The Ice Balloon. Alec Wilkinson

man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,” he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinet-maker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.

      Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.

      Wise had made roughly four hundred flights “and had had all manner of thrilling adventures,” Andrée wrote. “He had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

      “In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.”

      Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, “the dream of my lifetime.” The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.

      In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. “The discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain Hall’s death,” he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach the pole, “not to mention the journey of the vessel Polaris”—Hall’s ship—“which has just disappeared and probably been lost, is nothing but a pleasure trip compared to this journey through airspace, win or lose.” Wise eventually decided that the balloon wasn’t substantial enough, and he withdrew. While being filled, the balloon tore and collapsed. A smaller version left for Europe and after three hours crashed in a storm near New Haven, Connecticut.

      Wise took Andrée to his shop and showed him “how balloons were cut, sewed together and varnished.” When Andrée asked if he might go up in a balloon, Wise “acquiesced immediately, and a short time afterwards informed me that I might accompany his niece, who was to make an ascension a few days later. It was to take place at the city of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where the authorities had decided to celebrate the Day of Independence with a balloon ascension.”

      The evening before, Andrée, Wise, and the niece rode west on a train, with the balloon. When they arrived in the morning Wise said that he needed to rest and gave Andrée the task of filling the balloon, “which I naturally accepted with alacrity.” The gas was drawn from a main in the city square, and by five the balloon was full. As Andrée and the niece, dressed as the goddess of liberty, were about to get into the basket, a high wind rose and “the bag collapsed like a rag.” The balloon had been torn, and there was not sufficient time to mend it and fill it again. “Thus ended my first attempt to get up into the air.”

      A few weeks later Andrée heard of a balloon in Philadelphia that would be taking five passengers, and he reserved a place. The ticket, however, cost seventy-five dollars, and he had only fifty, which the owner wouldn’t accept. (“To be sure, I had more money,” he wrote, “but at the moment it had been lent to a fellow student, who just then was out in the country, painting picket fences at fifty cents a day and board, and thus was in no position to pay me back.”)

      Not long after that Andrée fell sick with an intestinal complaint that he believed was caused by drinking ice water, but may have been from his living mostly on cake, candy, and ice cream, according to his journals. Having stayed five months in Philadelphia, he went back to Sweden.

      Three years later, in May of 1879, Wise wrote a letter to the New York Times to say that someone should make a trip to the pole in a balloon. “In the polar summer there is an inflowing current of air that will carry a balloon into the polar basin, if it be kept near the earth, with balance ropes for compensation, to avoid the balloon’s rising up into the outflowing current,” he wrote.

      “It is utterly futile to attempt an ingress by landcraft or watercraft with a handful of men,” he continued. “With a well-organized party of a thousand men, moved and stationed at intervals of five miles—say ten men at each station, it may be accomplished…. Aircraft is the most feasible—the least expensive, the fewest number of men required, and the shortest time necessary to make the ingress and egress. It is possible to solve the problem within a hundred hours from the time the aerostat is made available. If you deem my suggestions of any value, give the scheme a push, as I am more than convinced that it can be pushed to ultimate consummation through the upper highway.”

      If Andrée ever saw the letter, he didn’t mention it in his writings.

      He never saw Wise again either. In September, five months after Wise had written to the Times, Andrée “read in the papers that my old friend had gone off on a balloon trip, had been caught in a storm and had never since been heard of.” Wise was lost on September 29, in the Pathfinder, over Lake Michigan. “For his sake I like to believe that he landed unhurt and that he thereafter encountered obstacles which prevented him from coming home,” Andrée wrote.

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      Andrée exemplified a conceit that outlived him—the belief, then nascent, that science, in the form of technology, could subdue the last obstacles to possession of the world’s territories, if not also its mysteries. More or less as psychologists were beginning to regard the deeper orders of the mind, this view saw nature as a shadowy chamber of secrets, a vault, that could be illuminated by the new instruments of science. Its banal applications were typified by devices for the home and the factory—the gramophone, the vacuum cleaner, the arc welding machine—that made life easier, and its sinister ones were the innovations in weapons—the machine gun, the torpedo—and their influence on the tactics of war. For all its worldliness it was also an innocent notion, a response to Romanticism, which had influenced earlier ideas about the Arctic.

      Andrée might also be said to have believed in a sort of new dismissiveness that held that anything modern was more desirable than a lived-in idea or artifact. The balloon was superior to the sledge and the ship. The encumbrances of the ocean and the land were absent from the air. The sledge and the ship had failed, the balloon and the air were all possibility. He was the first explorer to head toward the pole unaccompanied by Romantic references.

      A hallmark of the Romantic tradition was the notion of the “sublime,” described by Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry, which was published in 1757. The sublime was characterized by an astonishment that drove from the mind all other feelings but terror and awe, Burke wrote. This stupefying dread was “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” The terror, which was encompassing and prevented reasoning or reflection, was provoked partly by an apprehension of the infinite, and also of the holy. The sublime aroused