The Ice Balloon. Alec Wilkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ highlights, the balloon was constructed in a church, “where it reached nearly from the roof to the floor.” To inflate it Clarke soaked a ball of cotton in alcohol and set the cotton on fire.

      The balloon was to go up on July 28, a Sunday, after Mass. The Laplanders, “the most timid among the human race,” Clarke wrote, were frightened by the balloon, “perhaps attributing the whole to some magical art.” The wind was blowing hard, and Clarke thought it would ruin his launch, but so many Laplanders had showed up he “did not dare to disappoint them.” The Laplanders grabbed the side of the balloon as it was filling, and tore it. They agreed to remain in town, with their reindeer, while it was mended. Meanwhile “they became riotous and clamorous for brandy.” One of them crawled on his knees to the priest to beg for it.

      When the balloon was released that evening, the Lapps’ reindeer took off in all directions, with the Lapps running after them. It landed in a lake, took off again, then crashed. The Lapps crept back into town.

      Hydrogen balloons are absurdly sensitive to air pressure, temperature, the density of their gas, and the weight they have aboard. Pouring a glass of water over the side of a balloon, or a handful of sand, will make it rise. A shadow falling on it will cause it to descend. A balloon has an ideal (and theoretical) equilibrium, at which it would float indefinitely, assuming it didn’t lose gas through the envelope, but that point is impossible to sustain because the balloon’s circumstances keep changing. A rising balloon doesn’t slow as it approaches equilibrium; from momentum, it continues. Having passed the point of stability, it sheds hydrogen, because the gas has expanded as the pressure of the air has lessened, and the balloon sinks, passing the point on its fall. Shedding the perfect amount of ballast at the ideal rate might settle the balloon exquisitely, but shedding weight also causes the balloon to rise. If it rises too quickly the only corrective might be to release hydrogen, which the pilot would rather retain. Part of the skill of flight, particularly of a flight that is to last a long time, is to manage the altitude with sufficient temperance that little gas or ballast is lost. Enough ballast must be kept to land the balloon properly. Theoretically a balloon might be operated more stably at night, since the temperature does not change as clouds intersect the sun.

      Someone traveling in a balloon never feels the wind, or hears it, because he is advancing at the same speed. Early aeronauts, enclosed in silence, used to feel not so much that they were moving as that the land below them was approaching.

      16

      While Andrée was in Spitsbergen at the Swedish station, making measurements and shut in darkness, the American delegation to the International Polar Year was on Ellesmere Island, opposite the northern end of Greenland, on Lady Franklin Bay. Their camp was about six hundred miles from the pole, and the northernmost of all the nations’ camps. The twenty-five members lived in a hut which was sixty feet long and seventeen feet wide and which they had built and called Fort Conger, after a Michigan senator named Omar Conger, who had supported Arctic research. The officers—there were four of them—slept at one end, and the enlisted men at the other. The expedition was to make scientific observations and also to search for the Jeannette, which had left to discover the pole in 1879, and disappeared.

      The delegation’s leader was Adolphus Greely, who had asserted at Andrée’s talk in London in 1895 that although Andrée might reach the pole, the Arctic winds, which at that elevation blew only north, would strand him, and then said that the congress ought not to support such a plan.

      Adolphus Greely

      In Three Years of Arctic Service, a fantastically understated title, Greely described some of his comrades at Fort Conger, all of whom had volunteered. Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury, “in a service of over fifteen years, had a fine reputation for field duty,” Greely wrote. James Lockwood “had served eight years, almost always on the frontier, and was highly recommended as an officer of sterling merit and varied attainments.

      “Edward Israel and George W. Rice, in order to accompany the expedition, cheerfully accepted service as enlisted men. The former, a graduate of Ann Arbor University, went in his chosen profession as astronomer, while the latter, a professional photographer, hoped to add to his reputation in that art by service with the expedition. Sergeants Jewell and Ralston had served long and faithfully as meteorological observers; while Gardiner, though of younger service, was most promising. Long and hazardous duty on the Western frontier had inured the greater part of the men to dangers, hardships, and exposure.”

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