John Wise and the Birth of American Ballooning

In this episode, we explore the life and legacy of John Wise, the Lancaster balloonist who became one of the most important pioneers of early American aviation. From homemade hydrogen balloons and violent crashes to record-setting ascents, Wise treated every flight as both spectacle and experiment, using each failure to improve the safety and science of ballooning. 

The episode highlights his major breakthroughs, including early parachute-style safety systems, the rip panel, and his remarkable observations of the upper atmosphere that helped identify what we now know as the jet stream. It also follows his long campaign to prove that balloons could carry mail, gather military intelligence, and one day transform long-distance travel. 

Ultimately, this is a story about invention, risk, and obsession. It traces how Wise helped lay the groundwork for modern aviation, then closes with the mystery of his final 1879 flight over Lake Michigan, where the sky he spent a lifetime studying finally claimed him.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Imagine you're standing in a muddy field in the mid-19th century.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Okay, I am picturing it.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

And the air around you, it doesn't smell like a modern airport.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Right. No sterile tarmac or jet fuel.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Exactly. There is no jet fuel at all. Instead, you are just hit with this overpowering, almost suffocating stench of um bird lime, linseed oil, and raw, highly unstable hydrogen gas.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

That sounds absolutely awful, honestly.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

It gets wilder. You hear this furious, really high-pitched hiss of that gas being pumped into a towering, swollen sphere of varnished muslin.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Just waiting to burst.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Right. It looks like it could rip apart at literally any second. And below it, there's this sharp, rhythmic creaking of a super fragile wicker basket swaying in the wind.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Like a laundry basket, basically.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Yeah, a laundry basket attached to a bomb because standing right there is a man in a formal suit, and he is willingly strapping himself to what is, for all intents and purposes, a massive, highly flammable floating explosive.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

It is so hard to wrap your head around that level of risk.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Right. And you watch him pull a rope, the ground just falls away and he ascends into the sky, propelled by literally nothing but physics and sheer audacity.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

It's the absolute definition of technological frontiering. I mean, there is no manual for this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

None.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Every single flight is an experiment where the ultimate consequence for a miscalculation is death.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Welcome to the deep dive. The man dangling from that balloon is John Wise. And today we are extracting the raw, dangerous, and sometimes hilarious history of how this self-funded piano maker from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, fundamentally conquered the Earth's atmosphere.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

He really did.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

He eventually earned the title of the father of American ballooning. But this isn't, you know, some dusty biography. No, not at all. We are looking at the bleeding edge of early aerospace engineering, a time where safety regulations did not exist, and every piece of data was paid for with burned skin and broken bones.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

And to really appreciate the magnitude of what we are looking at today, we have to completely discard our modern understanding of aviation.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Aaron Ross Powell Right. Because when we think aviation, we think massive infrastructure. Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

In the 1830s, aviation was not a corporate enterprise. There was no NASA. Yeah. There was no military aerospace division with, you know, billions of dollars in funding and supercomputers running fluid dynamics simulation. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

But they barely had reliable weather vanes. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Right. The sky was conquered by highly eccentric, deeply driven individuals. And Wise wasn't just some thrill seeker. He was taking detailed meteorological notes while literally dangling from a thread.

SPEAKER_02 3:05

Aaron Powell Which is insane.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

It is. And in the process, he completely changed our modern understanding of the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

Aaron Ross Powell Okay. Let's unpack this. Because I'm looking at his origins and he doesn't start in a laboratory. No, far from it.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

He starts as a kid in Lancaster in 1822. And I really want to understand how 14-year-old in rural Pennsylvania even gets the idea to build a flying machine. I mean, what was the information ecosystem even like back then?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Aaron Powell Well, information about European aeronautics, like the Montgolfier brothers in France or the Charles brothers, that stuff was trickling into rural Pennsylvania through translated articles in local German language newspapers.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Aaron Powell Oh, interesting. So it was making its way across the ocean.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, exactly. And Wise was the fourth of eight children to William and Mary Trey Weiss, who later anglicized their name to Wise.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

So for a young, highly imaginative kid reading these dispatches from Europe, the idea of humans defying gravity was just intoxicating. It was basically the science fiction of his day suddenly presented as reality.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

Aaron Powell And he decides he wants in.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

