The Ice Balloon. Alec Wilkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ was born on October 18, 1854, in Gränna, a small town about three hundred miles southwest of Stockholm, on Lake Vättern. His mother, Wilhelmina, was called Mina, and his father, Claes, was the town’s apothecary. They had four other sons and two daughters, with whom they lived above Claes’s shop on the main street in the center of town (the building is still there). Mina’s father was a mathematics professor, and behind him were three generations of clergymen, some of whom were known for keeping records of the weather. As a child, Andrée was said to have a wide-ranging intelligence, a capacity for asking difficult questions, and to be stubborn. He was fond of games whose outcome depended on solving a problem. His mother noted that if he was treated unjustly by someone, “he spared no effort to pay him back,” but “by character and from principle he was magnanimous.”

      As a boy Andrée built a raft from boards he found, and he and a friend sailed out onto Lake Vättern and had to be rescued when the wind rose. Another time, from a cliff above Gränna, he launched a balloon he had filled with gas, and the balloon landed on the roof of a barn and caught fire. Over the Christmas vacation of 1867, when he was thirteen, he told his father that he no longer cared to study dead languages and that he wanted to be an engineer. He is said to have pounded the table as he spoke.

      Andrée’s attachment to his mother was profound and only deepened when he was sixteen and his father died. He left money for Andrée to attend the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where his favorite subject was physics and his closest friendship among the faculty was with his physics instructor, Robert Dahlander. During successive summers Andrée worked as a tinsmith, in a foundry, and in a machine shop, and for two years after he graduated he was a draftsman and a designer in a mechanical works in Stockholm. Through friends he got interested in phrenology, the practice of drawing conclusions about someone’s nature and tendencies from the topography of his skull, and while he worked at an engineering firm in Trollhaven, called Nydquist and Holms, he made a phrenological helmet out of brass. It was a half-sphere with screws ascending in rows an inch apart to the crown. It opened into two parts, connected by a hinge, and the screws screwed down to trace the skull’s bumps and depressions. Andrée didn’t so much believe in phrenology as he was interested in the conclusions phrenologists reached, which he thought sometimes were precisely apt.

      In 1876, when Andrée was twenty-three, he went to America to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had been organized to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially it was the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, and on display were all the world’s most prominent new inventions. Absorbed by modernity, he was there when word arrived of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

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      Sailing to America, Andrée had had two acquaintances, his cabin mate, “a young German who was ducking military duty,” he wrote in a journal, “and a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.” However, “the pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.”

      The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. Andrée had only one book, Laws of the Winds, by C. F. E. Björling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea “ripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,” he wrote. This was the thought “that balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.” The German happened to laugh and interrupt Andrée’s reverie, but he returned to it and “firmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.”

      In Philadelphia, Andrée went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldn’t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.

      Andrée would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, “but the best is good enough.” It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the “screws to make pocket watches so small and delicate that only with a microscope can you see that they are screws.” There was a steam engine “high as a three-story house,” and a cannon weighing “millions of pounds” that shattered a foot-thick steel plate “as easily as if it were glass.” In New York he had heard they were building “a suspension bridge over the city, which already cost eighty million crowns, but it is not ready yet for a long time” (the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883).

      Once in New York and once in Philadelphia, Andrée visited phrenologists. He presented himself as a tailor, and was told that he would make an excellent engineer. Also that his determination led people to regard him sometimes as stubborn. His contrary temperament made him “quick to avenge insults and repel attacks.” A love for independence and change led to behaviors that frequently contradicted his feelings. His thinking was unconstrained by conventions. He could be trusted with “positions that demand masculinity, honor and faith” and was a natural leader: “You win people over to your cause and get them to sympathize personally with whatever you undertake.” Nevertheless, from deep caution, he was “watchful and worried” and deliberate, and only reluctantly did he trust people. Judgment and prudence helped him control his fantasies, “however large.” As for his future, twenty years would “pass before you achieve the highest degree of your spiritual development.”

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      Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some of the ancients, it was both holy and infernal. The devil lived there in a house of fire, a supposition based on a reading of Isaiah 14, which says that Lucifer will “sit on the mount of assembly in the far north.” A northerly wind was believed to transmit evil. “The Victorine monk Garnerius says that the ‘malign spirit’ was called Aquilo, the north wind,” Jung wrote in Aion. “Its coldness meant the ‘frigidity of sinners.’” Jung also wrote that Adam Scotus, a theologian of the twelfth century, believed that “there was a frightful dragon’s head in the north from which all evil comes.” The smoke that came from the dragon’s nose and mouth “was the smoke which the prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of God, saw coming from the north,” Scotus wrote.

      The anthology of myths and deities and peculiar people assembled about the Arctic by the ancients includes the Arabs in the ninth century who knew about the Arctic from an Arabian traveler named Ahmad ibn Fadhlan. The king of the Bulgarians told Fadhlan that a tribe named the Wisu lived three months north of his country. Their summer nights were not even one hour long. The thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini says that the Wisu were not allowed to visit the Bulgarians’ territory, because wherever they went the air turned cold, even in summer, which killed the Bulgarians’ crops. To trade with the Wisu, from whom they mainly got furs, the Bulgarians would go to the border in a cart that was drawn by a dog. It had to be a dog, and not a horse or an ox, because dogs could get a purchase on the ground with their claws—in Wisu there were no trees or dirt or rocks, only ice. The traders would leave their goods on the frontier. When they came back, they would find an item beside their own, and if they liked the trade they would take it. Otherwise they withdrew their item, so they never saw the Wisu or knew what they looked like.

      The cold in the north made a fantastic impression on al-Qazwini. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, in his book In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, quotes his opinion СКАЧАТЬ