Interesting Pod #4 - The Space Race Begins: The Real Wonder Twins, First Female in Space, First Female Astronaut, and other Flight Adventures.

Last week we put on our wingsuit, or aired up our balloon, which is probably safer, and took a look at the history of humans engaging in flight, and a few early aeronautical pioneers like the Montgolfier Brothers and Franz Reichelt, and also a few early aviation disasters like the Hindenburg explosion. Flying is risky, and today’s episode chronicles some of the riskiest - and bravest - attempts by amateur flyers to ascend to the Heavens. Some, like Icarus, had a bad ending to their airspirations, but others accomplished some really impressive feats of flying with readily available technology. And some, just plane pulled our leg with tales of children flying off into the ether.

Welcome to the Interesting Pod. Our goal on this show is to tell stories that have two characteristics. One is in the name - Interesting. We want to be INTERESTING. But not only that - I’m a historian, working on finishing up a Ph.D in history, and not only do we want to be interesting, but we also want to have accuracy based on historical rigor - good research - without being tedious or dry, pedantic, or condescending. Interesting means that we will seek to tell stories that are fascinating and moving. Some episodes might be inspiring, some wacky, some unnerving, some downright scary, but all should be - hopefully - interesting. But we want to be ACCURATE too. Practically, what that looks like is that this week, we had a seemingly good source that said that Tacitus, the first-century Roman historian, had accused Livia, the first-century wife of Caesar Augustus, of using aphrodisiacs to help control the Roman court and have her way. This was reported by a fairly reputable book, but it didn’t have a direct source or quotation from Tacitus, so I spent some extra time combing through Tacitus’ Annals to try and find that story, and failed. It might be there, but this podcast isn’t a dissertation, and it was a minutely important facet of the story, so I didn’t want to spend all day on it. So when we talk about it, you’ll know that the story is possibly apocryphal. Thus, we aim for interesting, and we do our due diligence. That doesn’t mean the show will be infallible, but we’ll try!

Today we’re going to look at the wild balloon rides of the Catholic priest Adelir de Carli, who attached 1,000 helium-filled party balloons to a chair, rose to over 20,000 feet, and got caught in a terrible storm over the Atlantic Ocean. We will also find out about Jonathan Trappe, who crossed the English Channel over the White Cliffs of Dover, the Piccard twins, who pioneered balloon flights to the edge of space AND the bottom of the ocean, and the magician David Blaine, who may have outflown them all, reaching nearly 25,000 feet via hand-held balloons. So this episode is fun for anybody who is interested in the history of flight, OR those who dream of insane adventures that launch from your own backyard. You are NOT alone. And you may not survive.

Our ultimate focus today is on Lawnchair Larry, the backyard pilot who strapped balloons to his - lawnchair - and flew over three miles high - but before we get to our guy Larry, we’re going to go back in time a little bit. All the way to Jean Piccard.

No, actually, not that Jean Piccard, but possibly the guy he’s named after. Actually, not just Jean Piccard, but also his brother Auguste Piccard, and not just them, but also Jean’s wife Jeanette, who may have been the best balloon pilot of them all.

So let’s talk about the amazing Piccard family. Jules Piccard, born in 1840, was a Swiss chemist and the father of the Piccard twins Jean and Auguste. His mentor at the University of Heidelberg was Robert Bunsen, and yes! That’s the same guy who invented the Bunsen burner that you used in high school chemistry class. Jules studied a bunch of weird chemicals, including Dinitro-ortho-cresol, which is a poison that kills people and bugs, and also cantharidan, which is interesting enough to talk about for 60 seconds or so. Cantharidan is odorless and colorless, but extremely dangerous. Some people know it as Spanish Fly, and it is said that the first-century Roman historian Tacitus discusses cantharidan as an aphrodisiac, and notes that Livia, the wife of Augustus Caesar, supposedly used it as part of her nefarious scheming, but I couldn’t find that in any primary sources. Regardless, does it work? Maybe…but more importantly than that - it kills. Cantharidan is an extreme poison, and as little as 10 milligrams - which is about the weight of a large grain of sand or salt - can kill a person. So, no thank you! The archives of Mcgill University also tell me that Jules Piccard did research into the chemical weight of Rubidium, which I’ve nver heard of, but melts at 102.7 degrees and looks a lot like Mercury. So yeah - rabbit trails - Jules was the father of Jean and Auguste, who were really quite remarkable. Jean followed in his father’s steps as a chemist, and Auguste bucked the trend and became a physicist, but both brothers were aeronauts and balloon pioneers, and one of the brothers was ALSO a hydronaut - a deep sea pioneer!

