In popularising ballooning among the masses, Lunardi undoubtedly contributed to its anti-intellectual status, as did the various occurrences of mass riots reported with relish by the press. Focus was being lost from ballooning as the product of enquiring scientific minds. Sadler can be credited for reclaiming aeronautics from showbiz to scientific enquiry.
Although he remained an unreconstructed Latino dandy perfectly fitting the eighteenth-century image of playboy aristocracy, Lunardi demonstrated a modern PR consultant’s acumen. Prior to his landmark - or rather skymark - ascent he exhibited his balloon at a theatre in the Strand, charging a hefty one guinea admission fee which also included a seat at the take-off. Post-flight, the balloon was again exhibited with a public pay-to-view, this time in the Pantheon in Oxford Street.
John Francis Rigaud’s portrait of Lunardi, a male assistant and a lady friend (Yale Center for British Art/ Paul Mellon Collection)
Nearly 200,000 people were claimed to have viewed his take-off, though the claim was significantly made by the self-mythologising Lunardi himself. There is little doubt, though, that the public imagination was very much of the captured variety. The Prince of Wales attended the launch, the Prime Minister was rumoured to have rescheduled a Cabinet meeting to view the balloon soaring above London and Dr. Johnson’s sagely dispensed advice, to save a guinea and see the balloon for free, was thoroughly endorsed.
After over two hours of flight at the mercy of the currents - though Lunardi remained adamant he could row through the air even though he could probably hear the sniggers of Dr. Johnson and Boswell from 1,000 feet below - he somehow managed to land in Ware.
Never one to miss cashing in on a marketing opportunity, Lunardi granted interviews to anyone who would provide a willing ear and produced his own lengthy, yet undisputedly ghost-written, account of the flight My First Aerial Voyage in London 1784, complete with characteristic proclamations of self-importance, but also sartorial grandiloquence. J.E. Hodgson observed in 1924: “Lunardi’s effusive literary efforts were the subject of some not wholly deserved ridicule. Sadler, on the contrary, seldom uses his pen.”
No matter how reckless Lunardi was prepared to be in an attempt to pump hot air into his balloon at an equivalent rate to inflating his ego, the death of a cat and a ground worker finished his career. Like Blanchard who had also planned to capitalise on the mid-1780s British appetite for balloons by briefly moving to the UK, Lunardi quickly fled England too. Neither ever returned. This left British ballooning in the more scientifically capable hands of Sadler.
29 SEPTEMBER 1784: SHELDONIAN THEATRE
Perhaps the most astonishing detail about mankind’s quest to reach for the skies is the speed of progress once initial flight had been accomplished. After hundreds of thousands of years enviously watching birds gallivanting around the sky, the Montgolfier brothers had ascended in a hot air balloon (although if you’d asked them at the time, they would have described it as a smoke balloon) for the first time in public on 21 November 1783. Amazingly, within twelve days a manned hydrogen balloon ascent had also been successfully pioneered.
It is unlikely that Sadler consciously planned to be the UK’s first balloonist - his enquiring scientific mind was more interested in obtaining the correct instruments to accompany his ascent than in winning the race to be the first Englishman in the skies. Even so, aware of the publicity this brought him, he was certainly complicit in later attempting to win the race to cross the Channel and, afterwards, the Irish Sea. His probable indifference towards being the first English ascendant can be guessed at by the fact that Sadler planned his first manned voyage on a date after a scheduled attempt by a fellow countryman.
Dr. John Sheldon was a fittingly eccentric English gentleman to be attracted to the dangerous new sport of ballooning. Quite how eccentric can be determined by one detail: he kept his late wife’s embalmed body in his London house, and would wheel her into the room to put astonished dinner party guests off their starters.
To Sheldon ballooning was a new sport, not a new science. The doctor commissioned an umbrella maker to manufacturer a balloon, based upon the Montgolfier template. The result was an 85 foot high by 80 foot diameter monster orb. Two attempts at launching were made, and if either had been successful, Sadler would have lost his tag line “the first Englishman to fly”.
