Introduction

       Verne Takes Off

      It’s a balloonist’s nightmare—a nutcase on board …

      “The higher we go, the more glorious our death will be!”

      All of her ballast tossed out, the balloon carried us to unreachable heights! The vehicle trembled in the air; the tiniest noises became explosions under the arching skies; our planet was the only object that caught my eye in that vastness, and it seemed ready for annihilation, while high above us the sky vanished into deep shadows!

      I watched the fellow stand up in front of me.

      “The time has come!” he told me. “We must die! All men reject us! They hold us in contempt! Let’s crush them!”

      “No more!” I said.

      “Let’s cut the ropes! This gondola will run loose in space! The force of gravity will change direction, and we’ll head for the sun!”

      My despair galvanized me! I pounced on the maniac, and we grappled hand to hand, struggling fearfully! But he knocked me down, pinned me with his knee, and cut the ropes holding the gondola….¹

      Verne was in his early twenties when he published the French originals of these lines. They come from a short story entitled “A Journey by Balloon” and they initially appeared in the August 1851 issue of the magazine Musée des familles (Family Gallery). It was only his second story to reach print; the first saw daylight the month before, same periodical, different genre—a Mexican adventure yarn.

      Even so, “A Journey by Balloon” is an unsettling performance, among the darkest, fiercest things Verne ever penned. For one thing, it showcases two primordial fears—fear of heights and fear of falling. For another, it marks the debut of a crucial Vernian character—the renegade scientist. The plot is simple but riveting. The narrator, a French balloonist, stages a solo flight in a hydrogen balloon, only to have another Frenchman vault on board right at liftoff. The narrative instantly turns nasty. As the balloon rises into the air, the intruder assaults the balloonist, keeps throwing ballast overboard, and sends the vehicle over three miles up. The nameless skyjacker is dark, menacing, suicidal, apparently psychotic, thoroughly scary. The mix of high-impact fiction and news-making nonfiction seems immediately typical of this author.²

      Balloon Beginnings

      Human flight was still a new development—it had sprung up nearly full blown less than seventy years earlier and had barely changed in the decades since. The time was late in 1783. “Only rarely,” historian Richard Hallion writes, “do revolutionary systems and technologies appear within the same year, but such is true of the balloon: the practical balloon constituted the dual invention of the papermaking brothers Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier and scientist Jacques Alexandre César Charles” (47).

      The first launched the hot-air balloon, the second the gas balloon.

      On October 15, 1783, the Montgolfiers sent their first man up in a hot-air balloon, a tethered flight—i.e., the balloon was literally on a leash. On December 1, 1783, Professor Charles went up himself in the first hydrogen balloon—an untethered journey that covered some twenty-five miles and ultimately climbed to 9,000 feet. Charles had recognized “that one could fly by creating a balloon filled with a lifting gas … namely the 17-year-old discovery hydrogen” (Hallion, 49). Isolated in 1766 by British chemist Henry Cavendish, hydrogen went by the nickname “flammable air,” ranked as the lightest of gases, and offered the