A review by jacqui_des
Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes

4.0

An absolutely fascinating read about the history of ballooning.

Memorable Quotes

"Nature was sublime – and God a sublime Engineer."

"Hugo announced that he would willingly put on his ‘prophetic wings’ for his reckless old friend. The concept of Flight was democratic, it was progressive, it was ‘universal."

"The bitter comment went round that Paris was still a beautiful woman, but she had shaved her head in penitence."

"The wind was our postman, the balloon was our letterbox..."

"With each departing aeronaut, our deepest thoughts also took flight, our hopes and fears, our wishes for absent loved ones, our heartaches and our longings, everything that was good and fine in the human spirit … took to the air."

"As Victor Hugo had predicted, the future lay with the bird, not the cloud."

"Like beautiful sacrifices they would be ‘offered up to heaven’; and like angels they would ‘drop back from the clouds’ for the edification of casual onlookers."

"The mechanical business of flight itself was certainly now handed over, via the airship, to the heavier-than-air machine, and within the next hundred years, to the rocket, the satellite, and ‘ultimately’ to the spaceship. Though neither the Apollo programme nor the current Mars missions are themselves the end, either. There will undoubtedly be further extensions in the forms of interplanetary – if not intergalactic – travel within the next hundred years or so; provided we do not burst our fragile planetary balloon in the meantime."