He absolutely does.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Aaron Ross Powell So he builds a small fire balloon, a monk all fear style, which is basically a hot air balloon made of paper or really light fabric. Right. And he launches it right in the middle of Lancaster. And I mean, predictably, it plunges straight onto the roof of a house in the center of town and just sets the whole place on fire.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that was uh quite the public debut. After that rather disastrous launch, the local authorities and his parents strongly encouraged him to stick to kites and parachutes.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

I bet they did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So he apprentices as a cabinet maker at 16. And by 21, he actually transitions into making pianos.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Aaron Powell, which seems like a weird pivot, but okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

It does. But the ambition to fly never vanished. By 1835, so he's 27 at this point, he has saved up enough money from his piano making business to self-finance his first full-scale human-carrying balloon in Philadelphia.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

This is where my mind just boggles looking at the materials he had available. I really need you to explain this to me because it sounds completely insane.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

It does sound pretty wild.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

Because he obviously isn't ordering like ripstop nylon or high-tech synthetic polymers off the internet. Our sources say he uses muslin, which is just a plain weave cotton fabric.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Right, like bed sheet material.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Yeah. And he coats it in a mixture of bird lime suspended in linseed oil. What on earth is that combination and how does it possibly hold in hydrogen?

SPEAKER_00 5:30

It sounds incredibly primitive, I know. But it was actually a very carefully calculated chemical solution to a massive engineering problem. Okay. See, in 1835, vulcanized rubber was not yet widely available, at least not reliably for this kind of massive association. Right. You need a fabric that is incredibly light, but it also has to be perfectly gas tight. So the muslin provides the structural grid.

SPEAKER_02 5:53

Okay, the skeleton.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Exactly. Now, bird lime is an incredibly sticky viscous adhesive. It's made by boiling down tree bark. And historically, it was used to literally trap small birds on branches.

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Wow. That is so weird.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Yeah, it's super sticky. And then you have linseed oil, which is derived from flaxseeds. It's a drying oil.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Meaning it hardens.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Right. When it's exposed to air, it polymerizes into a solid, flexible film.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Oh, I see where this is going.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yeah. So by suspending the sticky birdlime in the linseed oil and slathering that all over the cotton, wise was essentially creating a crude early biopolymer.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

That is actually brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

It really is. The oil dries to create a flexible shell, and the sticky birdlime fills in all the microscopic gaps between the cotton threads to prevent the tiny hydrogen molecules from escaping.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

So it's basically a massive sticky bed sheet filled with explosive gas.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

That is a very accurate description.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

But I have to ask, was he just a reckless daredevil doing garage hacker experiments, or was there actual engineering rigor here? Because transitioning from making pianos to aerospace engineering seems like a pretty massive leap.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

The transition is actually perfectly logical when you look at the mechanics of a piano.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Really? How so?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Well, think about it. A piano is not just a musical instrument, it is a machine of immense tension and precise structural integrity.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

Oh, true. The strings.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Exactly. You are dealing with hundreds of heavy steel strings pulling with tons of force across a wooden frame. Building and tuning pianos requires an intuitive, deep understanding of how materials bear weight, how tension is distributed, and just meticulous, unforgiving craftsmanship.

SPEAKER_02 7:33

Because if it breaks, it snaps violently.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Right. If a piano frame cracks, the instrument is ruined. Right. But if a balloon's rigging snaps, you die.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Wow. Put like that, it makes total sense.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, when your life depends on the stitching of cotton fabric and the knotting of hemp ropes, those years of obsessive woodworking and tension management are exactly the skills you need.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

He understands stress loads natively.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Precisely.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

But even with that intuitive understanding, his first year of flying from 1835 to 1836 is just a brutal series of trial and error. I mean the learning curve was incredibly steep. Oh, it's punishing. His very first flight in May 1835 goes nine miles from Philadelphia to New Jersey, which is great. But then he pushes the envelope and the physics bite back hard.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

They usually do.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

On Independence Day that same year, he launches in Lebanon County. He's up in the air trying to manually open the valve at the top of the balloon to descend, but he just loses control. The gas expands way too rapidly, the balloon bursts in midair, and he plummets to the ground.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

And somehow he survives that.