Who should we talk about first - they are both so interesting! I guess let’s start with Auguste, who was born in January of 1884 in Basel, Switzerland. Auguste was a big science kid, and he went to the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and ultimately became a physics professor at the University of Brussels, Belgium the same year his son Jacques Piccard was born. Auguste was very interested in flight and ballooning, and in 1930 he designed an aluminum pressurized gondola that would be attached to a balloon and allow somebody to ascend to unheard of heights into the atmosphere without dying. Two things in that sentence should pique your interest. First - a gondola, second the part about ascending without dying.

If you’re like me, and you hear the word ‘gondola’, you might be thinking of a flat bottomed boat piloted by an oarsman in Venice that travels around the canals there. That is indeed a gondola. If you live near the mountains - particularly mountains that have skiing - when you hear gondola, you might be thinking of an enclosed cabin-style ski-lift, suspended from a cable, that can carry groups of people up into the mountains. That is also a gondola. OR, in this case, a gondola is the basket or enclosed capsule like thing that is suspended below a balloon, and it usually has room for passengers, equipment, and maybe even instruments. So a gondola is all three things - an enclosed people carrier on a ski lift, a flat-bottom boat dating back to the 1000s primarily used in Venice’s canals, and the basket or capsule below a balloon.

By the way - rabbit trail alert - a gondelier is what they call the pilot of a gondola in Venice. This is a licensed position by the city, there are about 400 licenses given per year, and it takes 400 hours of intense training over a period of six months to become a gondolier…which pays around $150,000/year in US equivalent salary, so it’s a pretty decent job!

Anyway, back to my sentence with two interest-piquing facts. Auguste Piccard designed the first pressurized, enclosed gondola, and the reason he designed it is because of the second interesting thing in that sentence, the part about ascending the heights without dying. What’s that all about? Well, to answer that question, we need to go back a few years to the mid 1920s, and there we will meet a heroic captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps - no Air Force yet - named Hawthorne Charles Gray. Captain Gray was an aeronaut and a brave man. He was born in Pasco, Washington to a prominent steamboat captain, who outlived his son by a few years, always a tragedy. In 1921, young Gray, then a second Lieutenant, began piloting balloons with the US Army Air Service, and showed a remarkable ability as a balloonist. March 9, 1927, Captain Gray climbed to previously unreached heights in his balloon launched from Scott field near Belleville, Illinois, climbing to 28,510 feet. On that trip, in what would be a portend of the future, Gray passed out from lack of oxygen in such thin air, and barely regained consciousness in time to drop the ballast he needed to slow his balloon down before it landed.

May 4, Gray set another unofficial record for highest altitude reached by a human being, becoming the first man to climb above 42,000 feet above the earth. This time, his balloon was coming down too fast yet again, so Gray parachuted out of it at 8,000 feet, landing safely.

His November 4, 1937 flight would not go so well. On ascent, Gray, who was using oxygen to survive, threw one of his empty tanks out of the gondola and it broke his radio antenna, which cut off contact between him and the ground. One wonders about that oxygen tank…I hope it didn’t land on anybody! Can you imagine? That would be quite a mystery for a Hercule Poirot or what’s an American detective active in the 1920s….maybe an Ellery Queen or Continental Op. They come upon a dead body who has been smashed over the head with an oxygen tank, laying nearby. Quite a mystery to solve unless you read the newspapers!

So - Captain Gray is ascending, heading up to 40,000 feet. He kept a journal of the flight, and his last entry says, “Sky deep blue, sun very bright, sand all gone.” Somewhere around 40,000 feet, Gray loses consciousness again, but the balloon rises a bit more, reaching somewhere over 43,000 feet and under 44,000 feet. Eventually, it begins to drop without Gray … and it rapidly descends. This time, Captain Gray doesn’t wake up, and he either died due to crash landing, or due to hypoxia, or possibly even organ rupture/failure due to the extreme low pressure up that high, because atmospheric pressure reduces with height. Let’s all salute Captain Gray - one time holder of the highest height by a human record.

These and other deaths inspired our guy Auguste Piccard to design that pressurized gondola so that aeronauts could ascend without fear. Well, that’s probably not at all true. So they could ascend with LESS fear. So Auguste invented a spherical and pressurized dome that would allow our pioneering aeronauts to go to the edge of space without wearing a pressure suit and without passing out in the low-pressure, low-oxygen, low-heat atmosphere.

