The Early History of Hot Air Ballooning

In man’s quest to become airborne, the first victories were won with balloons, and 1783 was the year of miracles.

As with the invention of printing, the Chinese really were the prime movers, although no one in Europe knew that until much later. As early as the 3rd Century AD, the Chinese were using small paper balloons with suspended fire sources, known as Kongming lanterns, for both festive and military signaling purposes. (Of course, the entire history of man in the air would continue to have a strong military component.)

European priests were a later group of innovators. In the late 17th Century, the Italian Jesuit, Francesco Lana, theorized that a “flying boat” could be lifted by spheres of copper foil that had been vacuumized. This was not quite practical, but Lana was on the right track in thinking about vessels rising in air by being lighter than air. He was presciently worried about the military implications of his concept: “Iron weights, fireballs and bombs could be hurled from a great height.”

The Brazilian priest Bartolomeu de Gusmao demonstrated a small model hot-air balloon for King John V of Portugal and his court on August 9, 1709. But knowledge of this demonstration was not widely disseminated outside the Portuguese-speaking world.

With the 1766 recognition by British scientist Henry Cavendish of hydrogen as a gaseous element only 1/10 as heavy as air, other scientists such as the Scotsman Joseph Black and the Frenchman Jacques Charles (1746-1823) inferred that a lighter-than-air hydrogen-filled balloon would probably fly.

Charles enlisted the aid of a pair of engineering brothers, Anne-Jean Robert (1758-1820) and Nicolas-Louis Robert (1760-1820), to help him build such a balloon. Their balloons would be made of silk varnished with liquid rubber.

But Les Freres Robert were the not the only brothers in on this chase. Enter the Montgolfiers, Joseph-Michel (1740-1810) and Jacques-Etienne (1745-1899). When you consider the later Wright Brothers, the prominence of brother acts in the history of aviation remains a curious fact!

Like the Wrights, the Montgolfiers were tinkerers and enthusiasts; compared to the Charles-Robert team, their command of the science involved was a little on the sketchy side. They figured out from observation that heated air rises, but thought that the smoke from the necessary fires was creating a special substance they brand-consciously dubbed “Mongolfier Gas.” The fact that heated air was lighter than unheated air initially escaped them.

The two teams, one exploring the possibilities of hydrogen balloons and the other hot-air balloons, both kept at their work intensely in the same time-frame. This pattern would be repeated with developments in heavier-than-air flight a century later; the “first to…” designation for many of those forward leaps is still intensely disputed, and even the Wrights’ “first to fly in a controlled, manned airplane” claim does not escape entirely without challengers. Many inventors around the world were working furiously on aviation in 1903 (and for the half-century before that).

Fortunately for historians though, the progress of ballooning in 1783 is well-documented and dated, and it was all happening in France.

The Montgolfiers had been born into and continued to work in the paper manufacturing industry, so they constructed their balloons of paper encased in sackcloth - although given the heating involved, this seems like a bad idea to us. Their balloons did not yet have portable, attached heaters; they were launched from on top of fiery pits.

Working in obscurity in Annonay in Southeast France, the Montgolfiers conducted experiments from late 1782 on, and felt ready to give a public demonstration in the Annonay town square on June 4, 1783. The balloon successfully rose to a height of about 6,000 feet, creating a sensation.

King Louis XVI got wind of this development and summoned the brothers to Paris, although only the slick Etienne went; Joseph was geeky and socially awkward.

Jacques Charles and the Roberts were also galvanized by the news of the Annonay launch, especially as they mistakenly believed that the Montgolfiers were employing their beloved hydrogen. They got a move on to launch their own balloon.

It was only a pipsqueak compared to the Mongolfiers’ June balloon (35 cubic meters as compared to 790 cubic meters). And it was confoundedly difficult to generate even that much hydrogen; it took four days of pouring sulfuric acid onto scrap iron, and feeding the resulting gas by lead pipes into the balloon (sort of the world’s biggest chem-lab experiment).

To raise the necessary money and the public’s awareness level, Jacques Charles’ good friend, geologist Bathelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, spearheaded a subscription effort – the first Kickstarter campaign? – which allowed contributors to get a close-up view of the launch action. Benjamin Franklin, then in France as ambassador from the brand-new United States, was among the subscribers.