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Right. But then he faces another catastrophic failure in October in Lancaster. He is standing in the c the basket, and as the balloon lifts off, the tension shifts unexpectedly. Oh. He is thrown violently from the basket, knocked completely unconscious on the ground, and he wakes up in the dirt to find his expensive, meticulously crafted balloon has just floated away into the clouds without him.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Adding insult to injury.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

Truly. You would think that would be the end of it, right? I'd be done.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Most people would be.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

But by May 1836, he tries again in Lancaster. He actually gets airborne, stays in the car this time, and flies 75 miles to Harford County, Maryland. A huge success.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Huge. But he finds out the danger doesn't stop when you land. While he's unloading the car, dealing with this massive envelope full of homemade hydrogen, something triggers a spark. Oh no. Yeah. The gas explodes and he is severely burned. So he is physically battered, burned, knocked out, falling out of the sky. I just keep wondering why does he keep doing this?

SPEAKER_02 9:36

Because the burns and the falls, to him, were not deterrents. They were data points.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Data points. That is hardcore.

SPEAKER_02 9:43

It is. A lesser person would have walked away, absolutely. But Wise approached these failures with the exact mindset of an engineer analyzing a stress test.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Okay, so how did he view the danger?

SPEAKER_02 9:54

He recognized that the danger wasn't inherent to the act of flying itself. The extreme danger came from a lack of reliable control mechanisms when the unpredictable inevitably occurred. Things like wind shears, static electricity, thermal expansion.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

So the environment is chaotic and you need a system to handle that chaos. It's exactly the brutal reality of crashing into a Maryland field forced a total reassessment of his design. He realized if you can't prevent the balloon from failing, you have to engineer a way to survive the failure.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

And that mindset brings us to a massive breakthrough in 1838. Wise demands control over his survival. So he perfects this brilliant design, a balloon that, if ruptured, will convert into an inverted parachute.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

It's so smart.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

But how exactly does that work mechanically? I'm having trouble visualizing it.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

The genius is really in the geometry and the air pressure. So a balloon is a sphere, right? Wise designed the lower hemisphere of his balloons to be slightly looser. So if the gas escapes from the top, say it bursts, gravity immediately pulls the basket and the attached netting downward.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Because it's heavy.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Right. And as it falls, the rush of air from below catches that loose bottom half of the sphere and pushes it upward, inverting it right up into the top netting.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Like an umbrella blowing inside out in a windstorm.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Exactly like that. It essentially creates an instant, massive umbrella shape out of the deflated fabric.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

It's an automatic failsafe. You don't even have to pull a cord.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Nope. Physics does it for you.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

But having the theory is one thing. Actually, testing it is a completely different level of crazy. In August 1838, during a flight from Easton, Pennsylvania, he gets caught in bad weather at 13,000 feet.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

That is extremely high up.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

Right, over two miles. His daloon is punctured, and in less than 10 seconds, all the hydrogen hisses out. Imagine standing in a wicker basket over two miles in the air, the fabric above you rips, and you just start free-falling.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

The physiological terror of that moment is hard to even overstate. But his design worked flawlessly.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Thank goodness.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

The rush of air caught the lower half of the fabric, forming the parachute just like he calculated. He descended rapidly, experiencing this sickening, oscillating swing, but the drag slowed his terminal velocity enough to be survivable.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Survivable being the key word.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Yeah, because when the basket hit the ground, the force rebounded, throwing him ten feet into the air.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Jeez.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

But he walked away without a single injury.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

And he trusts his math so much that two months later, in October, he advertises that he is going to deliberately puncture his own balloon just to prove it wasn't a fluke.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Yes, a public demonstration.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

He goes up, pops his own aircraft, and safely parachutes down again. That requires a level of psychological fortitude I can barely comprehend.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

It really highlights his core belief in science over primal fear. And he actually used these deliberate drops to settle a major aerodynamic debate of the era.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Oh, right, the parachute debate.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Yeah. An English balloonist named Robert Cocking had recently died using a cone-shaped parachute designed by Sir George Cayley. The public and the press blamed the cone shaped itself, assuming the older umbrella-shaped design by Andre Jacques Garnerin from 1797 was inherently safer.

SPEAKER_02 13:06

But Wise conducts numerous drops comparing Cayley's cone shape to Garnerin's umbrella shape, and he proves mathematically that the cone is actually far superior.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

He did.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

Why is the cone better than the umbrella? To a layman, an umbrella seems like it would catch more air.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

It comes down to fluid dynamics. An umbrella parachute traps air underneath it. As that air pressure builds, it has to escape somehow, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

So it spills out violently under one edge, causing the parachute to swing sharply in that direction. Then air spills out the other side, causing a swing back.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

Ah, that creates that rocking motion.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Exactly. It creates a violent, escalating oscillation that can easily throw a passenger right out of the basket.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Terrifying.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

A cone-shaped parachute, inverted like a funnel, allows the air to channel smoothly around its edges, creating a vastly more stable vertical descent. Wise proved that Cocking died because of shoddy construction and poor weight calculations, not because the cone shape was aerodynamically flawed.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

So alongside the parachute, he engineers another massive leap in aeronautical safety, which is the rip panel.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

This was revolutionary.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

To appreciate this, we really need to understand how horrifying it was to land a balloon before this invention. Walk us through a standard landing in the 1830s. The basket touches the ground, but you still have this massive sail full of buoyant gas above you.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

This was easily one of the most lethal phases of flight. The moment the basket touched down, the wind would catch that massive, semi-inflated envelope.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Basically turning it into a giant sail.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Exactly. Suddenly you were being dragged horizontally across the countryside at high speeds, smashing through trees, stone fences, and livestock.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

Just bouncing along the ground.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Early balloonists threw out anchors, but they still had to release the lifting gas to kill the brilliancy. The top valve was the only way to vent gas, but it was operated by a rope that could easily tangle or snap during a really rough landing.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

So what did they have to do if the rope snapped?

SPEAKER_00 15:02

The balloonists would literally have to climb out of the basket, scare the outside netting surrounding the thrashing balloon.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

While being dragged.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

While being dragged. They had to climb to the very top and manually open the valve.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

That is insanity.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

It is. As the gas escaped, the balloon would collapse inward. There were horrific, well-documented accidents where the balloonist would be on top, the fabric would suddenly fold, and they would become hopelessly entangled in the rigging.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

They'd either suffocate in the escaping gas or be crushed as the heavy envelope collapsed on them.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

That is absolute nightmare fuel.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Truly.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

So Wise looks at this and invents the whip panel. And instead of a small mechanical valve at the top, it's a specific, heavily reinforced structural seam near the crown of the balloon.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Right. A weak point by design.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Yeah. It's held together by a light adhesive and stitching that is literally designed to fail on command. There is a dedicated, brightly colored rope running straight from that seam down through the inside of the balloon to the basket.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

So when you want to land, you don't climb the rigging.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Never again.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

You stay safely in the basket, grasp that specific rope, and give it a massive two-handed yank. It physically tears open a huge panel at the top, instantly dumping all the gas in seconds.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

The lift is killed immediately. The balloon just collapses flat.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

It's the first true abort button in aviation history.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

It is a fundamental shift from flying an uncontrollable object to flying a machine with an engineered failsafe. It's so brilliant that hot air balloons today still use a version of the rip panel.

SPEAKER_02 16:35

It's the hallmark of great engineering, right? Solving a complex, life-threatening problem with a simple, reliable mechanical action. Exactly. But here is the disconnect. Wise is meticulously engineering safety panels and calculating fluid dynamics. But put yourself in the shoes of an average person at a county fair in Pennsylvania in the early 1840s.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Oh, they had no idea.

SPEAKER_02 16:56

Right. You see Professor John Wise doing things that look like pure magic. You pay a dollar to get into the jail yard enclosure just to watch him inflate this thing. To the public, he isn't a scientist. He's a carnival barker. That's the spectacle. And in October 1842, in Gettysburg, that disconnect results in one of the most bizarre and hilarious events in early aviation.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

The Gettysburg incident perfectly illustrates the profound gap between the austere world of scientific inquiry and the reckless enthusiasm of the general public.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

The story is pure gold. So Wise is in Gettysburg preparing for his 39th ascent. He has his enclosure set up, the balloon is filled with gas, he's throwing bags of sandballast and grappling irons into the basket. He is ready to launch. Suddenly, a local 30-year-old bank clerk named John McClellan walks past the enclosure. McClellan looks at the balloon and asks Wise, hey, can two people ride in that?

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Like it's an amusement park ride.

SPEAKER_02 17:52

Yeah. Wise says no, it's just rigged for one. McClellan is visibly annoyed. He is absolutely determined to get a ride in this machine.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

McClellan then demands to know how much it would cost to rent the entire balloon for himself.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

The audacity.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

I know. Wise, clearly trying to brush off an annoying spectator while managing a complex pre-flight checklist, throws out what he assumes is an astronomically prohibitive number. He tells McClellan it'll cost$100.

SPEAKER_02 18:21

Which in 1842 is a staggering sum of money for a joyride.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Absolutely massive. But McClellan's a bank clerk. He has access to cash. McClellan deadpans and says, I will give you$50.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

And Wise, assuming this is just playful bantering with a local, says, agreed, fork it over.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Right, he thinks it's a joke.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Wise humors him, allowing McClellan to climb into the basket, thinking the guy just wants the thrill of standing in the car for a moment.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

But the moment McClellan's feet hit the wicker, he shouts, Cut Loose.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

He ready to go.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

He is dead serious. He fully intends to take the balloon. Wise suddenly realizes the joke is completely evaporated. The crowd is waiting, the wind is picking up, and it's time for the professional to launch.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

So Wise politely asks McClellan to step out.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

And McClellan stubbornly refuses, crosses his arms, and declares he paid for a ride in this boat and he isn't leaving.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

Wise makes a critical miscalculation in human psychology here. He looks at McClellan and thinks, this guy has no idea what he's messing with. It's super windy today. I'll just let out a few feet of the ground tether, let the basket swing wildly in the wind, and it will scare the living daylights out of him. He'll be begging to come down.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Which was a highly logical assumption. The sheer sensory overload of a swaying, creaking wicker basket lifting off the ground is terrifying for a novice.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Right, it's not a gentle elevator ride.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

No. The physics of a tethered balloon in high winds create a violent snapping motion. But McClellan wasn't intimidated in the slightest. As the basket rises to the end of the tether and begins pitching violently, McClellan doesn't scream to be let down. Nope. He calmly reaches into his pocket, extracts a knife, and simply slashes the heavy ground rope.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

The moment that rope snaps, McClellan goes from being an annoying tourist to an accidental, completely untrained astronaut. He literally just stole a spaceship.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

The panic on the ground must have been palpable. Wise only has a split second to shout up a few frantic cursory instructions on how the ballast and the valve rope work before McClellan shoots out of earshot.

SPEAKER_02 20:22

Because he's ascending fast.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Very fast. Because McClellan had tossed out a couple of sandbags. His rate of ascent is incredible. Within minutes, this untrained bank clerk is two miles above Gettysburg.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Two miles. That's over 10,000 feet. The temperature plummets, the air gets incredibly thin. But according to the historical accounts, McClellan is having the time of his life.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

He really was.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

He's looking down, enjoying the panoramic view. He can see Hagerstown to the south, Carlisle to the north. He's floating eastward over Abbottstown, New Oxford, Hanover.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

It's a remarkable testament to the tranquility of balloon flight when you are at altitude and traveling in equilibrium with the wind. It's a smooth. Extremely. There's no sensation of speed, no wind blowing in your face, just a profound silent stillness. But the reality of his situation eventually catches up with him as he approaches the city of York, Pennsylvania. He realizes he needs to initiate a descent, or he will drift endlessly toward the ocean.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

Right. So he spots York, which is the biggest town around, and decides this is his stop. He remembers Wise yelling something about pulling the valve rope to let out gas. Oh. Yeah. He locates the string. But he's panicked, his hands are freezing, and he doesn't understand the mechanical tolerances of the equipment. He yanks at the rope with so much raw force that he completely tears the entire valve mechanism right off its hinges.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

The heavy wooden valve just tumbles down into the basket with him.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

So he has just created a catastrophic structural failure. There is now a gaping, unclosable hole at the absolute top of the balloon.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

The gas isn't venting slowly.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

No, it is pouring out in a torrential rush. He is a mile high, and his aircraft is rapidly deflating. Reporters on the ground in York, watching through spyglasses, noted that the balloon instantly lost all its rotundity and started falling out of the sky like a heavy wet bedsheet.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Except pure dumb luck intersects perfectly with the engineering genius of John Wise.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

