Chasing Icarus (6 page)

Post wasn’t troubled by his wife’s vow to squeeze him for every last penny. What ever happened, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d experienced on October 11, 1908.

There were many ways to die in a balloon, as the
New York Times
had insensitively pointed out in July 1910 when it listed the thirty-five fatalities in the last four years. One could drown, as Paul Nocquet had in April 1906 when his balloon dropped into Gilgo Bay in Long Island; one might be struck by lightning, as poor Lieutenant Ulivelli was near Rome in 1907; one could explode in a ball of fire as two British balloonists had during an exhibition in London in 1908; or one might be swept out to sea, to vanish forever, as was the case with Frank Elkins in 1909, last seen heading out over the Pacific Ocean.

Perhaps the most terrifying prospect of all was the plummet, the sudden fall from the sky with the balloonists powerless to do anything but scream. Aviators could, at least, struggle with the controls of their machine, allowing themselves a sliver of a sense that their fate was in their own hands.

When Augustus Post had been invited by Holland Forbes to be his copilot in the 1908 International Balloon Cup race, Post had accepted without hesitation. Forbes was a good man in Post’s estimation, the vice president of the Aero Club of America, and an accomplished sportsman who owned his own balloon, the
Conqueror
. The pair sailed to Germany, spending much of the voyage with their heads in a series of foreign-language phrase books they had been sent by the race organizers. Taking off from Berlin, the contestants were liable to end up anywhere from Scandinavia to the Sahara, so it was advisable to be as much of a polyglot as possible.

The day of the race was a Sunday, warm and sunny, and Berlin was teeming with spectators. The
Conqueror
was the ninth balloon to start, and at 3:40 P.M. it rose into the air to a great cheer. When the balloon reached four thousand feet, Post noted the height in his logbook and also entered the barometer reading. He heard Forbes cluck with delight and say, “How nicely it works!” Suddenly Post felt the basket tremble. He looked up and saw the bottom of the balloon beginning to shrivel as a large tear appeared on one side of the varnished cotton. “She’s gone,” said Post calmly. As the gas rushed out of the tear “like the blowing off of a steam boiler,” Post jumped to his feet and reached for the appendix cord, a rope that acted as a safety mechanism and tightened if pressure was lost so the balloon would keep its shape and not fold up. But the appendix cord hadn’t been designed for such a catastrophe as they now faced. With the balloon holed, turning it into a giant parachute was their only small chance of survival. Post slipped the cord through its knot and it rose inside to the top of the balloon.

To the tens of thousands of spectators on the ground death appeared assured. A woman standing close to the correspondent from the
New
York Times
screamed, “They are killed!” and turned her face from the sky. The reporter watched transfixed as for two thousand feet they “shot down like a bullet.” In the basket Forbes began to cut away the bags of ballast sand that hung from the four corners in a pathetic attempt to halt their descent. Post queried, what about the spectators below, might not they be hit by falling bags? Forbes ignored Post and continued to offload their ballast. Post looked up at the balloon, begging it to come to their aid, and suddenly it did. The
New York Times
reporter gasped with thousands of others as “the envelope appeared to take, first, a triangular shape, and then was transformed into a sort of parachute at the top of the net, and the progress of the wrecked balloon was considerably arrested.” Post and Forbes felt they were under a large mushroom as the netting over the balloon held firm against the cloth, which struggled to get through its meshes. They were no longer traveling at the speed of a bullet, but as the wind pushed them away from the field toward the city, it seemed to Post “as if some great giant was hurling buildings, streets, churches, up at us with all his might.” For several moments they skimmed the rooftops of first one street, then another, with Post and Forbes clinging for dear life to the concentrating ring above their heads. The basket smashed at an angle into a chimney, bounced upward, and dropped through the tiled roof of No. 7 Wilhelmstrasse in the suburb of Friedenau. Neither man dared move in case their descent had been only temporarily checked. Warily they got to their knees and peered over the basket’s rim. They appeared to be stuck fast in a hole in the roof with the cloth draped over the chimney. Forbes clambered out onto the flat roof, unslung his camera, and started to take some photographs: of the balloon, of the house, of Berlin. “The whole world,” he had decided, “looked beautiful.”

