Shifting perspectives

Two rich tales about men, machines

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air.By Richard Holmes.

England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines.By David Edgerton

RICHARD HOLMES, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, renowned for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, “The Age of Wonder”, which came out in 2008, he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, “Falling Upwards”, he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists.

The pioneers included John Money, who took off from Norwich one day in 1785, came down 20 miles from land and was rescued after five hours in the sea; and Sophie Blanchard, darling of the French revolutionary balloonists, whose “basket” was a decorative silver gondola shaped like a child's cradle and who was appointed Aeronaute des Fêtes Officielles by an impressed Napoleon.

Mr Holmes makes much of the esoteric side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in tethered balloons to scope out enemy movements. And during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870-71, balloonists managed to fly out of (if not back into) the city to communicate with the French government in exile in Tours. But the most thrilling tale belongs to Sweden, and Salomon Andree's doomed attempt to fly a balloon from Spitsbergen to the North Pole in 1896. Andree's craft came down on the ice, and he and his companions were unable to walk out of the wilderness. Diaries and film, found with the men's bodies over 30 years later, fill in the poignant details.

“Falling Upwards” contains much of the historian's apparatus, such as footnotes and bibliography, but its epilogue refers modestly to what has gone before as “a cluster of true balloon stories”. It does feel a touch light on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work.

Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the aeroplane. As David Edgerton's sure-footed essay makes clear, flying in this next age was a rather more serious affair. Aeroplanes, he notes, were—and to a considerable extent still are—primarily weapons of war, created to serve “national purposes”.

By examining Britain through the lens of its aviation industry, Mr Edgerton suggests that the country's recent history is both more militant and more technical than many historians claim. British emphasis on the bomber, rather than the fighter plane, he argues, “represented a technological way of warfare” that accepted the killing of the enemy by machines. It was certainly brutal: in the second world war 60,000 Britons were killed by bombing; 118,000 Germans died in Hamburg alone.

Like Mr Holmes's balloonists, Mr Edgerton sees Britain from an unusual perspective. He digs into research and development spending and the activities of long-gone government ministries in an effort to challenge versions of history that have become fixated on Britain's decline. In the 22 years since his book's first edition Mr Edgerton says such “declinism” has waned—something he ascribes particularly to New Labour and the birth of a cooler Britannia. He himself can also take some credit; his arguments provide sound backing for the idea that modern Britain is as much a warfare state as a welfare one.