And you know what? It worked! May of 1931, less than four years after Captain Gray’s 43,000 foot ascent and death, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer used the Piccard Gondola to great effect, reaching a record altitude of 51,775 feet, which essentially makes them - arguably - the first humans in space, because they were the first humans to enter the stratosphere. While they were up there, they used their instruments to gather data on the upper atmosphere and make measurements on cosmic rays.

The August 1931 edition of Popular Science focused on Piccard’s record breaking journey into the edge of space, writing, “"A huge yellow balloon soared skyward, a few weeks ago, from Augsberg, Germany. Instead of a basket, it trailed an air-thin black-and-silver aluminum ball. Within the contraption, Prof. Auguste Piccard, physicist, and Charles Kipfer aimed to explore the air 50,000 feet up. Seventeen hours later, after being given up for dead, they returned safely from an estimated height of more than 52,000 feet, almost ten miles, shattering every aircraft altitude record." Popular Science, August 1931.

This ascent, as well as many others, really began the space race between the USSR and the USA - way before president Kennedy’s announcement of his intentions to put a man on the moon, and before the first flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. For years in the 1930s and 1940s, the Russians and Americans went back and forth seeking supremacy in the skies. In September of 1934, the Soviets launched a large balloon with three russian Aeronauts on board that became the first to go above 60,000 feet, beating Auguste Piccard’s record by nearly 10,000 feet. Interestingly, FAI - Federation Aeronatique Internationale - the sort of Guinness Book of World Records for aviation at the time - did NOT recognize the Russian record for highest humans, because Russia wasn’t a member of the FAI at the time. Which, honestly, seems kind of petty.

That gave Thomas “Tex”Settle and Chester L. Fordney - American aeronauts the opportunity to claim the highest human record, and they did so in November of 1933, reaching the incredible height of 61,237 feet, and landing in a marsh in New Jersey that proved difficult to get out of. Though Settle and Fordney’s flight was about 1000 feet lower than the Russian one, they had the official record for a while, because they were part of the FAI. This flight did, however, impress the Russians, and as the U.S. Naval Institute website notes, the American Pilots received a telegram:

“From Maxim Litvinoff, Foreign Commissar of the Soviet Union, came this message: HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR GREAT ACHIEVEMENT. I AM SURE THAT YOUR COLLEAGUES IN THE SOVIET UNION HAVE WATCHED WITH GREATEST INTEREST YOUR FLIGHT. MAY BOTH OUR COUNTRIES CONTINUE TO CONTEST THE HEIGHTS IN EVERY SPHERE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNIQUE.

"Contest the heights"—these were the words that Litvinoff used. The Soviet intent to compete with American technology had been declared, the challenge given, the race towards space begun.

Russia's response to the new American record came only two months after the Settle Fordney flight. The Osoaviakhim, with a crew of three, Fedossejenko, Vassenko, and Oussyskine, climbed to a height of 72,182 feet on 30 January 1934. During descent, however, the balloon fell, out of control, killing all on board. The Soviets said that the crew, in their enthusiasm, had simply over-expended their ballast, failing to keep enough to control their descent. American balloonists, quick to doubt that their Russian counterparts would make such a fundamental error, were more inclined to believe that the Osoaviakhim, or Sirius as it was also known, had iced up during its descent through the clouds. One factor was unclear—why the flight had been attempted at such an unfavorable time of year.

Later, newspaper sources would provide an interesting, perhaps accurate, answer. That week in January was the week when the 17th All-Union Communist Party Congress was meeting in Moscow. Stalin, so the story went, anxious that a spectacular Soviet achievement take place while the Congress was in session, let it be known that he expected the Osoaviakhim to provide that achievement. When adverse mid-winter weather threatened to cancel the operation, he allegedly sent word direct: "You go ... or else!" Perhaps, then, with good reason, Fedossejenko had leaned from the hatch at take-off to cry "Long Live the 17th Party Congress! Long Live the World Revolution!"

Source: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1963/august/when-race-space-began

After all of this, Auguste Piccard’s interests seem to have had a big, big shift. He realized that his idea of a pressurized gondola of sorts could not only allow exploration into space, but ALSO into the DEPTHS of the ocean! So he applied his pressurized gondola principles to the construction of a bathyscaphe, which is like a deep-sea submersible that is suspended by a tether below a float. After a few designs and redesigns of his model, Auguste and his son Jacques built an improved version of his bathyscaphe and in 1953, they set the all time human DEPTH record into the sea at over 10,335 feet deep. Jacques would later go on to be one of the greatest undersea explorers of all time. In January of 1960, Jacques Piccard and his friend the American oceanographer Lieutenant Don Walsh boarded the Trieste - a bathyscaphe of Jacques Piccard’s design - and went to the floor of the Mariana Trench, the literal deepest place in the world. They got down to 35,797 feet in a descent that took over four hours.