It was the last time Augustus Post had worked with Forbes, a balloonist Post had come to realize was dangerously cavalier. One of the sandbags cut from their basket had landed on a baby carriage, and only the infant’s nurse’s quick grab of the child in it moments before the impact had prevented a ghastly accident. Moreover, why had the balloon dropped in the first place? When the pair arrived home a fortnight after their miraculous escape, Post refused to comment on the incident but his partner had plenty to say to the press. “It is inexplicable to me why the balloon should burst,” Forbes told reporters on the quayside. “None of the aeronautical experts to whom we referred the matter can find any reason for it.” Then he embellished the story with an untrue account of their crashing through a roof and finding themselves in a woman’s boudoir. “The lady,” he said with a chortle, “was unfortunately out.”

Unbeknownst to Forbes, Gaston Hervieu, a respected French balloonist, had widely been quoted in the American press attributing the calamity to “the length of the appendix, which increased the pressure at the top of the balloon and caused it to burst. I consider such experiments dangerous before proper experience has been acquired.” In other words, Forbes had recklessly endangered his life and Post’s with his foolish tampering.

Post’s enthusiasm for aeronautics hadn’t dimmed with his near-death experience, but he vowed to choose his partners with more circumspection. In one of the many articles he wrote for aviation publications, Post declared, “The successful make-up of a team in a long-distance balloon-race depends on many qualifications, mental almost more than physical. For many hours perhaps, two men, cut loose from the earth, sharing a profound solitude, must have one mind and one motive, and must act instinctively with a precision that admits of no hesitation and no discussion . . . Your companion must be one with whom you are willing to share a great memory—and that is in itself something of a test of one’s opinion.”

By the summer of 1910 Post was as much an aviator as he was a balloonist. Earlier in the year he had become the thirteenth American to solo in an airplane, and he had not long acquired his flying license when Alan Hawley appeared at the door of his Manhattan apartment.

Hawley had a job persuading Post to join him as his copilot in the balloon
America II
. Even though they had flown together—and finished fourth—in the 1907 International Balloon Cup race, Post now had other ambitions. He was about to journey to Boston to compete in the Boston Air Show, and was of half a mind to enter the Chicago to New York airplane race, for which the prize was $25,000.
*

Hawley lacked Post’s flamboyance. Where one had an exotic goatee, the other had a modest mustache. Post was a poet and an actor, a man who went running each day to keep in shape; Hawley was a sober-suited stockbroker, less impulsive and more cerebral than his friend, and his portly frame betrayed his fondness for a long lunch. The two were opposites in physique and temperament, but they complemented one another perfectly.

What won Post over was the revelation that the balloon would be the
America II
, which had won the USA the International Balloon Cup in 1909. It was considered a “lucky balloon,” and Post couldn’t resist its pull. He agreed to join Hawley after the Boston Air Show, and in the second week of September they were reunited in Indianapolis.

On September 17 the
America II
and eight other balloons rose into the air hoping to win the right to represent the USA in the International Balloon Cup the following month. The selection procedure was simple: the three balloons that covered the greatest distance before landing would be chosen. One by one the balloons came to earth, first the
New
York
after only 185 miles, then the
Pennsylvania II
, then
Hossler
. . . until only the
America II
remained airborne. Post and Hawley finally landed in Warrenton, Virginia, 450 miles east of Indianapolis, after a flight time of forty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes. It was a new American endurance record for a balloon, and Hawley told reporters they could have gone on longer but came down “for fear of being blown into Chesapeake Bay.” It had been a memorable trip, but, he added, “While we were passing above Noble County, Ohio, on Sunday evening I distinctly heard two bullets whistle past my ears . . . The government should take steps at once to protect balloonists who are likely to be killed at any time by ignorant or vicious countrymen who persist in firing at them as they fly above farms.” That he and Post had not been shot down was pure luck, and for that they thanked the continued good fortune of
America II.

