Richard Holmes

Documents the experiences of the pioneers of human flight to offer insight into the character qualities that inspired their ambitions and the ways in which their achievements have shaped culture, technology, and meteorology.

How We Took to the Air

Falling Upwards

FALLING UPWARDS is a vivid group biography and adventure that tells how men and women first felt as they rose towards the clouds into a new dimension - of science, exploration, warfare, literature, discovery.Romantic biographer Richard Holmes floats across the world following the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, from the first heroic experiments of the Montgolfiers in 1780s to the tragic attempt to fly a balloon to the North Pole in the 1890s. Dramatic sequences move from the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of beautiful Sophie Blanchard; the revelatory ascents over sprawling Victorian industrial cities of Northern Europe; and the astonishing long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise, and the French photographer Felix Nadar. Later we find balloons used to observe the horrors of battle during the American Civil War (including a memorable flight by General Custer); the tale of sixty balloons that escaped Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870; and the terrifying seven mile high flight - without oxygen - of James Glaisher, helping to establish the science of meteorology and the environmental notion of a 'fragile' planet. Readers will also discover the writers - from Mary Shelley to Edgar Alan Poe, Dickens to Verne - who allowed the imaginative impact of flight to soar in their work. In exploring the interplay between technology and science fiction, the understanding of the biosphere, and the metaphysics of flight itself, Holmes offers another of his subtle portraits of human endeavour, recklessness and vision.

Falling Upwards How We Took to the Air

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