So not only was Auguste’s son Jacques an amazing balloonist and undersea pioneer, but his grandson (and Jacque’s son) Bertrand Piccard is ALSO a pretty amazing guy. As a youngster, he was - shockingly - afraid of heights, but he overcame that fear and took up hang-gliding as a 16 year old. His degree - he’s still alive at 67 - is in psychiatry, but like his dad and granddad, he is also an adventurer, and is a record setter in his own right! In 1999, Bertrand and his friend Brian Jones completed the first non-stop balloon world circumnavigation in LESS THAN 20 days. NON STOP! And in less than 80 days!

Think about that. This ONE guy - Auguste - a nerdy academic - at least to look at him - at one point held the all time human record for highest height ascended and deepest depth ascended, and had an equally impressive son and grandson. That’s crazy fascinating, and yet not one in a hundred college students today could probably tell you much of anything about Auguste Piccard.

Or, his twin brother Jean. Jean was born in 1884 in Switzerland and in 1931 moved to the US where he taught chemistry at the University of Chicago. While teaching there, he met Jeannette Ridlon, a graduate student, and they eventually got married. Jean was also an aeronaut, and a chemist like his father, but also an inventor like his brother. He invented a frost-free window that one could use in the gondola to look out and see the surroundings at extreme altitudes, and also a liquid oxygen converter that could convert liquid o2 to breathable air at high and cold altitudes. He also taught and inspired Robert R. Gilruth, who would go on to become the first director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. In addition to ALL of that, he was also a pioneer in the invention of the plastic balloon AND the inventor of cluster ballooning, which refers to the use of multiple balloons in flight. This is going to be important soon when we finally get to our guy Lawnchair Larry, the inspiration for this series.

Jean wasn’t just an inventor, he was also a doer, and so was his wife. Jeanette obtained a doctoral degree in education in 1942, and also graduated from seminary in 1973.

Jeanette and Jean both became flight pioneers in October of 1934 when they lifted off from From Airport in Dearborn, Michigan with Henry Ford and Orville Wright both watching. Jeanette was the pilot of the Piccard Gondola, Jean was in charge of scientific instruments and testing, and their pet turtle, Fleur de Lys, was in charge of security. Though they did not break the world HUMAN altitude record, two important records were broken that day. Jeanette became the first human in space - having reached the stratosphere - and also became the highest female human in history. As well, presumably, Fleur de Lys set the all time turtle altitude record, which is pretty significant for reptiles. Jeanette’s highest female ever record lasted for almost 30 years until in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first female astronaut/cosmonaut.

Speaking of - here is a fascinating woman that most people have ALSO never heard of. Tereshkova, born in 1937 in the former USSR, was trained in engineering and skydiving at an early age. In 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in OUTER space, completing an orbit of earth aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule. Gagarin reached a maximum altitude of 203 miles - way beyond the capability of balloons. Russia had won the first leg of the space race. But, they were monitoring American/NASA progress, and noted that female pilots were training to be astronauts in the U.S. as part of the Mercury 13 program. This caused Nikolai Kamanin, the USSR director of Cosmonaut training, to contend, “"We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women." And, true to his word, that’s exactly what happened. Valentina Tereshkova, along with a group of prospective Russian female cosmonauts, went through a rigorous training and selection period, which culminated in Tereshkova being selected to be the first woman in space.

On a June morning in 1963, barely two years after Gagarin’s historic flight, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova climbed into a metal marble called Vostok 6, took the call sign “Chaika” (“Seagull”), and became the first woman to ride a controlled explosion into orbit. For just under three days, about 71 hours, she circled our planet 48 times, a tour count that would make Phileas Fogg jealous and most stomachs mutiny. starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov

Context first: the Soviets staged Vostok 6 as a duet with Vostok 5, flown by Valery Bykovsky. They drifted to within a few miles, chattered on the radio, and gave the world a celestial his-and-hers photo-op that also happened to be serious science: how would a woman’s body handle spaceflight? (Short answer: quite well, though the PR gloss was thicker than a Moscow winter.) During the flight, Tereshkova even beamed live TV back to Earth, which, in 1963, felt like sorcery with wires. She also had a “Kremlin-to-cosmos” chat with Premier Nikita Khrushchev—imagine your boss phoning you at 17,000 mph to ask how your day is going. SpaceEuropean Space Agency