The parachute effect.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

Yes. The wind catches that empty silk envelope blowing from the bottom up, and the The balloon automatically turns into the inverted parachute. Wise had deliberately engineered his balloons to do exactly this four years earlier, and now it was saving the life of a hijacker who had just destroyed his equipment.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

The descent is still frighteningly fast, but the drag makes it survivable. McClellan remembers one last instruction Wise yelled, which was to deploy the grappling iron.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

To catch on something.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Right. As he plummets toward a field in West Manchester Township, he prepares to throw the iron anchor over the side to catch a tree or fence. But before he can even throw it, as he later told reporters, the earth bounced up against the bottom of the car.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

He hits the dirt, the basket rolls, and he walks away completely unscathed. Incredible. And then he just goes back to being a bank clerk. He lived to 1886, became the county treasurer, built a hotel block on the Gettysburg Square, and never married. Just a guy who one Tuesday decided to hijack a flying machine, survived a mile-high catastrophic failure, and went back to work.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

It's a fantastic story of 19th century spectacle. But while the public saw magic and thrill rides, Wise was up in the air taking meticulous notes.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

He was always working.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

He was observing temperatures, pressure changes, acoustics, and air currents. And this rigorous scientific observation was about to lead him to his most significant discovery, one that would change meteorology forever.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Let's look at the early 1840s. Wise is conducting these scientific flights all across Pennsylvania. He starts noticing a pattern in the upper atmosphere. In May 1842, he launches from the jail yard in Belafonte, Pennsylvania. And for this specific flight, he uses a specialized balloon made of black fabric. Why black?

SPEAKER_00 24:09

The black balloon is a crucial detail that highlights his deep understanding of thermodynamics.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

Okay, lay it on me.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Black body objects absorb the sun's radiant heat far more efficiently than lighter colors. When the sun hits the black envelope, it absorbs the photons, significantly heating the gas inside.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

And hot gas expands.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Exactly. As the gas heats up, the kinetic energy of the molecules increases, causing the volume to expand. This expanded volume displaces more of the cold dense air around it, providing tremendous additional buoyancy without having to drop a single ounce of valuable sandballast.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Oh, that's incredibly efficient.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

It allowed him to reach much higher altitudes and sustain them for longer periods.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

So he takes this black balloon up to 12,000 feet. And his journal entries from this height are practically poetry. He notes the acoustic properties of the atmosphere. He writes that at a mile high, the roar of the crowd cheering his departure sounded like the screams of a child under a feather bed.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

He is observing how sound waves are muffled and distorted by the dense lower atmosphere. He smells the fragrance of the fruit orchards perfuming the cold air. He looks down to the towns of Mylesburg and Bilifante and describes them as being laid out like a chessboard.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

But the most critical observation wasn't sensory, right? It was aerodynamic.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Absolutely. At 12,000 feet, he enters a massive, high-velocity current of air that is consistently blowing from west to east.

SPEAKER_02 25:34

He hits it over and over again on different flights. He documents what he calls a great river of air. He is the very first person to observe and formally document the existence of what we now call the jet stream.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

This was an absolute paradigm shift in meteorology. Before Wise, wind was considered localized, chaotic, and largely unpredictable.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Just weather doing weather things.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Right. But Wise realized there is a constant, high-speed transcontinental highway in the upper atmosphere.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

And because he was fundamentally an engineer focused on utility, he immediately grasped the immense commercial potential.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

He saw the future.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

He posited that if you could build a craft capable of reaching that altitude and staying there, you could travel from St. Louis to New York or even across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe in a matter of days.

SPEAKER_02 26:22

He is predicting transcontinental and transatlantic air travel in the 1840s.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Way ahead of his time.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

He is so convinced of this that in 1843 he goes to the United States Congress. He pitches this idea and asks for an appropriation of$15,000 to build a massive aerostat to study this west to east current and prove we can use it to transport people and goods.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Which was a massive fortune back then.

SPEAKER_02 26:46

A huge ask. He even secures the backing of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, but what does Congress do?

