Five Weeks in a Balloon. Jules Verne

38. Fergusson is no less diligent with the hard sciences, devoting all of chapters 7 and 10 to his balloon’s inventive design. Finally, as a change of pace, Verne even has Joe deliver a mock lecture—in chapter 9 the servant delivers a bogus description of the cosmos, discoursing “about Neptune where seamen get a hearty welcome, and Mars where soldiers hog the sidewalks.”

      And finally Five Weeks contains pinches of the Vernian ingredient known to most: futuristic speculation. In chapter 16 Fergusson envisions a pattern of mass migrations with Africa emerging as “the center of the civilized world.” We’re not there yet, but another piece of speculation came to pass pretty quickly: in chapter 18 Fergusson and Co. pinpoint the Nile’s source, and it’s much as Henry Stanley confirmed it during the next decade. Prophetic also are the novel’s new ballooning technologies: as Verne’s grandson wrote a century later, “No satisfactory solution had yet been found for steering a balloon” (Jules-Verne, 57). His grandfather’s scheme entails a hydrogen balloon, a double envelope, and a pioneering version of today’s burner. Fergusson’s vehicle rises and descends in order to find air currents heading in the desired direction. In the past this was accomplished only by dropping ballast or expelling gas—but after a while the balloon would run out of both and the journey inevitably grind to a halt. Fergusson’s contribution is a heating system whereby the balloon “would rise to the appropriate altitude when the pilot heated water” (Lottman, xi). Warming up, the hydrogen expands and the balloon will climb; cooling off, the hydrogen contracts and the balloon will descend.

      Critics Corner

      It sounds simple and it is. Furthermore, Verne has been applauded by some commentators for coming up with an authentic innovation. The mechanism just described seems “to have been an invention of Verne himself,” Costello writes (75), and Walter James Miller agrees that the Frenchman had “invented a new and plausible kind of balloon control” (xv). Even three decades later, Verne scholar Jean-Marc Deschamps concurs: “No balloon in Jules Verne’s time had been equipped with such an ingenious arrangement” (15).

      Yet Verne’s contraption makes Deschamps jittery: he labels it “a flying bomb,” marveling that it “never exploded despite the dangers lurking on every page” (15). Butcher likewise calls it a “frightening combination” (147), and naturally enough Verne’s device sounds dubious today: hydrogen has long had a shady reputation, ever since taking the fall for the 1937 Hindenburg tragedy. But Verne’s explanations were probably convincing in his own era when hydrogen was king—certainly Nadar was persuaded (Jules-Verne, 56). These days helium and propane often replace it, although it may be coming back in vogue: some space scientists now blame the Hindenburg fire on other causes, “as hydrogen produces none of the spectacular flames that consumed the airship” (David Owen, 63). In any case Verne’s concept still operates in the burners used by today’s hot-air balloonists: the purpose is still to climb and descend in search of favorable currents.

      Other criticisms haven’t always been well founded. Costello worries that Verne “does not seem to have considered how dangerous it would be if any oxygen leaked into the system” (75). And yet Verne repeatedly emphasizes (chapters 10, 12, 19, and 42) that the balloon’s throat is hermetically sealed; further, when Fergusson finally resorts to oxygen for lift (chapter 43), the text explicitly tells us that “he took care beforehand to expel any remaining hydrogen through the valve.”

      Jacques Noiray has different doubts: he wonders if Verne’s device is truly original, finding it “oddly similar” (45–46) to a so-called secret method used in an 1857 balloon flight to Algiers by the artist Paul Gavarni. I can find no official confirmation that the trip genuinely took place, but in any case it couldn’t have had much in common with Verne’s novel: Gavarni’s vehicle boasted a propeller, two side-by-side balloons, and the usual release of gas in order to descend. The undisclosed method is alleged to have replaced the lost hydrogen—which makes it an entirely different animal from Verne’s heating system.

      As indicated, Verne’s candidate for the Nile’s source has sometimes been called prophetic: he opted for a stream flowing north from Lake Victoria (rather than Lake Tanganyika, as Burton argued). It was a prophecy “fulfilled in a matter of months when John Henning Speke returned from Africa to announce he had discovered the source of the Nile. But Verne’s hero … had already made exactly the same discovery” (Miller, xv). The hard facts leave no wiggle room: Five Weeks in a Balloon rolled off the presses on January 31, 1863; Speke’s famous telegram (“The Nile is settled.”) reached London on May 6, 1863, appearing in the Times on the following day (Benjamin Disraeli, 275).

      Given this chronology, it seems bizarre of Martin to disparage Five Weeks by claiming that Speke had found the Nile’s source in 1858, long before the novel and that it was “something which has already been discovered” (35–36). Few agreed back then and few would agree now: as Fernández-Armesto reminds us, Speke “had seen only the southern shore of the lake and had not established how big it was or even whether it was a single body of water” (352). In fact Speke’s later claim in 1863 (after he actually reached the northern end) also met with widespread resistance; it was only in the mid-1870s that an expedition under Henry Stanley “settled the question” and at last confirmed that Speke’s hypothesis was correct (Fernández-Armesto, 355).

      Generally, then, Vernians have high regard for Five Weeks in a Balloon. Butcher speaks for many when he notes its “innovative theme,” calls it “a highly readable story,” praises its “variety and pace,” and labels it “quintessential Verne” (147–48). Not surprisingly, the book enjoyed strong sales, effectively launching Verne on a lifetime career. His grandson judged it “an immediate bestseller” (Jules-Verne, 57), while Lottman and Butcher both agree it was Verne’s most successful title after Around the World in Eighty Days: the former (xiii) estimates that it was his second biggest seller in its original edition, while the latter (150) goes even farther: “Over Verne’s lifetime … Five Weeks … [sold] second best among all his books, with an estimated one third of a million copies in French alone.”

      Aftermath and Influence

      Verne stayed interested in aeronautics. Later in 1863 he joined Nadar in founding “a Society for Aerial Locomotion” (Jules-Verne, 57–58), then helped promote his friend’s manufacture of a colossal balloon nearly as tall as Notre Dame cathedral. Christened the Giant, the vehicle was, in Miller’s words, “one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time” (xiv), since it raised money for Nadar’s aviation schemes while simultaneously boosting sales for Verne’s new novel.

      The author waited another decade before he went flying himself: “his first and only balloon flight … lasted only twenty-four minutes” (Lottman, 91). His pilot was the famous aeronaut Eugène Godard, and Verne wrote up the experience in a newspaper article, “24 Minutes in a Balloon” (1873), for the Journal d’Amiens. His verdict on ballooning was positive: “It’s even more than a journey, it’s something like a dream, but a dream that’s all too short!”

      This brief account was one of several further pieces by him on the topic. Earlier, Verne had penned two articles for the Musée des familles, one on Nadar’s colossal project entitled “Concerning the Giant” (1863), the other the aforementioned Edgar Allan Poe and His Works, in which he critiques Poe’s ballooning stories. Following his twenty-four minutes with Godard, balloons would again play key roles in his novels (The Mysterious Island, Hector Servadac [1877], Robur the Conqueror), not to mention related gadgetry such as giant