Falling Upwards : How We Took to the Air: an Unconventional History of Ballooning

How does a professor of biography approach ballooning? In 2013's FALLING UPWARDS: HOW WE TOOK TO THE AIR, Richard Holmes writes of ballooning as biography, as telling of personal stories! Not as pre-history, history or science but threading one ballooning story after another. He distinguishes three aspects of every human balloon ride: launch -- flight -- landing. ***Throughout this 416 page book, chock full of helpful drawings and photos, author Richard Holmes selects among his favorite tales, real and imagined, from cartoons, documentary and feature films and books by Edgar Allan Poe and others. Almost always the focus is on what common traits make men and women go up in balloons. Of his own December 1, 1783 first ever flight by anyone in a true hydrogen balloon, Dr Alexander Charles later wrote that he said to his companion Robert while in flight: "I'm finished with the earth. From now on our place is in the sky!" (Ch. 1). *** American Ambassador to France Benjamin Franklin watched that very flight with a telescope. Franklin then remarked that someone asked him "what's the use of a balloon?" The Philadelphia sage countered: "what's the use of a new-born baby?" *** This book lacks much of what I expected to learn: more on the transition from hot air to hydrogen as lifting element, how hydrogen was initially extracted from water and at what cost, for example. After a while one similar story after another of ballooning began to run together. I was minded of a lecture I heard five days ago by Dr Mary Neal, author of TO HEAVEN AND BACK. She has since shared with 400 others having similar true personal tales her own 1999 near death by drowning experience while kayaking in southern Chile. Dr Neal found not all that much difference from one tale to the other 399. -OOO-http://www.biblio.com/books/629563531.html