SPEAKER_00 26:52

They dismissed him entirely.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Laughed him out of the room.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

They viewed it as utter science fiction, just a frivolous waste of taxpayer money on a carnival Barker's pipe dream. It is a recurring tragedy in the history of science. The visionary is mocked by the establishment because the establishment lacks the conceptual framework to understand the vision.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

They couldn't see it.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

The government was entirely blind to the strategic and commercial value of the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

So Wise realizes he has to prove it to them with undeniable practical results. We jump forward to 1859. He decides to do a proof-of-concept flight to show that balloons can transport goods on a schedule.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

The mail run.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

Yeah. He secures a contract with the U.S. Postal Service. He takes a balloon named Jupiter and launches from Lafayette, Indiana, carrying a locked mailbag with 123 letters and 23 circulars.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

His intended destination was New York or Philadelphia, aiming to catch that upper level current. Unfortunately, on that specific day, the lower altitude winds were uncooperative, and a lack of thermal lift forced him to land only 30 miles away near Crawfordsville, Indiana, after about five hours.

SPEAKER_02 28:00

So not quite New York.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

The mailbag was taken off the balloon and put on a train to finish its journey.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

A 30-mile flight might sound like a failure compared to reaching New York, but historically it was monumental. This was the first officially sanctioned airmail delivery in United States history.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

A huge first.

SPEAKER_02 28:17

In our sources, we have an image of this beautifully designed seven-cent U.S. postage stamp issued a century later in 1959 to commemorate this exact flight. It shows a red and blue illustration of the Jupiter balloon with two American flags hanging from the basket, soaring over a crowd. It solidifies his place in postal history.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

He knew it wouldn't convince the skeptics or secure the funding for a transatlantic voyage. He needed an undeniable epic demonstration that the jet stream could carry humans across a continent.

SPEAKER_02 28:53

He needed to go big.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

He needed to build the ultimate balloon.

SPEAKER_02 28:56

And that brings us to the summer of 1859 and the construction of a colossal airship named The Atlantic. This entire sequence honestly feels like a Jules Verne novel come to life.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

The Atlantic was a Leviathan. It was 50 feet in diameter and 60 feet tall. The lifting capacity was unprecedented.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Massive.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

The car itself was a large wicker basket. But Wise, anticipating a potential water landing on his way to the East Coast, went a step further. Suspended 15 feet below the wicker basket was a fully functional, heavy wooden boat.

SPEAKER_02 29:30

A heavy wooden boat hanging beneath a basket, hanging beneath a massive silk bubble. The aerodynamic drag on a wooden hull swinging below a balloon must have been tremendous.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

It was definitely a bulky setup.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

And the crew is quite the cast of characters. You have John Wise acting as the director-in-chief. You have John LeMountain, a 29-year-old former seaman from Troy, New York, who actually built the balloon under Wise's direction.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Right.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

You have O.A. Gager, a Vermont businessman who financed the whole thing and came along as the scientific observer. And then you have William Hyde, a reporter for the St. Louis Republican who had never been near a balloon in his entire life, brought along just to guarantee press coverage. That poor reporter. Seriously. So they launched from St. Louis on the evening of July 1st, 1859. They are hauling a thousand pounds of sandballast, water, ice, a bucket of lemonade, a basket of wine, and cooked meats. They take off at 7 20 p.m., lifting into the twilight. But there is a crucial logistical shift here. They are not using hydrogen.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

No, they are inflating the Atlantic with coal gas.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

Why switch to coal gas? He used hydrogen for decades.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Pure hydrogen is highly buoyant, but incredibly expensive and difficult to produce at scale in 1859, requiring massive amounts of iron and sulfuric acid. Coal gas, which is a mixture containing methane and hydrogen produced by heating coal, was heavily used in municipal lighting.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

Oh, so it was just readily available.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

It was vastly cheaper and easily accessible directly from the city gas works in St. Louis. The trade-off is that coal gas is heavier than pure hydrogen, requiring a much larger balloon to lift the same weight, and it's highly toxic if inhaled.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

That toxicity is going to become very relevant very quickly. The crowds are cheering, the sounds of the city fade away, and Wise settles back to enjoy the flight. But the relaxation lasts about five seconds. He looks up at the rigging and realizes something is horrifyingly wrong.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

A builder's error.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

The balloon is attached to the basket by 36 ropes, designed to distribute the immense weight evenly across the fabric. But Lamoun rigged it improperly. All that weight is pulling on just six ropes.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

That's a disaster waiting to happen.

