelin might at that moment have shriveled up and vanished from history. But he didn’t.
His besmirched reputation prompted neither self-pity nor self-recrimination but instead an inexorable drive to restore his honor and prove to his foes that he was worthy of their respect and admiration. If anything, he became more patriotic, more devoted to Germany, more worshipful of his emperor.8
Within a month of realizing the war games had been fixed, Zeppelin embarked on the great project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.
3. The Government of the Air
BLESSED, IF NOT voluntarily, with a surfeit of time, Zeppelin could at last undertake the serious study of aeronautics. No more idle fantasias scribbled in a journal; he had to learn how to fly. He compiled a bibliography, then collected a library, of the texts and manuscripts containing the secret knowledge of the aeronauts, and he studied them with beetle-browed intensity.
At the very beginning, he discovered, nobody had cared that balloons were ungovernable. In the fall of 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers in France sent aloft a bemused sheep, duck, and rooster (King Louis XVI had suggested two convicted criminals instead) on an eight-minute journey in a paper-and-sackcloth balloon filled with heated air, the sheer wonder of flying was more than enough to amaze the world.
Of his own first ascent, Professor Jacques Charles excitedly recalled, “Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off. I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles and persecutions forever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical rapture….I exclaimed to my companion Monsieur Robert—‘I’m finished with the Earth. From now on our place is in the sky!…Such utter calm. Such immensity! Such an astonishing view….Seeing all these wonders, what fool could wish to hold back the progress of science!’ ”1
The “progress of science” was spectacular enough, yet for some it paled beside the glories fashioned by the Great God of Nature. Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, upon being taken up, was enraptured by the experience of reaching some low-lying clouds, a sight just a handful of humans had ever witnessed. He saw them as “chains of snow-white mountains wrought into fantastic forms, [which] seemed as if they were tumbling headlong upon us. One colossal mass pressed upon another, encompassing us on every side, until we began to ascend more rapidly and soared high above them, where they now lay beneath us, rolling over each other like the billows of the sea when agitated by the violence of the storm, obscuring the earth entirely from our view.”2
What was dubbed “balloonamania” erupted across Europe at the news that men could fly. One could soon purchase bonnets, walking sticks, clocks, jigsaw puzzles, bed warmers, fans, jewelry, garters, snuffboxes, chinaware, commemorative medals, and even chamber pots festooned with aerial imagery. Almanacs, plays, jest books, novels, poems, and penny ballads were devoted to the ballooning craze, while journals kept readers informed with new sections dedicated to “balloon intelligence.”3
Fashion, too, took notice. Balloon-shaped straw hats of monstrous size were seen everywhere, and the wealthy could purchase balloon-themed coaches and furniture. In France, a yellow ribbon came to be regarded as the identifying badge of aerial enthusiasm and was quickly adopted by the smart set in England. When the Prince of Wales attended a society event wearing “an air-balloon satin [sash] embroidered down the seams with silver,” a newspaper reported, “the seat of majesty was forgot, and all eyes (particularly the ladies) directed towards him.”4
During 1783 and 1784 alone, all manner of balloons were launched (not always successfully) in London, The Hague, Madrid, Hamburg, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna, Warsaw, Leipzig, Saxony, and Brunswick. The Scots Magazine counted at least twenty-five flights made in the course of a single year.5
Americans were particularly taken with ballooning. Since the Treaty of Paris—which ended the War of Independence and acknowledged the United States as a sovereign nation—was signed on September 3, 1783, just weeks after the first Montgolfier and Robert ascensions, it seemed as if the Creator Himself had celebrated the birth of flight with the gift of America, a land conceived in the same spirit of liberty as the desire to soar unimpeded to the clouds or to travel wheresoever one wished.