Some people - men and women, get carsick just driving to the store. And one can only imagine that a drive through space is stunning; but space food, especially early space food, less so. Tereshkova later reported that while attempting to eat, she vomited, chalk it up to the cuisine, not the cosmos,and then carried on with her checklist. That detail survived the censors and post-flight euphemisms and comes straight from technical reconstructions of the mission. It’s the kind of gritty, unfussy note that makes the achievement feel human: this was pioneering science done in a tin ball with a menu that fought back. She was pretty cagey in reporting this incident to mission control until she was back on terra firma. russianspaceweb.com

Her kit list also included a small lesson in logistics. Years later, Tereshkova dryly revealed that ground crews packed food, water, and toothpaste… but no toothbrush. Soviet engineering could put a “Seagull” in orbit; Soviet packing could still forget the bristles. Not having a toothbrush after barfing is a pretty big bummer, considering she was in space for 2 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes. She improvised; history moved on. (And yes, she also disclosed a far more serious glitch: the capsule’s guidance was initially set to climb, not descend—later corrected from the ground. But that’s another tale.) The Guardian

The work itself was real. Tereshkova kept medical logs, took photographs of Earth’s horizon, which was useful for studying atmospheric layers, and reported on her condition in coded language if needed. (“Palm tree” would have meant she felt unwell; “rowan tree,” that she’d vomited. She didn’t rely on the euphemisms; she relied on grit.) In a program where image often outran information, her notes and photos added data points to a thin file about human adaptation to space. Smithsonian Magazine

Then came the bit that makes Vostok flights sound like daredevilry wrapped in bureaucracy: reentry by ejection. The capsule plunged, Tereshkova blew the hatch around 20,000 feet, and parachuted to Earth like it was just another weekend at the aeroclub, because for her, it almost was. Touchdown was safe; and she immediately became a legend, though not a very well known legend outside of Red borders. She’d spent more time in orbit than all American astronauts combined to that date, and she did it solo. Space

History later tried to sand down the edges. Official Soviet assessments called her performance “adequate,” which is how bureaucracies spell “historic but imperfect.” Yet the record is the record: first woman in space; 48 orbits; a tough flight in a cramped sphere with a stubborn menu and a missing toothbrush, capped by a parachute landing and a phone call from the Soviet premier. It’s hard to imagine a neater encapsulation of the Khrushchev era: audacious, improvised, successful—and just a bit absurd. starchild.gsfc.nasa.govEuropean Space Agency

If you want a moral, here’s mine: the barrier wasn’t broken by a flawless robot; it was crossed by a human being who did the job, handled the mess, and came home. “Seagull” flew into history. Pretty impressive, if you ask me, as are pretty much all of our pioneering aeronauts and astronauts.

Tereshkova is the first woman in outer space, the ONLY woman ever to be on a solo space mission, and the youngest woman to orbit the Earth. Amazingly, Tereshkova is STILL ALIVE TODAY!

And you know what? That’s a good place to end. Let me pull back the podcasting curtain a little bit, and give you a peak into the process. Initially, this episode, or - rather, the last episode was supposed to be all about Lawnchair Larry and the history of wacky human flights like his - crazy guys who donned wingsuits too early for the technology to have matured, or people who attached balloons to their chairs and floated off into the ether. But, the more I researched, the more fascinating and surprising stories I found from the history of aviation, so the last episode ended, and we hadn’t got to Lawnchair Larry. No problem, I thought, I guess we will lead episode #2 with him. And, yeah. So - here we are at episode two, and we haven’t even gotten to the inspiration for this mini-series…which is just insane to me, but I hope you have enjoyed learning about the Montgolfier brothers and Franz Reichelt from last week’s episode, and the Wonder Twins - Pierre and Auguste Piccard plus Valentina Tereshkova, from this week’s episode. There’s so much more to the history of flight than I had realized, and that’s what I love so much about history. It’s as deep as humanity. There’s literally billions of untold interesting stories out there, and I hope to at least get to tell you about a few of them. Tell a friend about the show, share it on social media, whatever. A podcast like this survives by word of mouth and social media shares, so however much of that you do, I surely appreciate it!

Like last week, we will close this week’s episode with a song all about the first human-powered flight, a failed jump off of the Eiffel Tower, the Hindenburg Disaster and Lawnchair Larry’s amazing trip across the West coast floating at 16,000 feet in his lawnchair. This song was commissioned by our Dayton, Ohio band friends Four for Flying out of the Kayfabe Municipal Airport there. Thanks for listening!