In New York there was little interest in the balloon race about to start in St. Louis, nor was there much enthusiasm for Walter Wellman and what the
New York Sun
called his “mad enterprise.” All eyes were on Belmont Park and the forthcoming International Aviation Meet, even though it was still a week away. The Sunday edition of the
New York American
carried a photograph of Glenn Curtiss greeting two of the French aviators, Count Jacques de Lesseps and Hubert Latham, as they stepped off the steamship
La Lorraine
twenty-four hours earlier. Both men had expressed their pleasure to be in New York and their eagerness to begin tuning up their aircraft. The race organizers took the Frenchmen to lunch at the Café Martin, and later, when the six-foot-tall count, who was the tenth child of Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, arrived at his apartment at the St. Regis Hotel, he was asked by a reporter what had impressed him most about New York. “Your Fifth Avenue and the constant stream of pretty women passing along it,” replied the twenty-seven-year-old, with the earnest appreciation of a connoisseur. “I think your American women are the personification of elegance and ‘chic.’ They are admirable.”

Hubert Latham had checked into the the Knickerbocker Hotel (now known as 6 Times Square), an Astor establishment on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, and he was soon sitting at the bar admiring the magnificent twenty-eight-foot-long mural,
Old King Cole and
His Fiddlers Three
, by Maxfield Parrish,
*
and chatting to the bar steward in flawless English. Born in Paris in 1883 to an English father and a French mother, Latham was a slim, well-dressed man with a pallid complexion, visible evidence of his consumption. A Parisian physician had given him a year to live—eighteen months ago. Latham’s grip on life was still strong, and he intended to keep squeezing until the pips squeaked. He was rarely to be seen without a glass in one hand and his long ivory cigarette holder in the other. The ivory reputedly came from the tusks of an elephant shot by Latham during an expedition to the Sudan in 1905. Big game had been Latham’s first love upon graduating from Oxford University in 1904, but in 1908 he witnessed one of Wilbur Wright’s flights at Le Mans and, like Claude Grahame-White, fell in love with the airplane. He bought shares in Gastembide & Mengin, a struggling company set up by a French mechanical engineer called Leon Levavasseur, who had constructed a lightweight monoplane that had crashed in every trial. Latham cut a deal with Levavasseur: “I will try the machine for you and continue flying with it, no matter how often I smash it. If I am killed, all the better—but you must repair it for me.”

The crashes were frequent in the first few weeks of the partnership, but Latham survived each one, crawling out from under the wreckage with one hand already reaching for his cigarette case. Steadily, Levavasseur ironed out the flaws in his airplane (christened the
Antoinette
in honor of the wife of Monsieur Gastembide) until, in June 1909, Latham flew fifty miles without a hitch. The following month he’d left France in an attempt to win the $5,000 prize on offer for the first man to fly across the English Channel. Thousands cheered his departure and thousands waited for his arrival, but it was not to be. Six miles off the French coast the airplane’s fifty-horse power engine coughed like a consumptive and died. Latham made a perfect landing on a flat sea, and as the wooden machine bobbed gently up and down, he lit a cigarette and waited for his rescue.

Latham was one of several aviators whose photograph appeared in the
New York Sun
on Sunday alongside an article that listed the names of the twenty-six fliers slated to appear at the meet. The paper also gave details of the money on offer: “The cash prizes amount to $72,300 [approximately $1,152,500 today]. The aviators will also receive a percentage of the gate receipts. One special prize of $10,000 is offered for a flight from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty and back. Another prize of $5,000 will be awarded to the aviator who reaches or exceeds an altitude of 10,000 feet. Other prizes will be given for duration, distance, speed, cross-country flights and passenger carrying.”

But the
New York Herald
, which was owned by Gordon Bennett,
*
was keen to point out that the Belmont Park event would be more than just a “Show,” a few days of inconsequential entertainment given over to playboys and stuntmen. Much more was at stake, proclaimed the paper in an article headlined NATIONS BATTLE FOR AIR CHAMPIONSHIP:

“So great is the interest in the secrets that are expected to be revealed that army officers, not only of this government, but of France, England and Germany, will be students of what takes place there. The first practical use of the flying machine being for military purposes, this demonstration of types designed by the greatest constructors in the world will add something like a final word on their relative values.”