Even the normally unflappable George Washington succumbed to the excitement, telling a correspondent that “the tales related of [balloons] are marvelous, and lead us to expect that our friends at Paris…will come flying thro’ the air, instead of ploughing the ocean to get to America.”6 Lovers, also, might be reunited thanks to the balloon: John Adams, for too long separated from Abigail, promised that he would leave France and “will fly [to you] in one of them at the rate of 30 Knots an hour.”7 The somewhat less lovelorn Thomas Jefferson cannily noted that since “the French may now run over their laces, wines, &c. to England duty free [by air],” so too might his airborne countrymen circumvent British taxes on trade.8
Edward Warren, a thirteen-year-old from Baltimore, became the first American to fly on June 24, 1784, when Peter Carnes, a Maryland tavern owner and Methodist preacher who’d enterprisingly built a small hydrogen balloon, asked for someone, anyone, to take his place in its basket. Carnes, who weighed 234 pounds—colossal for the time—could not induce the balloon to take off, and impatient spectators were clamoring for their money back. As scarred Revolutionary War veterans and hardy frontiersmen shrank from the challenge, young and clean-limbed Warren had stepped boldly forward. The teenager went aloft a few hundred feet and “politely acknowledged” (said a newspaper) the cheers of the crowd with “a significant wave of his hat.” A couple of minutes later he touched down and everyone took up a collection to reward his bravery. Warren took the money and vanished from history.9
Now that the sky was given to man’s domin
ion, there was no end to the excited predictions about the fabulous future that awaited. Balloons were a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which anyone could inscribe their dreams—and did.
Explorers would soon cross pathless mountain ranges and soar over uncharted seas and wander above the most tangled jungles and search for the fabled North Pole. Neither geographical features—rivers, mountains, seas, and deserts—nor long-established borders would continue to sunder one state from another. “The whole order of our existence, our habitations, our architecture…will be turned upside down,” the Russian diplomat Count Morkov told friends in Saint Petersburg, for balloons freely floated above natural and man-made obstacles alike. “Like gods they will descend and ascend,” heedless of ancient custom and laws.10 Aeronauts, one correspondent suggested to John Jay, might even transform into astronauts by flying to the moon.11
Closer to home (and reality), balloon-borne scientists would perfect the developing field of meteorology by measuring temperature, air pressure, and humidity at various altitudes. Physicists could investigate the speed of sound, electrical phenomena, and the mysterious effects of gravity. Astronomers could at last peer into space clearly without clouds interfering. Topographers could compile precise maps and please kings with the expanse of their realms. The literary critic Friedrich Melchior, who kept in close contact with the Parisian scientific elite, reported that “among all our circle of friends…as in the academic schools, all one hears is talk of experiments, atmospheric air, inflammable gas, flying cars, journeys in the sky.”12
From out of thin air, an entirely new branch of science was invented to further the new art of flying balloons. Dubbed “aerostation,” it amounted to the rudimentary study of what would become aerodynamics—how things fly—and the pursuit of research and technical development to improve performance.
More interesting to some people was the prospect of making fortunes. Merchants would use balloons to transport cargo, mail, and passengers between cities along new air routes. Commercial empires would flourish as businessmen forged international deals in less than a day: One French journalist predicted that soon a director of the English or Dutch East Indies Company could “have breakfast at the Cape of Good Hope, dine and make an expedition to Canton [China], and return to have supper with his family in London or Amsterdam.”13
Indeed, exclaimed some, the entire System of the World would be overthrown when every man became brother to man as national prejudices dissolved through familiarity and understanding. Neither king’s writ nor pope’s edict held warrant in the air. For the first time in history, revolutionaries proclaimed, men would be free of ancient authority. Among the clouds, their spirits, their minds, and their flesh would be liberated from earthly shackles. Harmony and universal understanding would pass between once-warring nations.
Well, perhaps, said others, more cynical of human nature. More likely, generals would embark their armies aboard balloons and attack the enemy from behind his own lines or reduce the mightiest of fortresses (the Montgolfiers patriotically suggested British-held Gibraltar) to rubble with their air artillery. From proto–aircraft carriers, admirals would launch swarms of bomb-bearing balloons toward rival fleets and sink them at no risk to their own precious men-of-war. Or maybe there would be vast sky battles between what the poet Tennyson later called “the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue” to decide the fate of empires: A British cartoon of the time depicted four cannon-laden balloons, two flying the Union Jack and two the French fleur-de-lis, unleashing broadsides at each other like Nelsonic ships of the line.14
But the future never happened. Owing to balloons’ instability and uncontrollability, few scientific experiments were conducted, no explorers discovered any Dark Continents, merchants foolish enough to invest in them lost their money, generals left “airy navies” to poets’ imaginations, and budding radicals realized that the most effective method of overthrowing the status quo was to chop off kings’ heads (in the French case, that of poor Louis XVI).
Owing to fears of rogue balloons setting fire to wooden buildings and razing entire cities, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, the Austrian Netherlands, Genoa, and Rome went so far as to ban aviation.15 Even in France, birthplace of flight, ballooning’s fortunes collapsed: Between 1783 and 1790, no fewer than seventy-six civilian ascents were made, but in the decade following, just six.16 For nearly a decade, not a single manned balloon was launched in America after young Edward Warren’s ride in 1784.17
The “aerial phrenzy” quickly waned, and once-awed journalists made running gags about overpromising aeronauts resembling their conveyances in being filled with nothing but hot air.18 One cynic joked that never “has a soap bubble occupied more seriously a troupe of children” than a balloon, while Horace Walpole, that most waspish of critics, lethally stung aero-enthusiasts by remarking that he expected their “new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and the idle.”19
He was right about the “idle.” Ballooning eventually declined into showmanship, the kind of sideshow diversion in which impresarios took passengers up to a couple of hundred feet or tossed cats equipped with makeshift parachutes from the basket. A pursuit that had so recently been exalted as the savior, the redeemer, and the benefactor of humanity degenerated into a vulgar carnival act akin to dancing bears and performing monkeys.20
As for the “learned,” Walpole was wrong. When the scientist Thomas Martyn pointedly asked, “Of what use are balloons?” the Royal Society, home to some of the finest minds in Britain, quickly distanced itself from ballooning. Sir Joseph Banks, the brilliant botanist who served as its president, warned his great friend Benjamin Franklin that “the more respectable part” of the membership wished to postpone further research into aviation “until some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to Society or Science is proposed.”21
Advocates retorted that only time would tell. Balloons were so ingenious, and their implications to human existence potentially so staggering, that one day they would prove their worth in ways nobody could foresee. As Franklin, who watched several flights in Paris, remarked to a skeptic scoffing that balloons had no purpose, “What is the use of a new-born babe?” And to Banks he replied, “It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter, till we can see to what use the power may be applied. When we have learnt to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were [also] mere matters of amusement.”22
In that letter, the always perceptive Franklin put his finger precisely on the problem. Progress would have to wait until “we have learnt to manage” the balloon.23 In other words, he identified aerial navigation—or, as another supporter put it, “the government of these machines in the atmosphere”—as the critical, maybe even the sole, factor in determining whether lighter-than-air flight had a future.24
Yet, try as they might, not even their most zealous enthusiasts could work out how to regulate balloons in the air, even if at first glance the problem seemed simple to solve. The Montgolfiers theorized that all one had to do to create propulsion was to rend a hole in one side of the balloon and release hot air or hydrogen through it.25 In the event, all that happened was that the spherical balloon sagged through loss of pressure and rapidly lost altitude. The mere act of wastefully valving gas to thrust the vessel forward could not overcome the counterforce of wind resistance. Some kind of supplementary motive power was needed. But what form should it take?
An enterprising fellow named Mr. Uncles proposed building a balloon propelled by four eagles, which, he advertised, are “perfectly subservient to his pleasure.” He actually succeeded in making a fifty-foot-wide balloon out of Persian silk and on July 18, 1786, he took his seat with the seemingly compliant eagles harnessed. After the balloon rose eight feet, Uncles tried to coax the b
irds to pull forward in unison but he and his contraption crashed to the ground, to the great amusement and little consternation of the ten thousand spectators present. No more was ever heard of Mr. Uncles.26
A more promising avenue lay in likening the balloon to a ship. As boats were obviously capable of sailing against or across the wind, wouldn’t it make sense to outfit a balloon with a sail? Unfortunately, it didn’t, mostly owing to the fact that sailboats can be steered because they interact with two competing environments (they float on water and are propelled by wind), whereas balloons rely on just one. If a boat has its sail removed, all you end up with is the nautical equivalent of a balloon: a drifting vessel at the mercy of the current. So the addition of sails to a balloon was hardly an addition at all: They merely enabled it to head in the same direction and speed as the prevailing wind—which had been the problem in the first place.27
A better idea might be to liken apples to apples: Another object that moved exclusively in a single environment was a fish. Why not mimic a sea creature’s means of propulsion by adding a rudder and oars as substitutes for its tail and fins?
It was quickly discovered, however, that the density of water—around eight hundred times that of air—was critical to allowing a fish’s fins to “push” against something for propulsion, while oars lacked any similar purchase in the relatively thin air. True, it might have been possible to build oars with sails at their ends, but to have any chance of exceeding the current windspeed so many rowers would be needed that the balloon would be too heavy to lift off. And in the absence of sufficient muscle power to generate significant airflow past it, no rudder—even assuming one light enough not to sink the balloon could be made—stood the slightest chance of creating a turning movement, as it does in water.
Empires of the Sky Page 4
