Forster, 1832, Annals

From Inventing aviation
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Thomas Forster, M.B., F.L.S., F.R.A.S. Annals of some remarkable Aërial and Apline Voyages, including those of the author; to which are added Observations on the Partial Deafness to which Aerial and Mountain Travellers are Liable, and an essay on the Flight and Migration of Birds, the whole being intended as supplementary to "Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena." London: Keating and Brown, Duke Street, and 63, Paternoster Row; and Heighly, 32, Fleet Street. 1832.

Online at Internet Archive.

Forster made his own ascent on 30 April 1831, with celebrity balloonist Charles Green. His description of the sensation of ballooning follows:

Picture yourself, reader, two persons suspended in a small basket slung under an inflated bag of huge dimensions buoyant in the air immediately beneath a canopy of mist, and in the elevated plane of evaporating and coloured clouds, whose grotesque forms are gradually becoming lost amid the shadows of greyhooded evening, in perfect stillness, without any perceivable motion, and looking down upon a great and apparently concave amphitheatre, divided like a map, and made up of objects rendered too diminutive by their distance to be well defined, and which appear to have no altitude at the great height from which we view them;—and you may get some idea of the sensation produced by a view from a becalmed balloon. One seems, as it were, to have been divested of all terrestrial connexions, and, raised above the smoke and stir of that dim spot which men call earth, to be breathing, in delicious tranquility, the pure ether of the celestial regions.

(Cf. John Jeffries, who experienced a palpable "stillness" in the air during his voyage 47 years earlier.)


Original title
Simple title
Authors
Date
Countries
Languages
Keywords
Journal
Related to aircraft? -1
Page count
Word count
Wikidata id