The Balloon That Wouldn't Come Down

"I could not see the hands of the watch, nor the fine divisions on any instrument..."

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity and wonder - and today, its seventh season begins!

Best hold onto your hat for this one.

(If you’re reading this in email, click on the Article Voiceover button to open up the Web version & listen to me narrating this one with my very own cakehole.)

For many of my teenage years, I had a recurring dream that I was trapped on a runaway train.

You can put a lot of this down to over-excited hormones, growing up in a rural corner of Yorkshire I was struggling to escape from, not quite knowing what I wanted to do with my life, or the side-effects of my chemical addiction to Swizzels Orange and Cherry Double Dip Sherbet.

But the weirdest thing about this dream was how much I enjoyed it. It wasn’t a train that was heading for a distant cliff or a brick wall - it was just going faster and faster, and I was cheering it on. Come on! How much more have you got? Let’s gooooo!

Most people’s runaway-train dreams are powered by anxiety. I think in my case it might have been megalomania. (Or sherbet.)

Instead, the only dream that made me anxious was about flying. Not in the human-engineered sense, but the way birds do, by flapping my arms.

The flying part of it was fantastic and I loved every minute of it - right up to the point I found I couldn’t get down again. No matter how hard I flapped, I couldn’t fight my way down to ground level, as if I was attempting to walk into a gale.

So I just kept getting pushed upwards, through the clouds, then above them, with the sky above me turning blacker and blacker…

That one made me wake up in a cold sweat.

So it was with a certain amount of horrified fascination that I recently learned the story of two English balloonists in 1862 who found they couldn’t stop going upwards.

It’s just before two on an afternoon in early September, and professional aeronaut Henry Tracey Coxwell has just discovered something that’s turned his blood cold.

The balloon he’s riding in with meteorologist James Glaisher has developed a serious fault. As it rose above the countryside around Wolverhampton, it’s developed a slow but inexorable spin - and Henry’s just discovered this has tangled up the release-valve line, the duo’s only way of venting enough gas from the balloon to trigger a descent.

Around them, the sky is turning a deeper blue. The temperature has fallen below freezing, and every surface is becoming slippery with ice. They’re past 8,000 metres high (26,246 feet) - the altitude which mountaineers call ‘The Death Zone’, because of the catastrophic effect it can have upon the unprotected human body.

Neither aeronaut has supplementary oxygen, an innovation that won’t make an appearance for another decade. Coxwell has already been “panting for breath” for the last ten minutes, and Glaisher’s vision is now dimming (“I could not see the fine column of the mercury in the wet-bulb thermometer; nor the hands of the watch, nor the fine divisions on any instrument”) and his limbs are becoming sluggish and unresponsive...

And yet up they continue to go.

These days, ballooning is remarkably safe. For example, in Australia you have a 0.3% chance of encountering an accident for every 1,000 hours you spend in the air - and according to the US National Transportation and Safety Board, only 0.07% of all ballooning accidents result in fatalities.

In its earliest days, ballooning was, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, not quite so safe. But still - the list of recorded ballooning accidents before the sport became immensely popular in the 1960s isn’t as alarming as you might think. (Here’s Wikipedia’s roundup.)

Part of the reason for this is the people doing it. Early aeronauts weren’t the historical equivalent of modern “cluster ballooners” inspired by truck driver Larry Walters, who in 1982 achieved worldwide fame by strapping himself into a Sears lawn chair suspended beneath 42 military surplus weather balloons, in the hope of propelling himself a few dozen feet off the ground…

Instead, Walters quickly discovered he had enough lift to reach 16,000 feet (4.8km), and to drift into the primary approach corridor of Long Beach Airport.

Quoting his spectacular Wikipedia page:

“After 45 minutes in the sky, Walters shot several balloons with a pellet gun, taking care not to unbalance the load. He then accidentally dropped his pellet gun overboard. Despite having taken a camera, he did not take any photos. He descended slowly, until the balloons' dangling cables became caught in a power line at 423 E 44th Way in Long Beach. The power line broke, causing a 20-minute electricity blackout. He landed unharmed.”

Instead, professional aeronauts (which by the 1860s included men and women) were meticulous planners and immensely resourceful in a crisis.

Nevertheless, accidents continued to happen.

In 1910, three Germans (Distler, Joerdens and Metzger) took to the sky near Munich, in an attempt to travel the roughly 200km to the Swiss border. Instead, the wind turned and swept them away onto another bearing. With the ground hidden by cloud they were quickly lost - but for reasons entirely beyond me, they decided not to steer the balloon back down to ground level, but to keep going.

As night approached, they heard the sound of the sea far below, and cautiously descended to have a look. The sea immediately rose up to meet them, and the balloon’s basket smacked into a wave and lurched back into the air. When they’d recovered their senses, they discovered Metzger had been thrown overboard. He was never seen again.

Faced with no option than to keep going until they saw land, the two aviators climbed to a safe altitude and allowed the wind to take them onwards - until, as the second night fell, they saw lights far below. They quickly descended, hit the sea once more, bounced up a beach and smashed through the stone wall of a cottage on the outskirts of Kirkwall in Orkney. It was the first ever air crash in the islands, and the first crossing of the North Sea by air.

Uninjured but thoroughly bewildered by the whole experience, the two men enjoyed Orcadian hospitality for a few days, then caught a ferry to Aberdeen.

Half a century earlier, there will be no such lucky escape for Coxwell and Glaisher. If left to its own devices, their balloon will continue to rise for tens of thousands of feet - perhaps within tolerances for the vessel itself, but far beyond the physical limits of its passengers.

If the aeronauts don’t act, and act quickly, they are dead.

