Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes – review

Like most human activities, ballooning has sponsored heroes and hucksters and a good deal in between. For every dedicated scientist patiently recording atmospheric pressure and wind speed while shivering at high altitudes, there is a carnival barker with a bevy of pretty girls willing to dangle from a basket or parachute down to earth. It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in a basket: perhaps out of a desire to escape the gravity of this world or to get a preview of the next; perhaps to moralise on the oneness or fragility of the planet, or to see humanity for the small and circumscribed thing that it is; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment. Some must surely have just wanted to make money or cut a figure, or to go higher or further than anyone had gone before.

Then there is a darker narrative and a different set of desires: to drop a bomb on your enemy or to get a look at the disposition of his troops. Richard Holmes makes regular efforts to tell the upbeat story, as one might expect of the author of The Age of Wonder, which devoted one of its chapters to ballooning. But he wisely does not let himself get too carried away on the currents of romantic idealism. Ballooning is finally a technology, and is as such open to all the uses and abuses that we have devised for all our technologies.

In this respect, what is perhaps most striking about ballooning is that its basic mechanics have not advanced much since its heyday in the late 18th and 19th centuries (which is the topic of this book). Hot air, hydrogen and coal gas along with rubberised silk canopies have been supplemented by helium and modern microfibres, but the balloon is still by definition not a "dirigible": it can move up and down but it cannot be steered. The first Channel crossing came in 1785, just two years after what is traditionally taken as the first ascent by the Montgolfier brothers (the same year saw the first major disaster befalling civilians). But the first Atlantic crossing did not happen until 1978, the first Pacific crossing occurred in 1995, and the first non-stop round the world flight came only in 1999. The balloon is an unruly thing, sailing serenely through the air at one moment, plummeting or rising uncontrollably at the next, like the wind and weather on which it depends. It is, strikingly, designed not to be a site of transformational innovation but to remain a place where risks are taken. It once did what no other machine could do, but now all of its tasks except the recreational ones can be performed more safely and efficiently in other ways.

Holmes is not offering a history of either ballooning or its technologies. The Montgolfiers and Vincenzo Lunardi are barely mentioned (perhaps because they feature in The Age of Wonder). What we have instead is a "cluster of balloon stories" drawn from life and fiction, and more from life than from fiction. Some of the footnotes are anecdotal, but the book itself is more than that; Holmes is a distinguished biographer with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around them. He barely mentions money, and when he does, it is often to record the losses, as if to endorse the idealistic or compulsive nature of the enterprise: making a fortune is not what it is all about. Fame, whose rewards are dubious, was certainly a factor, and even disaster could be managed as a means to extend one's reputation, as it was by Félix Nadar after his giant balloon, with 15 paying passengers, narrowly missed a steam train, swept into a tangle of telegraph wires and bounced along the ground for 10 miles before coming to a stop in a clump of trees. No one died, but none escaped uninjured. This was in 1863. At the same time, across the Atlantic, Union armies were assisted in the Virginia campaign by the eight military balloons of the Military Aeronautics Corps, founded by Thaddeus Lowe, sending information about Confederate troop locations down an attached telegraph cable or, when this did not work, dropping handwritten notes over the side of the basket.

Nadar appears again as the figure presiding over the first (albeit small-scale) "civilian airlift" out of Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870-71. Although around a hundred individuals (among them Léon Gambetta) were ferried across the enemy lines, the primary purpose here was communication: millions of letters were sent out of the city by balloon and forwarded on to their destinations after landing in French territory. Return mail came in by carrier pigeon, reduced to microfilm and transcribed by a battery of clerks sitting in front of magic lanterns. By ballooning standards, this operation was a success; of the 67 balloons involved, only five were captured, though some went far afield. One landed in Norway, while another disappeared over the Atlantic horizon off Land's End and was never seen again. Carrier pigeons would still be of use in the first world war; less so the balloon, now vulnerable to attack by aeroplanes. The first primitive dirigible was produced in 1852; there were working airships by the 1880s, and in 1909 Louis Blériot crossed the Channel in a plane.

The siege of Paris generated a proto-military organisation in the manner of a small air force. But the balloon has mostly been associated with individuals, and has functioned as an apparatus for fashioning individuality itself. Much of Holmes's narrative is given over to these larger-than-life personalities. When Jacques Alexandre César Charles went up to 10,000ft in 1783, the experience must have been unimaginable, and his reports were euphoric. But the science got harder as it went higher. Gaston Tissandier was the only one of three to survive the high altitude ascent of the Zénith in 1875. In the early 1860s, James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell made several ascents of over 20,000ft, calmly recording the discolouration of their skin and the onset of oxygen deprivation along with the meteorological information they were primarily seeking. In September 1862 they reached a height of something above 32,000ft – how far above depends on informed conjecture, since Glaisher was insensible and Coxwell too preoccupied with saving their lives to be reading altimeters. Here we are in the narrative zone of the great mountaineers, defying the odds by going higher and higher, some never to return: the many men, so beautiful.

Holmes's last chapter indeed projects its own George Mallory-Captain Scott figure in Solomon Andrée, who combined the already considerable risks of balloon flight with the yet more demanding routines of Arctic exploration. Andrée set out to plant the Swedish flag at the North Pole. He thought he had a dirigible, a balloon that would not only go where he wanted it to go but also come back in one piece. After a first failed expedition, he set out from the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in July, 1897, but the trail ropes, which were the source of his steering technology, immediately detached themselves and fell away. The balloon was never seen again, and the bodies of the three crew members were discovered only in 1930 on White's Island (Kvitøya). Along with the damaged and frozen corpses were journals and intact photographic plates which gave evidence of a 190-mile trek across the ice before the party succumbed to the elements. Thus ended what Holmes calls "the last great romantic balloon expedition of the 19th century".

It is a moving tale, and final evidence that the fantasy of precise navigation and the thrill of being carried along by irresistible forces could not be combined, at least not in the balloon. John Wise dreamed of taming the wind in proposing a high altitude mail service in 1859; his balloon ditched in Lake Ontario and his mailbags washed ashore at Oswego. Claims to precision, of course, would continue to elude the highly dirigible machines that came along later: the precision bombers that flew over England and Germany and that "precisely" destroyed entire cities, and the currently oh-so-precise weaponised drones that are targeting a mixture of intended and unintended persons in Pakistan and Afghanistan today. Unlike the aeronauts of the heroic age, drone pilots take no risks, a fact that will undoubtedly make the subjects of Holmes's book seem all the more glamorous and admirable in their pursuit of knowledge, fame, fortune, military superiority or sheer excitement.