The first intended ascent occurred on 16 August 1784 in the garden of Lord Foley’s residence in Portland Place, London. As the gathering crowd’s impatience grew, Sheldon’s attempt to raise the balloon on a very hot day in the middle of a heatwave helped ensure the orb remained stubbornly flaccid and impotent. This was a success compared to the full 18-certificate horror show that happened with the next attempt six weeks later on 29 September 1784.
After several hours and with dusk encroaching, the flight was announced as cancelled when insufficient “lifting gas” had been pumped into the obviously porous balloon envelope. A bad tempered crowd dispersed noisily. Only then did Sheldon and his accomplice Keegan suddenly overcome the inflation problems, and the guide rope holders collectively announced there was sufficient propulsion to engage a lift-off.
At this point, disaster struck. Fragments of incandescent straw escaped from the huge seven-foot burner, designed on a scale deemed necessary to provide sufficient propulsion to pull such a cumbersome monster from terra firma. Like the Montgolfiers, who deliberately chose straw and sheep’s wool for smoke-emitting properties when burnt, Sheldon mistakenly believed smoke, not hot air molecules, provided the balloon’s ascension.
In front of a huge crowd, the balloon did go up... in flames. The illustrator Paul Sandby callously satirised Sheldon, depicting him with a giant balloon bottom - his charred backside going up in flames in an illustration titled “The English Balloon”.
Sheldon was by no means the only failure. Several Frenchmen, determined to enjoy their self-considered superiority obtained from being the first nation to reach the skies, decided to show the English how it could be done on their own soil. One such Gaelic visitor, the Chevalier de Moret announced an ascent from Five Fields Row in Chelsea. After numerous delays, rumoured purely to provide more publicity and ticket sales opportunities, the balloon itself proved incapable of inflation. In truth, it displayed no attributes of being airworthy. The paying and baying crowd concluded quickly, and justifiably, that they were in the presence of a charlatan. Riots occurred, and the Frenchman was pursued back over the Channel.
All this accumulated ostentatious failure ensured a quickly polarised press. “Everyone should laugh this new folly of ballooning out of practice as soon as possible!” thundered the Morning Herald, whereas the Chronicle applauded ballooning as “the furthest humans have thus far succeeded - we are indeed fortunate to live through these times”. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail probably ran with “Does ballooning give you cancer?”
1 NOVEMBER 1784: BALLOON HATS SOAR IN POPULARITY
Before Beatlemania there was balloonomania. Britain and France collectively went proper-balloon-mental in 1784 and throughout most of the following year. Whenever a trend sweeps a nation, three things inevitably follow in its slipstream: hysteria, exploitative memorabilia sales and people eagerly prepared to satirise it. All three were present in an article that appeared in the Daily Chronicle that year, which reported women wearing miniature inflated balloons levitating above their hats. One newspaper advert in 1784 proclaimed: “AIR BALLOON HATS, either trimmed or plain, or the wires to make them, may be had, in the greatest variety of colours, at Hartshorn and Dyde’s, Wigmore Street, and in the Circus, Bath; where likewise may be seen a large quantity of particularly fine Goat’s-beard Muffs, from two to three guineas.”
Meanwhile a brisk trade was reported in balloon-related paraphernalia: hats, cups, brooches, sketches, snuffboxes, ceramics, medals, cigarette cases, fans, tobacco pipes, garter belts and even bidets all came with a balloon motif. Basically if you wanted to make
something sell in the mid-1780s, paint a balloon on it.
Reports had reached Britain of French ladies wearing balloon-shaped bonnets to commemorate inaugural flights, and several British aristocrats were incomprehensibly keen to be seen supporting the trend - with their heads if not their minds. Because to wear a balloon hat certainly constituted a blind leap into trusting fashion.
The Morning Herald in March 1784 found the target irresistible, fulminating against the fickleness of fashion: “Balloon Hats now adorn the heads of much of the parading impures as can afford them; whilst the more inferior tribe have invented a hat which is, not improperly, called ‘the bastard balloon’! Being a humble imitation of the green-balloon fashions are about their zenith and must soon burst and be forgotten!”
