Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air Hardback - 2013

Excerpt

1
My own flying dream began at a village fete in Norfolk. I was four years old. My uncle, a tall and usually silent RAF pilot, had bought a red party balloon from a charity stall, and tied it to the top button of my aertex shirt. This was my first balloon, and it seemed to have a mind of its own. It was inflated with helium, which is a gas four times lighter than air, though I did not understand this at the time. It pulled mysteriously and insistently at my button. ‘Maybe you will fly,’ my uncle remarked. He led me up a grassy bank so we could look over the whole fete. Below me stretched the little tents, the stalls, the show ring with its bales of straw and small dancing horses. Above me bobbed the big red balloon, gleaming and beautiful, blotting out the sun. It bounced off the top of my head, making a strange springy sound, full of distance. It tugged me impatiently towards the sky, and I began to feel unsteady on my feet. I felt that I was falling – upwards. Then my uncle let go of my hand, and my dream began.
 
2
Throughout history, dreamlike stories and romantic adventures have always attached themselves to balloons. Some are factual, some are pure fantasy, many (the most interesting) are a provoking mixture of the two. But some kind of narrative basket always seems to come tantalisingly suspended beneath them. Show me a balloon and I’ll show you a story; quite often a tall one. And very frequently it is a story of courage in the face of imminent catastrophe.
 
What’s more, all balloon flights are naturally three-act dramas. The First Act is the launch: the human drama of plans, hopes, expectations. The Second Act is the flight itself: the realities, the visions, the possible discoveries. The Final Act is the landing, the least predictable, most perilous part of any ascent, which may bring triumph or disaster or (quite often) farce. The ultimate nature of any particular balloon ascent – a pastoral, a tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama, even a sitcom – is never clear until the balloon is safely back on earth. Sometimes it is not clear even then.
 
Even the well-known fable of the Cretan engineer Daedalus and his young son Icarus, so oft en retold as the Genesis myth of flying, is curiously ambiguous in its outcome. It appears originally in Book VIII of Ovid’s long poem Metamorphoses, ‘The Transformations’, completed two thousand years ago, around 8 A.D. Having constructed wings for both of them, Daedalus and son launch into the empyrean together, but famously the impetuous Icarus flies too high; the wax joints of his feathered wings melt ‘in the scorching heat of the sun’, and he tumbles down into the sea. Yet this primal legend of flight is more complex than it might appear.
 
It is often forgotten that in the same Book VIII of Ovid’s poem, Daedalus also has a twelve-year-old nephew (the son of his sister) called Perdix. Perdix is a brilliant and precocious child inventor, loved by all in Crete. But Daedalus, in a crazed fit of grief and jealousy after the death of Icarus, hurls Perdix ‘headlong down from the sacred hill of Minerva’. Yet unlike Icarus, Perdix does not crash to earth and die. Instead, he takes to the air and flies with divine aid: ‘Pallas Athene, the goddess who fosters all talent in art and craft, caught him and turned him, still in midair, to a fluttering bird and covered his body with feathers, so the strength of his quick intelligence sprang into his wings and feet.’ He becomes Perdix, the partridge (perdrix in French), a child who has indeed learned to fly successfully – although unlike Icarus he always remains close to the ground, ‘and does not build his nest in mountain crags’.
 
What may happen while actually aloft is equally mysterious. Balloons have always given a remarkable bird’s-eye or angel’s-eye view of the world. They are unusual instruments of contemplation, and even speculation. They provide unexpected visions of the earth beneath. To the earliest aeronauts they displayed great natural features like rivers, mountains, forests, lakes, waterfalls, and even polar regions, in an utterly new light. But they also showed human features: the growth of the new industrial cities, the speed and violence of modern warfare, or the expansion of imperial exploration.
 
Long before the arrival of the aeroplane in the twentieth century, balloons gave the first physical glimpse of a planetary overview. Balloons contributed to the sciences and the arts that first suggested that we are all guests aboard a unified, living world. The nature of the upper air, the forecasting of weather, the evolutions of geology, the development of international communications, the power of propaganda, the creations of science fiction, even the development of extra-terrestrial travel itself, are an integral part of balloon history.
 
But there are also stranger, existential elements, far less easy to define. The mental release, the physical heart-lift, the calm perilous delight of ballooning – an early aeronaut described it as ‘hilarity’ – is an absolute revelation, but one not easily or convincingly described. I have tried to capture its spirit indirectly, by tying together this cluster of true balloon stories and colourful tales, from the vast ‘history and lore of aerostation’, in the hope that they will bear us aloft for a little while.
 
While airborne, they may also provide a new perspective. The vulnerable globe of balloon fabric is itself symbolically related to the vulnerable globe of the whole earth. There is some haunting analogy between the silken skin of a balloon, the thin ‘onion skin’ of safety, and the thin atmospheric skin of our whole, beautiful planet as it floats in space. This thin breathable layer of air is not much more than seven miles thick – as balloonists were the first to discover. In every way, balloons make you catch your breath.