The crowd got much larger than Saint-Fond bargained, however, as the days of filling the balloon wore on and progress reports were issued to the eager would-be spectators. It became clear that the original launch location in the Place des Victoires would be inadequate, so the balloon was moved four kilometers away to the Champ de Mars, where an assembly of 400,000 watched the balloon ascend on August 27.

It traveled quite a ways, landing 21 kilometers distant in the small village of Gonesse. In terms of 18th Century publicity, that might as well have been a thousand miles, because the local peasants had no idea what this flying contraption was and interpreted it as some kind of threatening monster – much as some Japanese in the 1850s thought that Commodore Perry’s black steamships were “giant dragons.” The Gonesse residents attacked the balloon with rocks, pitchforks, and knives, and finally carried off the corpse.

Now there was ballooning excitement every few weeks. The next major development came on September 19, when the Montgolfiers sent the first animals skyward in a basket attached to the largest balloon yet (1,060 cubic meters) – a duck, a rooster, and a sheep named Mont-au-ciel (“climb to the sky”), the unsung predecessors of Laika the Space Dog who orbited the earth for the Soviet Union in 1957. All three animals survived the eight-minute flight, although the rooster was a little roughed up; apparently the inconsiderate sheep sat on him.

Clearly, sending people up was the next step. But the danger! – perhaps, King Louis XVI thought, the first men in the sky should be condemned criminals, just in case? The scientist and Montgolfier associate Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier argued otherwise; to be the first fliers was too great an historic honor to be awarded to mere miscreants.

And in fact, Pilatre de Rozier got the glory. After experiments with tethered human flight throughout October, he and the Marquis Francoise d’Arlandes made the first free manned balloon flight on November 21, traveling five to ten miles (accounts vary) in 25 minutes. They landed in a vineyard amidst another group of upset peasants, but were ready with champagne to offer to them; bubbly and balloons were associated ever after.

Pilatre de Rozier was responsible for another, less desirable flight milestone in 1785, when a balloon he was attempting to pilot across the English Channel blew up, making him and his co-pilot the first aeronautical casualties.

Not to be outdone by the Montgolfiers, Jacques Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert made the first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon on December 1. To show that the rivalry was a friendly one, Joseph Mongolfier was invited to release a tiny “pilot balloon” before the main balloon, to help Charles see which way the wind was blowing. 

Charles and Robert stayed aloft for two hours, went to a height of 550 meters, and traveled some 30 miles, once again landing in a field. Although it was getting dark, and the hydrogen was running low, Charles was in such good spirits that he insisted on going up again briefly by himself.

It was the last time he ever flew, for the experience rattled him. He went higher than anyone had ever done, about 3,000 meters, felt intense ear pain, and in a bit of a panic, vented gas and tossed ballast, landing safely but quite disoriented.

The last of these significant early flights happened on January 19, 1784, when the Montgolfiers sent up a 2,000 cubic meter monster balloon with seven people in the basket. One of them was unanticipated, a young man named Fontaine who jumped in at the last minute, becoming the first aerial stowaway.

Ballooning was tried in every country within a short period of years after that. It only remains to say – you saw this coming – that the first military use of the new balloons came during the Napoleonic Wars in 1794. War has never been out of the air since.        

Commonplace Book: Cornwall

Cornwall seems to have been custom built for secrecy. The county is filled with tiny lanes enclosed by high hedgerows so thick with age and overgrowth they seem as much part of the natural landscape as the cliff tops, steep village streets down which nothing wider than a bicycle can pass with comfort, unexpected coves appearing and disappearing behind another few miles of switchback road, twisting river mouths and thickly wooded hillsides, glimpses of water vanishing behind ambiguous headlands, similar-sounding place names, and always that dreamlike sense of having passed this way a little time before. It is that confusion, the sense of having stumbled across a half-discovered land, which forms so much of Cornwall's attraction. You could stay in the same place every summer for twenty years and still get lost every time. The fishing village at the bottom of a near-vertical hillside with its bath-sized cove, its perfect pub and its peeling red phone box might be there one weekend but have vanished by the next; the patch of beach on which you built a fire and cooked an impromptu meal might seem vivid in memory but no longer exists in fact. Walk along the same stretch of headland and somehow the path leads you off to a different place on each revisitation. Sail up one of the inlets and stare round you as the sun goes down; whatever you see will be gone by the time you return. Landmarks get nearer or further, headlands appear or repeat; expected signs refuse to materialize. Cornwall is England's mirage, parts of it always vanishing before your eyes. From land and sea, it is a cartographer's nightmare and a wrecker's dream - a place that could not possibly have been better designed for concealment. - Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers 

Growth (Troy S. Gamble)

Peculiar case, this one. Despite some bizarrely off-the-point Amazon reviews that make it sound like an earnest novel about personal growth, it is actually an archly satiric novel about (mostly) economic growth. The style is like a Britishized distillation of the opening line of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49:

One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

The book is also Pynchon-esque in that it takes place in a world that is not quite the real world; it's just a little too absurd and improbable. Thus, a key skein of the plot (at least for a while, until the author seems to forget about it) has to do with the possible purchase of a piece of real estate that would definitely never be for sale in our reality.

This is difficult fictional territory to work successfully, and it cannot be said that debut novelist Troy S. Gamble really succeeds. There are bright spots, such as funny bits of observation:

This man was the epitome of life as it should be, she thought...She wanted her life to be like that: walking a dog, flying her own jet to her own Caribbean island, helping people across the street, reading a good book while listening to the friendly chat of her partner on the phone discussing a loan to some small Eastern European country in exchange for a special tax arrangement approved in the local parliament. Apparently, it wasn't possible, not for long.

Or encapsulations of the novel's financial themes:

"The new rich usually have a small part of their worth in liquidity, some fraction of a percent. Everything else is loans, goodwill and market capitalization - and it is not real money, it's just funny numbers to juggle and brag about. Do you know how many people who buy or rent high-end property are unable to pay their utility bills?"
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"Open your laptop, add some zeroes to a random digit, call it money."

But the drags on the (long) narrative are many. It proceeds by a series of set-pieces, some of which are passably amusing, others obviously derivative - a masked-orgy sequence is straight out of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and suffers by the comparison. The plot frequently descends into mere silliness (the aforementioned real estate sub-plot, for example). The protagonist, failed corporate manager and would-be poet Peter Copeland, is an annoying nitwit; in fact, many of the characters are annoying nitwits. Despite the book's length, a number of plot-lines are left dangling and unresolved, and the key one that is resolved achieves its denouement through the arrival of a new set of characters out of nowhere. This may be intended as a comment on life's essential randomness, but it come across as novelistically inept.

In short, an interesting try at a thematically timely literary performance, with glints of real talent, but I could not easily recommend it.

Francis Jammes: On the Life & Work of a Modern Master (Kathryn Nuernberger / Bruce Whiteman, editors)

This tribute volume to the turn-of-the-20^th-Century rural poet Francis Jammes (1868-1938) is self-recommending to those interested in French literature of the period (or in the Pays Basque where the writer lived), and is perhaps most valuable for the Introduction and six essays that place Jammes in context and argue for his importance.

Much of this critical writing discusses Jammes’ relation to Modernism, which looks very slight from this distance (although it was also debated when he was alive). Simplicity is indeed a hallmark of one type of Modernism which we can associate with William Carlos Williams as an exemplar. Jammes does not seem so radically simple as Williams, partly because, as critic Christopher Howell points out, he relies a lot on conventional Romantic phraseology, as Williams certainly did not. The most apt comparison for Jammes in English-language poetry might actually be Thomas Hardy, although Jammes’ forms are freer.

Howell eventually absolves Jammes of conventionality on the grounds that he means his clichés; I’m not sure it’s a convincing argument. The danger with a simple poet is shading into the simplistic, and the language which Howell quotes, and which is on display elsewhere in this volume, does sometimes seem simplistic.

Kathryn Neuernberger, one of the book’s editors, makes a better case for the tougher, sharper, more acutely observant Jammes that emerges in the late Four Books of Quatrains, written in the poet’s 50s.

