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RICHARD HOLMES
Falling Upwards
How We Took to the Air
To Eleanor Tremain and John Lightbody
with love and balloons
Contents
9. Mariners of the Upper Atmosphere
Voices Overhead
‘A Cloud in a paper bag’
JOSEPH MONTGOLFIER, 1782
‘Someone asked me – what’s the use of a balloon?
I replied – what’s the use of a new-born baby’
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1783
‘Practical flying we may leave to our rivals the French.
Theoretical flying we may claim for ourselves’
SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1784
‘I would make it death for a man to be convicted of flying, the moment he could be caught’
WILLIAM COWPER, 1794
‘O Thou who plumed with strong desire
Would float above the Earth – beware!
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire –
Night is coming!’
P.B. SHELLEY, 1818
‘There’s something in a flying horse,
There’s something in a huge balloon’
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1819
‘No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species, unless he has been up in an air-balloon’
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON, 1825
‘Your balloon voyage so occupied my mind that I dreamt of it!’
J.M.W. TURNER, 1836
‘Beautiful invention, mounting heavenward – so beautifully, so unguidably! Emblem of our Age, of Hope itself’
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1837
‘How should I manage all my business if I were obliged to marry – I never should know French, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon’
CHARLES DARWIN, 1838
‘To look down upon the whole of London as the birds of the air look down upon it, and see it dwindled into a mere rubbish heap’
HENRY MAYHEW, 1852
‘Chance people on the bridges peering over the parapets, into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in misty clouds’
CHARLES DICKENS, 1852
‘The basket was about two feet high, four feet long … to me it seemed fragile indeed … the gaps in the wicker work in the sides and the bottom seemed immense and the further we receded from the earth, the larger they seemed to become’
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER, 1862
‘Poetry has described some famous descents into the subterranean world … But we have just had an ascent such as the world has never heard of or dreamed of’
THE TIMES, 1863
‘Next to the climbers of the Alpine Club, in order of utter uselessness are the people who go up in balloons, and who come down to tell us of the temperature, the air-currents, the shape of the clouds, and amount of atmospheric pressure in a region where nobody wants to go, nor has the slightest interest to hear about’
BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE, October 1864
‘Dear Nadar, I must beg you to renounce these terrible balloon-antics!’
GEORGE SAND, 1865
‘I am an Ancient Mariner of the Upper Atmosphere’
CHARLES GREEN, 1868
‘Paris is surrounded, blockaded, blotted out from the rest of the world! – and yet by means of a simple balloon, a mere bubble of air, Paris is back in communication with the rest of the world!’
VICTOR HUGO, 1870
‘It has already done for us that which no other power ever accomplished: it has gratified the desire natural to us all to view the earth in a new aspect’
JAMES GLAISHER, 1872
‘The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared’