|
The day Count
Zambeccari dropped in
On 23rd March 1785 something quite extraordinary
happened in a field near Horsham - out of the skies a
hydrogen balloon descended on a surprised
neighbourhood, bumped along a bit before finally
coming to rest, and out of it staggered an Italian
count and an English admiral. What on earth was going
on?
Just this: Count Francesco Zambeccari and Admiral Sir
Edward Vernon, the two men in question, were among the
early pioneers of ballooning, and this adventurous duo
had taken off from 'the cheap-bread warehouse' in
Tottenham Court Road about an hour earlier. (A third
member of their party, a certain Miss Grist,
apparently never made the take-off because of weight
problems). Damaged equipment and the wrong kind of
weather had curtailed their flight, but they came out
of it unscathed (which, as we will see, was not always
the case), and all the same there must have been a
real sense of achievement, as their balloon was
proudly put on public display afterwards at the Lyceum
in the Strand (admittance 1/-). Let us look at a
little of their story, and at the exciting times of
these wonderful men in their flying balloons.
It starts over 75 years earlier, in 1709, when a
certain priest from Brazil, Bartolemeu de Gusmao, flew
a model hot air balloon at the behest of King Johan V
of Portugal. But the first flight to carry passengers
was not until 19th September 1783, when the
Montgolfier brothers (Joseph and Ettienne) launched a
full-scale hot air balloon during the reign of the
French King Louis XVI. This enterprise was an airborne
mini-version of Noah's Ark, and its passengers were a
sheep, a duck and a rooster. By some misfortune the
latter broke its neck when the balloon came down to
earth, but the other members of the menagerie
survived, proving conclusively that it was possible to
breathe at altitude – which no-one had known the
answer to up until then. The upper air was then a
great unknown, to be explored with caution, as was
space in the twentieth century, and it is not too
fanciful to compare yesterday's balloonists with
today's astronauts.
So armed with this knowledge, the French confidently
pressed ahead, and the first recorded manned flight
was two months later, on 21st November, when
Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier, a professor of
natural philosophy, and the Marquis d'Arlandes, a
major in the Garde Royale, took off from the Chateau
La Muette in the Bois de Boulogne in a Montgolfier-made
paper and silk balloon. The flight over Paris lasted
22 minutes, and achieved a distance of nine
kilometres, before finally crash-landing in the middle
of a vineyard. With a sense of style that was the
hall-mark of these early pioneers, the bemused farm
workers were offered champagne all round by the two
balloonists. These men were the very first to rise
above the earth's surface, so there really was
something to celebrate.
Next, on 1st December that same year, came a flight by
Professor Jacques Charles in his hydrogen-filled
balloon, which he hoped would prove more reliable than
the hot air version. Later, in 1785, de Rosier
experimented with a mixture of the two, but his
balloon caught fire 30 minutes after take-off, and he
fell to his death.(That year was a busy one for the
balloon pioneers, and The Gentleman's Magazine
reported upwards of a dozen ascents between
January-June 1785. The year started well when on 7th
January Dr Jeffries and M. Blanchard - 'an active and
ingenious little Frenchman' - made it across the
Channel from Dover Castle to a spot near Calais in a
'grand balloon').
To turn now to Count Zambeccari, who had been snapping
at the heels of the French pioneers. The English had
lagged behind the French in terms of aeronautical
development, and it took the Italians – on English
soil – to show them the way. Zambeccari had the
distinction of being the first person to launch a
balloon in England, on 4th November 1783. It was small
and unmanned, and was released in Cheapside, from the
roof of the home of an Italian colleague, Michael
Biaggini, who apparently was an artificial flower
maker. A few weeks later, on 25th November, Zambeccari
released a hydrocarbon balloon from the Artillery
Ground at Finsbury Park (if you travel on the
underground you will see its ballooning history
celebrated with attractive tile decorations in the
tube station). Off it drifted, until it finally came
to earth near Petworth, 48 miles away.
And so we come to the Count's manned flight in March
1785, which ended up near Horsham. But he was not, in
fact, the first man in this country to go up in a
balloon – that distinction was earned by Vincenzo
Lunardi (another Italian), who was secretary to the
Neopolitan Ambassador in London. He took off before a
crowd of many thousands from the grounds of the
Honourable Artillery Company on 15th September 1784.
Ballooning was now all the rage, but it seems that
Count Zambeccari was running short of funds. His money
problems forced him to leave England for a while, but
he returned in the autumn of 1784 and promptly
announced his intention of mounting a manned flight in
the spring of the following year.
His new balloon was made of 32 pieces of oiled silk
('delicate, elastic and transparent') and measured 34
feet in diameter, with a capacity of 20,615 cubic
feet. The flight was on Wednesday 23rd March, and
turned out to be a high risk venture. A report at the
time said it was probably 'the most hazardous voyage
yet been made'. A turbulent wind was against them, and
as they took off it 'tore away the lower part of the
netting and broke the glass at the lower part of the
machine, through which the firing of the valve
passed'. A piece of silk was hastily applied to patch
up the aperture, but there were more problems ahead.
When they were well above the clouds 'three of the
strings that attached the boat to the balloon gave
way...and all means of descending seemed out of their
power, until the Count thought to cut the silken
tubes, which fortunately gave the necessary exit to
the inflammable air'. I am not sure I understand all
this, but it does sound pretty horrendous.
Above the cloud level the sun shone brightly, but when
descending they hit a snow fall, and it became very
cold. The balloon became 'much agitated' on its
downward path, and developed a disconcerting habit of
spinning round in the air. Not only that, but 'a
peculiar noise was heard like rustling among the
clouds'.
Below cloud level, the sight of terra firma must have
been a huge relief, and no doubt they hit the ground
with a bang. They ended up in a ploughed field 'about
three miles beyond Kingsfield (Kingsfold) near
Horsham', and what the locals made of it all, we can
only guess. There are reports of other such landings
among herds of cows and the like, and of terrified
farmers (who probably did not read the press, and were
not up with the balloon frenzy that was sweeping the
nation), attacking these strange and alien objects.
Who knows whether this happened in Sussex, but after
landing, and when damage to the balloon had been
rectified, off it went back to London for public
display. It was proudly announced, in a specially
produced broadside, that the balloon and its
passengers had 'performed a voyage of 37 miles in the
space of a single hour', and that 'this Aerostatic
Globe is the largest, and most magnificent, of any
hitherto constructed', and its gondola was 'decorated
in a Stile of unparalleled Elegance'.
But what about Admiral Vernon? Born to a Staffordshire
family, he was a Navy man through and through, had
worked his way up the ranks, and his last posting had
been in the East Indies. He retired from active
service in 1781 and returned to England, when it seems
that a late-onset attack of the ballooning bug bit
him. He was 62 when he took off for Horsham, and
followed on with another flight from Tottenham Court
Road in the summer of that same year, this time ending
up in Colchester. But none of it seemed to do him any
harm, and he lived on for another nine years, before
passing away on 16th June 1794. (His brother,
incidentally, was another interesting character.
Richard Vernon was a great racing man and an original
member of the Jockey Club - known to some as 'a
gentleman of acute notoriety on the turf'. He also had
another, and completely different string to his bow:
he was the pioneer of fruit-forcing, and was famous
for the peaches he grew at Newmarket).
Count Zambeccari was just 33 years old when his
Horsham adventure took place. But ballooning was
clearly in his blood, and he was no quitter. There
were more flights to be made, more risks to be taken.
Later, in the company of Dr Grassati of Rome and M.
Pascal Andreoli of Antona, he made an ascent one
November night from Bologna (his family's ancestral
home), and because of the extreme rapidity of the
ascent both he and the doctor passed out. They ended
up pitching into the Adriatic at 2 am, and were forced
to jettison their balloon, which was last seen
floating off towards Greece. By a happy accident they
were found and rescued by some fishermen – but the
whole thing sounds like an absolute nightmare.
Sadly, his luck was not to last. In 1812 he made
another Italian ascent, but while returning to the
ground his balloon got tangled in a tree, and in the
confusion a spirit lamp used to give buoyancy got
spilt, and the whole contraption went up in flames.
Count Zambeccari jumped for his life, but the fall of
50 feet killed him. This indefatigable man was aged 60
at the time, and had lived one heck of a life – and a
long one considering the risks he used to take. One
suspects he was not the type to relish dying in his
bed, and when his time came, surely a short, sharp
ballooning accident was more his cup of tea than a
lingering end from one of the many tedious diseases of
the time.
Final note: there is at least one other report of a
balloon landing in Horsham, some time later. At 9pm on
9th July 1823, one drifted down onto the meadow land
by Chesworth. It had travelled from Bampton in
Oxfordshire, and had left there 2 hours 15 minutes
earlier. But it was all a bit spooky. The balloon,
Marie Celeste-like, was silent and empty, and there
was no more than a note pinned to 'the car', as they
used to call the basket. It asked anyone who found the
balloon to inform a certain Mr L Forestier, and
enjoined the finder 'to be kind to the traveller and
keep her well'. |