At this point, Glaisher loses consciousness.

We are marvellously well-adapted for life down here at ground level.

Over millions of years, our bodies have adjusted themselves to work as efficiently as possible under an air pressure strong enough to offset 29.92 inches of mercury, representing 1,013.25 millibars or 1 atmosphere (atm), created by all the air pressing down on us from above.

When that pressure changes, even slightly, we hear it in the whistling and popping of our ears, and (this is something I experience myself) as a deep ache in formerly broken bones.

But when that air pressure is removed, our bodies start to malfunction. For mountain-climbers or aviators, all it takes is a change in altitude of maybe 2,000 metres (6,500 feet). At that point, the still-unpredictable condition known as AMS (acute mountain sickness) might make an appearance at any minute - and while the mechanics of our individual susceptibility to it are still being investigated, it seems it’s partly down to genetics. This means that even the fittest people can suddenly succumb to headaches, nausea and, most dangerously, a build-up of fluid in the lungs (pulmonary edema), in a place where treatment is difficult or impossible.

Coxwell and Glaisher are now five times higher than this point. They’re still only the tiniest fraction of the way out of the Earth’s atmosphere, which stretches for another 9,900 km - but they’re halfway to the Armstrong Limit, the point where the air pressure is so low that even if someone had breathing apparatus, all the water in their body (like their saliva, tears, urine and the moisture in the lungs) would start to boil away.

But it’s the lack of oxygen that’s now threatening to kill them within minutes - combined with the speed of their ascent, around a thousand feet per minute. Mountain-climbers with AMS have time to adjust, including descending the mountain until the symptoms ease. But if the change is quick, it’s incredibly hard on the body. This is why in an airliner in the half-hour after takeoff, you might notice your ears crackling slightly - that’s because the cabin altitude, the air pressure within the pressurised parts of the aircraft’s fuselage, is slowly being adjusted to reduce the stress it exerts on the structure of the aircraft.

(The regulatory maximum for cabin altitude is the air pressure equivalent of being at 8,000 feet/2,438 metres, but most modern aircraft are now designed to run at higher pressure, to keep passengers as comfy as possible.)

Only Coxwell remains conscious, and now he’s battling the effects of hypoxemia, manifesting as extreme breathlessness accompanied by rapid breathing and a hammering heart-rate, making him dizzy and weak. On top of that, it’s minus 20 degrees Celsius, so he only has minutes before his hands freeze into useless stumps.

With nothing but a six-mile drop beneath him, Coxwell clambers out of the basket and pulls himself up into the balloon, attempting to yank the release line free. Again and again his grip slips on the icy ropes as his fingers deaden and lose their strength - but somehow, he manages to pull the line free.

Now he’s faced with two problems: he can’t climb down with his increasingly frostbitten hands, and he can’t pull the release-valve line with them. Using his elbows to take the strain, he somehow slip-slides back into the basket, takes the line in his teeth and yanks it with all his might…

As Simon Clark notes in his wonderful book Firmament: The Hidden Science of Weather, Climate Change and the Air That Surrounds Us, the following exchange took place between the exhausted Coxwell and the just-roused Glaisher a few minutes later:

C: “Do try to take temperature and barometer observations, do try.”

G: “I have been insensible.”

C: “You have, and I too, very nearly.”

Since they are now descending quite rapidly, the readings they take can’t tell them how far up they’d gone - but modern estimates point to somewhere between 32,000 and 37,000 feet (that’s 9.7 - 11.3km), making them the first humans to escape the lower atmosphere, and the record-holders to this day of the greatest height achieved without breathing apparatus.

(Glaisher himself would later suggest that “artificial appliances might be contrived” to help balloonists “continue...higher still.” A decade later, Paul Bert, Professor of Physiology at the Sorbonne, was the first to formally recommend supplemental oxygen as a “practical precept...for mountain travellers and aeronauts.”)

The two intrepid explorers descend without further incident and land in a field, only to discover the nearest train station is 7 miles away. This they promptly walk - and find the trains aren’t running that day.

They fire off a telegram telling of their exploits, and wander off in search of dinner.

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It’s easy to appreciate early pioneer stories like these for their gonzo entertainment value: ‘oh, the good old days of science and exploration, when everyone was that bonkers’, or perhaps: ‘well, nowadays people, and by that I mean “idiots”, only do stuff like that for social media likes.’

But they also serve as reminders of the dual nature of the sky in our imaginations - at once so utterly banal that we can barely give it our attention (“another cloudy day, meh”), and yet how alien it is, and how utterly unsuitable for our continued survival, such a bizarrely short distance from where most of us spend our lives, if only we took a moment to consider this.

(For example, how far is it to the next town from where you are right now? In my case, it’s 8.06km as the crow flies, via a refreshing beach walk I try to hike at least once a month. Vertically, that’d put me firmly into the Death Zone. I wouldn’t last five minutes.)

As I said previously, this season will be all about the surprising science of our planet’s atmosphere - “the invisible sea we live at the bottom of, which we breathe in and out of our bodies 20,000 times a day”:

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But it’s also about our own curious relationship to it, and how we can be so oblivious to this remarkable physical phenomenon - the product of billions of years of biochemical modification by our planet’s thin coating of life - that will keep us alive every minute of every day for the rest of our lives.

So, for the coming months of this new season of Everything Is Amazing, I hope I can encourage you to occasionally stop and look into the sky, letting your mind’s eye soar above the clouds, and getting really curious about what you don’t yet know about what’s up there. I hope there’s plenty.

Thanks for reading.

- M

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Images: Sawyer Bengston; Rijksmuseum/Wikimedia; Daniel Nielsen; Ian Dooley; Mel -.