I was very glad to read this volume, but as a vehicle for getting to know Jammes better, it fails in two signal ways, both related to the presentation of his writing. The rather short selection of his poetry, offered in translations by different hands, does not include the original French on facing pages. In 2015, this is practically a deal-breaker. All translated volumes of poetry in the major European languages (at least) ought to contain the original texts. All it takes is a smattering of the original language (true of my French!) to be able to discern much better what the translators are up to.

The second failing is that the selection gives a very limited impression of Jammes’ writing. He was voluminous in prose as well as poetry, but apart from a three-page “Literary Manifesto,” none of his prose is here. Probably including some of it would have entailed commissioning and paying for new translations that would have been beyond the book’s budget; but without a fair array of Jammes’ output, which included fiction, memoir, and drama as well as lyric poetry, the volume falls short of representing him in the most rounded way. 

The Party's Over

Alas, I am pulling out of the reviewing game. As many of you may have become aware, Amazon is suing more than 1,000 reviewers - and although yes, they are fake reviewers and I am an honest one, still, the climate for reviewing just got very, very chilled. Amazon is big guns and can obliterate small fry, and they also own Goodreads, IMDB, and probably other platforms I'm not even aware of. Reviewers at Yelp have also been sued for libel, and a negative reviewer of an academic book in France was sued for defamation a while back. It is getting crazy out there.

The reviewers who are being sued by Amazon are associated with the Fiverr website. I do writing-for-pay through Fiverr, too, although not reviews. I write articles and blog posts, mainly on business-related topics.

Although I will leave my existing content up wherever it is, I vow here and now NEVER to again post content or links to content at ANY Amazon-owned website, including Amazon itself, Goodreads, and IMDB. The corpocracy has really gone far enough for me. 

I will complete some reviews for books I have already finished, hard copies that have been sent to me, and content that I have actively solicited. However, the reviews will ONLY be posted at this site. Nowhere else: I will not even post links back to this site. 

Eventually, the site will just fade out. 

It is a very dangerous world.

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Tobias Smollett)

I have said it before and I'll say it again: I am never disappointed when I read a classic. Always there is at least historical interest to be gotten out of them, and usually a great deal more than that.

Despite a good grounding in 18th Century British fiction, I had somehow failed to explore the works of Tobias Smollett up until now, so when I spotted the Heron Books hardcover reprint of Smollett's final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, on a sale table at one of the weekend book fairs here in Queretaro, naturally I snapped it up. (The frontispiece illustration below is from a different edition of approximately the same vintage, the Folio Society printing of 1955.)

Humphry Clinker draws in genial fashion on several literary traditions - the travelogue, the picaresque, and the epistolary novel.

The story follows the peregrinations of a Welsh squire, Matthew Bramble of Brambleton Hall, his husband-hunting sister Tabitha, his nephew and niece Jeremy and Lydia Melford, and their servants and occasional fellow-travelers, as they make their way in literally roundabout fashion through various spa towns - Bath, Harrogate, Scarborough - and prominent cities - Gloucester, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow - across the whole Island of Britain. This positions the book in the company of such non-fictional specimens as Daniel Defoe's A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain.

Smollett wrote an account of his own travels in France and Italy just a few years before Clinker, and apparently was an even more dyspeptic chronicler than his own Matt. Bramble, who may be taken as a somewhat autobiographical portrait. Bramble finds travel a great fuss and bother, but is willing to undertake it for the possibly salutary effects on his health - he suffers from gout - and the edification of his younger relations.

As an epistolary novel, Humphry Clinker is perhaps unusual for highlighting letters by men - in most novels of this kind, the women are the more enthusiastic correspondents. By my count, there are 27 letters by Bramble here; 28 by Jery Melford; and a total of 28 by four others - Tabitha, Lydia, Tabitha's scattered servant Winifred Jenkins, and Lydia's now-you-see-him-now-you-don't suitor Wilson (who gets but a single brief missive). The letters by Matt. Bramble and Jery Melford are epically longer than those by the others, which together can't take up more than 15% or so of the word-count of the novel. The novel belongs to the two men.

