Superman may have been the Man of Steel, but Henry Coxwell was the real-life gutsy hero with nerves of steel- and he also loved to fly.
The very cool customer that was Henry Tracey Coxwell once shimmied up the rigging of a hot air balloon while it was drifting out of control FIVE MILES up in the air- the same cruising altitude as a Jumbo jet. Teetering on the edge of the balloon one wrong step would see him plummet 37,000 ft to the ground. The temperature was so numbingly cold his hands had frozen, so thinking outside of the box (or the wicker basket in this case) he was forced to use his teeth to open a valve which allowed the balloon to descend back down to earth.
Coxwell’s buoyant bravery, as he demonstrated on more than one occasion, was typical of an era when hot air ballooning was a romantic pursuit and adventure-seekers were everywhere.
When we think of hot air ballooning today perhaps images of Richard Branson on one of his record-breaking balloon exploits comes to mind? Perhaps the Wizard of Oz leaving a tearful Dorothy behind as he took off for Kansas without her or maybe Phileas Fogg launching off on his journey in Jules Verne’s legendary ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’? But the truth is although it’s not a hot topic today, ballooning was once a colossal craze.
Hot air balloon appeal in the UK cranked up when Italian aeronaut Vincent Lunardi, nicknamed ‘The Daredevil Aeronaut’ made several flights across Britain in front of large crowds. The Prince of Wales was among 200,000 people who watched him take off from the Artillery Ground in London in September 1784, accompanied in his wicker basket by a dog, a cat and a caged pigeon.
Henry Coxwell grew up decades later but even when he was a child his sights were fixed on the skies. In fact, Henry, who had been born in 1819 in a village on the banks of the river Medway in Kent, developed a fascination for hot air ballooning that would see him go down in history as one of the earliest aeronauts devoted to pushing the boundaries of lighter-than-air flight.
Coxwell was born at the parsonage at Wouldham, the youngest son of Commander Joseph Coxwell of the Royal Navy. His family moved to Chatham in 1822 and Henry went to school in the town.
Young Henry was never happier than when he was watching a hot air balloon ascent. He admired pioneers like Margaret Graham who was the first British woman to make a solo balloon flight, a feat she accomplished in 1826. Another of his heroes was Charles Green who was the most famous balloonist of the 19th century in England and who had made his first flight in a coal gas balloon when Coxwell was just three years old. When he was nine Henry watched Green take off in his balloon from Rochester -a day he would never forget.
Coxwell made his first flight in a hot air balloon in August 1844 when he was just 25. He didn’t fly it, he was a passenger in the balloon which ascended above White Conduit Gardens,at Pentonville.
The experience only added to his love of the pursuit and the following year he founded and edited The Balloon magazine.
In 1847 Coxwell had his first taste for the perils of ballooning when he made a night flight from Vauxhall Gardens with co-pilot Albert Smith. The flight, during a storm, proved almost fatal and ended with the balloon – packed with 60lbs of fireworks which they were supposed to let off as they ascended- plunging rapidly to earth. The men were only saved because some scaffolding broke their fall.
Coxwell later described the drama: “Just before the ascent was made a storm was brewing, and the manager of the gardens queried to whether it was safe to make the voyage. I had never made night ascent before but on being appealed to I decided to go, discharging the rockets and the Roman candles as we ascended. Suddenly the storm burst out in all its fury. We were 4,000 feet above the surface of the earth. The balloon was rising and higher, when all at once ' flash of lightning disclosed the fact that we were falling headlong over the West End of London.
“For moment l scarcely knew what to do, but soon collecting thoughts, I flew up to the hoop of the balloon and cut the line that connects the safety valve to the lower part of the balloon, that as the gas escaped the lower hemisphere formed a sort of parachute.”
Being the confident chap he was, Coxwell dusted himself off and within a week he was back up in the skies.
Coxwell had been trained as a dental surgeon and was making a good living out of the profession, however performing root canals with his feet on the ground just didn’t get his blood pumping and in 1848 he abandoned dentistry and became a professional balloonist.
He travelled to Europe where he made balloon ascents all over Belgium, Germany and Austria, taking up fee paying passengers in his own balloon creation- The Sylph. Affluent men and women delighted in this romantic new leisure pursuit and crowds of thousands of spectators often came out to witness flight launches.
One account of two of his flights in Germany read: “They were both extremely majestic, and the number of persons assembled was so great that cavalry, infantry, and police were stationed around the aeronaut, to preserve order and assist in the proceedings. His fame in Germany is very great, and he is much liked and patronised by the higher orders.”
Ballooning was a dangerous past time of course. As well as the risk of falls, explosions and flying too high, one flight saw Coxwell’s balloon being shot at and riddled with bullets after he was mistaken for a ‘Danish spy’. Another time, as he was about to take off in front of a large crowd in Stepney, with several passengers onboard the balloon’s silk canopy ruptured and ‘burst’, rendering the craft inoperable.
After one near death incident where he fell from the balloon he was in and came crashing down in a public park, Coxwell opened his eyes to see an indignant policeman standing over him, pointing to the sign ‘keep off the grass!’
By the 1860s Coxwell earned a reputation as a skilled balloonist so in 1862 when the British Association for the Advancement of Science wanted to make investigations of the upper atmosphere using air balloons, Dr James Glaisher, a noted meteorologist, was chosen to carry out the experiments and Coxwell was employed to fly and make the balloons.
Glaisher persuaded Coxwell to build a new balloon suitable for a record altitude ascent. Coxwell responded with the largest balloon ever constructed, with a capacity of 90,000 cubic feet of gas. It would later be named the Mammoth.
Together with barometers, thermometers, hygrometers and other instruments, the pair would ascend into the atmosphere and carry out temperature and altitude readings that would end up greatly helping scientists of the age.
For their third flight, on September 5 1862, Coxwell and Glaisher took off from Wolverhampton in the coal powered balloon that Coxwell had designed.
Their first ascension had reached 26,000 feet, the second, 24,000 feet and everything worked well, and so for this trip they decided to try for the record and go even higher. Before long they were five miles up in the sky, with Glaisher tentatively measuring the weather and atmospheric pressure as they rose.
But at around 29,000 feet as the temperature nosedived. Glaisher could no longer read the fine markings on any of his instruments nor the time on his watch, and shortly afterward his eyes failed and he became senseless.
The balloon kept rising but the temperature kept dropping. Coxwell realized that he needed to open the gas valve to initiate a descent before he passed out as well. If he didn’t, the balloon would either carry on going up higher or burst altogether. Either way both men would be history.
As the balloon came down, dropping 19,000 ft in just 15 minutes, Coxwell attempted to rouse Glaisher- who had been unconscious for seven minutes. The scientist soon came round and immediately continued to monitor the instruments and make his observations. When he saw Coxwell’s frost-bitten hands Glaisher tried to help by pouring brandy over them.
The fact they landed safely was nothing short of a miracle. It turned out they had almost reached the Stratosphere, breaking an altitude record when they attained an estimated height of 37,000 feet, without breathing apparatus and enduring temperatures as low as -46 degrees Celsius.
As well as setting a new record for the age the readings gleaned from the flight proved to greatly enhance scientist’s knowledge of weather patterns and the formation of clouds and rain.
In the years after the ‘miracle flight’ Coxwell continued to travel and fly. He also carried out important research into using hot air balloons for military purposes and charted his many adventures in his memoirs, My Life and Balloon Experiences. He moved to Tottenham for a time with his wife Lydia before settling in Seaford, East Sussex, where he opened his own balloon factory.
Henry Coxwell died in January 1900, aged 73. He is still remembered and celebrated amongst historians and scientists for his long list of literal high achievements.
In 2019 the Hollywood film, The Aeronauts, starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, was released and was broadly based on the 1862 Glaisher/Coxwell miracle flight. However, Coxwell was left out of the film altogether and replaced with a fictional female character. It led to some criticism that this was a missed opportunity to share Coxwell’s remarkable story with a new generation.
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