Media reviews

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)**
**Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2013**
**The New Republic Best Books of 2013**

“Holmes has written a book that is as compulsively digestible as the Internet, and yet it is rounder and warmer, and packed with more facts and obscure stories than you would learn if you combed the Web for months. Holmes’s writing is a carnival of historical delights; at every turn there is a surprise, all adding up to a whole…. ‘Falling Upwards’ sneaks the trajectory of mankind into under three hundred and fifty pages, which you can read in short dashes. You may not notice it at the time, but what he is doing is changing the game.” —Rachel Syme, The New Yorker

“…the book that gave me the most unadulterated delight this year was nonfiction, Richard Holmes’s Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. The book is nominally a history of the hot air balloon, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a history of hope and fantasy—and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight.” —Chloe Schama, The New Republic, Best Books of 2013

“Out of an ostensibly placid, dreamy activity, hot air ballooning, Holmes conjures an extraordinarily vivid, violent, thrilling history, full of bizarre personalities, narrow escapes and fatal plunges. A peerless prose artist, infectiously curious, Holmes revives such forgotten heroes as Sophie Blanchard, Napoleon’s official aeronaut, and James Glaisher, who in 1862 rode a balloon to 29,000 feet without oxygen in the name of science, and Thaddeus Lowe, who flew over Civil War battlefields, doing aerial reconnaissance for the Union” —Time Magazine, Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the 2013

“A book as delightful as it is unexpected, one that is a testament to the sheer pleasures of writing about what you know, about what excites you and what gives you joy. And what more joyous a topic than the hilarious insanities of ‘Falling upwards’!.... Richard Holmes’s extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment, a book that will linger and last, as it floats ever upward in the mind.” —Simon Winchester, The Wall Street Journal

“No writer alive and working in English today writes better about the past than Holmes….The stories themselves are remarkable.” —Paul Elie, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Throughout his book, Holmes’ love for the balloon (a ‘mixture of power and fragility in constant flux’ is his description for it) is obvious. It’s a fine addition to his already extraordinary oeuvre.” —Mark Gamin, Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“British biographer Holmes’ passion for the topic comes through in this rich and often entertaining chronicle of intrepid vertical explorers who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives lifting human flight out of the realm of mythology and into the air.” —Braenna Draxler, Discover
 
“Holmes is a charming and impassioned guide…his prose often reaches a moving pitch.” —Tom Beer, Newsday

“An unconventional history of ballooning, this quirky, endearing, and enticing collection melds the spirit of discovery with chemistry, physics, engineering, and the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly

“Gripping…Meticulous history illuminated and animated by personal passion, carried aloft by volant prose.” —Kirkus  

“In the same month that Julian Barnes published Levels of Life, with its melancholy meditations on balloon flight, Richard Holmes presents a full-blown, lyrical history of the same subject, investigating the strangeness, detachment and powerful romance of ‘falling upwards’ into a seemingly alien and uninhabitable element. Holmes lovingly charts a course from the Montgolfier brothers’ first hydrogen-fuelled flights in the 1780s to the use of balloons by fugitive East Germans in the 1970s and the latest forays by polar explorer David Hempleman-Adams, a history full of awe and inefficiency…Holmes is a truly masterly storyteller .” —London Evening Standard

“Ballooning was among the numerous bold scientific adventures outlined in Holmes’s multi-award-winning best seller, The Age of Wonder. Here Holmes details its history and consequences, starting in the late 1700s and proceeding to the seven-mile-high flights of James Glaisher, FRS, which launched the new science of meteorology.” —Library Journal

“(Holmes) has a rare and infectious capacity for wonderment…dazzling…I felt I was flying—with the sensations of hilarity, ecstasy and terror that are rightly provoked by our escape from gravity…while I was reading Holmes’s heady, swoopingly, aerodynamic book.” —The Observer
 
“Richard Holmes’s captivating and surely definitive history of the madness of pre-Wright brothers ballooning.” —The Times
 
“This is a book in which the delight the author clearly took in researching and writing it carries over to the reader…puckish is its pleasure in its details and in its gusts of digression…he has a lovely wit and ease of address…above all what Holmes teases out…is the very interesting idea that ballooning gave us, quite literally, a different point of view….it offers a wholly novel experience of sublimity…This exhilarating book, wonderfully written, generously illustrated and beautifully published, captures all that and more.” —The Spectator
 
“In this charming, witty and insightful account of windblown ideas and adventures Holmes succeeds neatly in matching his form to his subject.” —Sunday Telegraph
 
“It is a tragic tale, punctuated with ghastly accidents, but thanks to Holmes’s enthusiasm and eager curiosity it remains valiantly airborne.” —Sunday Times
 
“enthralling, picaresque history…Holmes cuts his thrilling set-pieces with haunting images…Appropriately his prose is lighter than air elegantly traversing aviators and eras. It means that as his balloonists embark on journeys full of danger and wonder the reader is suspended in the basket alongside them.” —Financial Times
 
“Endlessly exhilarating…FALLING UPWARDS is packed full of swashbuckling stories, as well as fascinating historical accounts of the use of balloons…It is also a singularly beautiful book, wonderfully designed and illustrated and quite clearly a product of love.” —Mail on Sunday
 
“his enthusiasm is one of the book’s many pleasures…it is hard not to discern something similarly joyous in this second-hand account (of ballooning narratives)…a spirited work.” —The Economist
 
“(Richard Holmes’s) wonderful history of the early years of ballooning.” —Daily Telegraph
 
“Beautifully written and lovingly researched.” —Country Life
 
“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…the aeronauts of the heroic age …seem glamorous and admirable in their pursuit of knowledge, fame, fortune, military superiority and sheer excitement.” —The Guardian

“Full of surprises….a book to seek out.” —Toby Lester, American Scholar Review
 
“The human drama…is marvelously handled. Holmes is an astute biographer, and has already shown with The Age of Wonder…that he can write about multiple subjects just as well as he can about an individual….He has made a subtle and captivating whole of this series of aerial adventures.” —Lily Ford, TLS