Numerous creative varieties followed. Sadler would certainly have been aware of the fashion, and no doubt accepted it as further endorsement of balloonomania defining his age. In an era desperate for heroes, yet with a paucity of celebrities, it is worth reflecting that Sadler would have been as big in late eighteenth-century Britain as the Beatles ever managed to be two hundred years later. Sadler’s appeal was utterly ubiquitous. A surge in patriotism greeted his achievements, not unlike a flag-draped nation during a successful English team at a football tournament. Union jacks fluttered around anywhere Sadler had consented to ascend.
The balloon hat was also known as the “Lunardi Hat”. Manufactured from a straw base representing the balloon basket (straw being Lunardi’s fuel of choice), draped fabric representing clouds would trail from the side of the hat, cascading down from an elongated brim irregularly topped with added esoteric decoration, often a small spherical balloon. The hat’s popularity soon extended to British shores from France, hence the common presence of the ‘parading impures’ that so riled the Morning Herald’s fashion correspondent.
During the Regency period ladies’ balloon hats were predominantly constructed from silk, felt, ribbon, linen, straw and bad taste. Decorated according to the wearer’s fancy (with lace, feathers, fruit, flowers, foliage, etc.) they were inappropriate for any occasion, as common styles were crowned with a miniature inflated balloon floating above the hat. Oversized berets (tams) were also popular. These could be made of velvet or some other heavy fabric, and trimmed with feathers or jewels. Adding some sort of balloon emblem was considered de rigueur.
***
Deterred by Lunardi’s flamboyantly showbusiness approach, the scientific community did not all rush to embrace balloonomania with the enthusiasm shown by the rest of a nation collectively gripped by all things balloon-related in the last quarter of the century.
There were other dissenters. One notably grumpy refuter of such hype was Prime Minister Horace Walpole. He famously caught sight of a balloon and pronounced it “certainly no bigger than my snuff box” - a remark which questions Walpole’s relationship with perspective: “If stuff is near, it looks bigger - no, Strawberry Hill has not suddenly got smaller whilst you walked further away from it.” Walpole was renowned for being dismissive of aeronauts, branding them “a mere job for getting money from gaping fools”. Upon learning that Lunardi had actively endangered a cat’s wellbeing during his ascent, Walpole menacingly concluded: “Lunardi... has every right to venture his own neck” but, by implication, not that of his feline accomplice.
Whereas many foresaw a more exciting future due to man’s eventual conquering of flight, Walpole was mainly concerned that the first people to put the new technology to use would be smugglers. Walpole speculated in a letter to a friend in December 1784: “This enormous London, that must have some occupation, is most innocently amused with those philosophic playthings, air-balloons. But, as half of a million people that impassion themselves for any object are always more childish than children, the good souls of London are much fonder of the aeronauts than of the toys themselves. Lunardi, the Neapolitan secretary, is said to have bought three or four thousand pounds in the stocks, by exhibiting his person, his balloon, and his dog and cat, at the Pantheon, for a shilling each visitor. Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a Frenchman, is his rival, and I expect that they will soon have an air-fight in the clouds, like a stork and a kite.”
Blanchard was equally detrimental to ballooning’s early image. He claimed in a later London flight to have accomplished his pre-flight boast of landing on the same spot as his launch-site - thus demonstrating hitherto unseen piloting skills. In reality, he had hired two horsemen to tow his balloon back to the starting point from a landing achieved several miles away. Subsequently an unimpressed mob destroyed his newly opened “London School of Ballooning” and he hopped back across the Channel, where the King of France had equipped him with a life-long pension.
Writing to a friend, Walpole is distracted by seeing another balloon over London from his Strawberry Hill mansion, and concludes:
I saw the balloon from the common field before the window of my round tower. It appeared about a third of the size of the moon, or less, when setting, something above the tops of the trees on the level horizon. It was then descending; and after rising and declining a little, it sunk slowly behind the trees. But I chiefly amused myself with ideas of the change that would be made in the world by the substitution of balloons for ships. I supposed our seaports to become deserted villages; and Salisbury Plain, Newmarket Heath and The Downs, arising into dockyards for aerial vessels. In these days Old Sarum will again be a town, and have houses in it. There will be fights in the air with wind-guns, and bows and arrows; and there will be prodigious increase of land for tillage, especially in France, by breaking up all public roads as useless.
***
Sadler achieved some semblance of balance, like a pendulum swinging from extreme to extreme, between daredevil recklessness and scientific innovation. His proclivity for advertising dates well in advance of his ascensions meant he was utterly exposed to the vagaries of the weather. Taking off in a gale renders a safe landing unlikely. Yet he was a highly skilled pilot. This ability saved not only his own life, but those of his travelling companions. On one occasion, his cargo was MP for Norwich and Secretary for War in Prime Minister Pitt’s cabinet, William Windham (1750-1810), a self-confessed balloon fanatic. Windham later recounted: “From the moment of hearing about balloons I felt in common with anyone of even the smallest imagination the wish of adventuring in one.” Sadler had the expertise, Windham had the money.
5 MAY 1785: MOULSEY HURST
Showing that Sadler’s social status had risen with comparable speed to his balloons, he was now hanging around with new best friend William Windham, prominent Whig and even more prominent wig-wearer. The two planned an ascent together, selecting Surrey as a launch site.
Windham was so convinced of the peril he was about to place himself in when stepping into a balloon gondola that he busied himself on the eve of the flight by making a will and composed a letter, “only to be delivered upon my death”, to Lord George James Cholmondeley. It contained instructions “to leave my suits to my brother Peregrine, my guns to my Uncle Grenville, and the rest of my estate to my mother to dispose of as she sees fit after my death.” The letter was eventually delivered, 25 years later rather than the next day, in 1810 after Windham had died. His in-the-event-of-my-demise correspondence proclaimed his faith as a committed Christian. In fact, Sadler was the one taking more of a risk, placing himself in unnecessary additional danger by ascending with an inexperienced flyer. It did not end at all well.
The pair ascended before a huge throng of spectators from the grounds of Mr. Dodswell’s gardens in Surrey between Sunbury-on-Thames and Kingston at Moulsey Hurst, a location already established as a site for cricket, prize fighting and other mass entertainments for a holidaying or weekending public.
After spending two and half hours filling his balloon with hydrogen, by 9am Sadler was prepared for the launch. Oddly, Windham does not appear to have been identified by the newspapers at the time, nearly all
subsequent reports referring to “Sadler and a gentleman”. Only some days after the flight was Windham identified, when a correspondent from Oxford wrote to the Whitehall Evening Post and identified him as “Honourable Mr Windham, formerly of this University”. Windham had attended University College in the High Street, located only a few doors from Sadler’s café in the same street, so may have encountered him as a young man in Oxford - although social lubricant ensuring frictionless movement between Town and Gown would have been extremely rare then. (It’s still quite rare today.)
The Oxford correspondent confirms that the balloon was large enough to have carried four passengers. Teasingly, however, he doesn’t go on to state categorically that the pair’s intention was to cross the North Sea. The report rather confirms their route over London and Westminster towards Kent - later verified by witnesses - and states that the pair had taken “mathematical instruments” on their voyage. It concludes: “on the utmost danger of being carried into the North Sea the balloon happily met another breeze that landed our adventurers near the North Sea after having travelled nearly 200 miles from whence they took post-chaise and returned to town that evening.”
The Times was keen to point out that “Mr Sadler and the gentleman were provided with proper instruments for philosophical experiments.” At that time the word “philosophical” possessed a sufficiently wide definition to cover the area we would today describe as science - rather than implying that Sadler might have become philosophical and remarked to Windham: “If your lack of skills as a aeronaut ensure we fall into the North Sea and there’s no one around to witness it, would you still emit a sound when I punch you?”
A correspondent reporting for a different newspaper observed that:
Mr Sadler and his companion came down in a field near Rochester where a labouring man was at work. Who was very much alarmed at the balloon. And it was with great difficulty that they could prevail him to lay hold of a rope which they threw him for the purpose of assisting them in their descent which he at last consented to do and held until they alighted but before they could procure a ballast for the balloon pulling rather strong and the man having no great relish for his employment let go his hold when it ascended with great rapidity leaving the aerial travellers behind taking the direct course over the German Ocean.
The Man With His Head in the Clouds Page 10