Matt. Bramble's letters to his friend Dr. Lewis are a combination of the philosophical and the somewhat petulant; Jery Melford's letters to his fellow Oxonian Watkin Phillips are observant, amused, and largely carry the thread of the narrative.

Matthew characterizes his nephew as a "pert jackanapes, full of college-petulance and self-conceit; proud as a German count, and as hot and hasty as a Welch mountaineer." Jery is a splendid depiction of a post-collegian male who would seem at home in any era, but oddly perhaps, he is not especially lusty. Oh, he makes the occasional admiring comment about this or that woman. But he is skeptical about the "permanence" of female charms, and to that extent resistant of them. Although Humphry Clinker is full of love and lust - all the women are hot for beaux in one way or another - it is decidedly not a tale of Jery Melford's love-life.

And what, you may wonder, of Humphry Clinker himself? He does not, surprisingly, figure very largely in the book named for him. He comes on the scene late, insinuates himself into the family's graces as a manservant for Squire Bramble, has a few misadventures, writes no letters, and makes a pretty minor character overall.

So why is this novel titled The Expedition of Humphry Clinker? It may have to do with the picaresque element, which is the weakest of the major strands here. A picaro is a rogue who lives by his wits. Humphry Clinker is lower-class and marginally roguish, with a penchant for getting into scrapes - but is also very religious. Nothing in "his" novel is related from anything close to his POV, which would ordinarily be standard in a picaresque narrative. So I am afraid he is a half-picaro at best - but apparently just enough of one to score a title. Frankly, I would have named the novel something else.

No matter ultimately, for this is a joyous book despite all of Matt. Bramble's grousing. It has high spirits for days. The late-arriving character who stands out is not actually Clinker, but the Scotsman Lieutenant Lismahago, who once spent an extended period with a Native American tribe, thereby securing a "colorful" status for all time, and who although interesting to talk to is confoundedly contradictory of whatever position one might choose to take. Matt. Bramble can't quite decide whether he likes this fellow or not, but sister Tabitha has no such qualms - he is an available male of appropriate age and social class, and she moves in for the kill.

All resolves nicely, as is appropriate for a comedy - although one must admit that the long-term prospects for a couple of the couplings do not look all that bright.

Closer to God (dir. Billy Senese)

Indie films that try to behave commercially run the risk of falling between two stools, and Billy Senese's cloning thriller Closer to God is a classic example of this. It starts with a team of unglamorous scientists - shades of The Andromeda Strain (1971) - guiding the birth of a human clone, and although crucial questions are left unanswered (such as, where's the funding for all this coming from?), the widescreen visual style is controlled enough to suggest that the movie might just be interested in tackling an explosive and controversial subject in a serious manner.

Vain hope. It never attains the seriousness of The Andromeda Strain, even, let alone its obvious forebear, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Naming the chief scientist "Victor" was a cute, bad idea, although the character is played well by Jeremy Childs. Our Dr. Victor, alas for him and even more so for the film, is hiding the existence of some missteps on his scientific trail that will return to haunt everyone concerned in full-blown horror-movie fashion. The protestors who rise up against the scientists for dabbling in cloning in the first place, because of concerns about dangers in execution / bioethics issues /researcher hubris (take your pick), have no idea, really.

Since Closer to God abandons any pretenses to thoughtfulness or subtlety early on, it is fair to say that it was designed not as a potential succès d'estime but as a "calling card" - a chance to show the Big Money Boys that a director can deliver the Hollywood goods on a small budget. Needless to say, I don't find that as worthy a goal as making a genuinely interesting film, and wanting to continue to do so. To take one example, if a Rian Johnson "graduates" from Brick to Looper to (heaven help us) Star Wars: Episode VIII, the quality going down as his paychecks go up, that is more of interest to his accountant than to film lovers.

But there are good calling cards and bad calling cards, and if Closer to God really worked as a genre piece, I'd be happy to point that out. It doesn't, though. I can't say how it doesn't without giving away too much plot, but the third-act borrowings will be pretty obvious to a seasoned movie buff. The proceedings never become boring, and the film remains watchable till the end, but that is kind of low praise. A calling-card-type film should knock your socks off in the manner of Steven Spielberg's Duel. Otherwise, why bother?