SPEAKER_02 31:36

Those six ropes are cutting into the varnished silk of the balloon like cheese wire. If they slice through, the balloon catastrophically ruptures.

SPEAKER_00 31:44

It requires immediate desperate action. Wise calls Gager up from the boat into the basket. While floating thousands of feet in the air in the dark, these two men have to balance on the narrow rim of the swaying wicker basket.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

I'm getting vertigo just thinking about it.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

They have to physically grab the slack ropes and heave with all their might to redistribute the tension, pulling and shoving until the rigging is equalized. By the time they finish, half an hour later, their fingers are torn open and bleeding.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

But they survive the initial crisis. Night falls. Wise notes in his logbook how the balloon actually glows in the dark. It's this pale, orange-colored brilliance caused by the mixture of heat, starlight, and the coal gas inside.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

Almost beautiful in a terrifying way.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

They can hear dogs barking on the ground, they drop sand and time how long it takes to hear it hit the tree leaves to calculate their altitude. Wise is exhausted from the rigging crisis, so he tells the crew, I'm taking a nap in the basket. You guys stay down in the boat, keep the ship high, wake me if you need me. He curls up in the cramped wicker basket and falls asleep.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

This is where a silent, terrifying threat emerges. A perfect demonstration of how unforgiving atmospheric physics can be. While Wise is sleeping, the three novices down in the boat decide the balloon isn't flying high enough.

SPEAKER_02 33:03

They want to catch warmer currents.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Right, the air is cold. Yeah. So they start shoveling out a liberal amount of sand ballast.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Which makes the balloon lighter, causing it to shoot upward.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Exactly. But as they rise, the ambient atmospheric pressure around them drops significantly. According to Boyle's law, as the outside pressure decreases, the volume of the gas inside the balloon expands rapidly.

SPEAKER_02 33:25

Because there's less air pushing against it from the outside.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Yes. The massive envelope swells into a perfect tight sphere. At the bottom of the balloon, there is an open exhaust hose, a fabric neck designed to hang down over the side of the basket to vent expanding gas safely away from the crew.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Okay, I see.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

But as the balloon swells and the fabric pulls taut, that exhaust hose physically retracts.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

It pulls up into the basket right where John Wise is sleeping.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

The open hose is now pointing directly at his face, pumping raw, toxic, suffocating coal gas straight into his nose and mouth as he sleeps. He is being finally poisoned at 12,000 feet.

SPEAKER_02 34:02

He's literally being gassed. Down in the boat, the men are getting chilly. Gager yells up, Hey Professor, pull the valve rope, let's go back down. Silence. Gager yells again. Nothing.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Panic sets in.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

Gager climbs the ropes from the wooden boat up to the wicker basket. He looks inside and finds Wise unconscious, his face blasted by coal gas, taking convulsive, dying gasps. The Gageer dives in, rips the hose away, and drags Wise to the very edge of the basket, forcing fresh air into his lungs until he finally revives.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

It was an incredibly close call. They survive the night, navigating by the sound of dogs and the occasional howl of a wolf. By dawn, they are passing over Fort Wayne, Indiana. Back on track. They are caught perfectly in the jet stream, traveling at an estimated 60 miles per hour. At one point, to relieve the monotony, Wise drops the balloon down to just 500 feet above Lake Erie and actually hails a steamboat captain with a brass speaking trumpet.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

The captain is staring at this massive flying sphere, and Wise yells down, Fine morning for boating, Captain. We're heading to Buffalo and then Europe.

SPEAKER_00 35:04

The sheer swagger is incredible.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

But it doesn't last because as they pass Niagara Falls, which the crew hilariously critiques as looking tame and like a clever little mill dam from 10,000 feet. Wise looks ahead and realizes they are flying straight into a monster.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

The meteorological signs are unmistakable. Massive anvil-shaped cloud formations rising from Lake Ontario, accompanied by severe barometric pressure drops. They are riding the advance wave of a massive storm system.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

A massive storm over a great lake.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

And they are almost completely out of sandvallast, meaning they cannot increase their altitude to fly over the storm. And Wise estimates they're now being hurled forward at 90 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

Gager looks down at the ground near Rochester and says, I can hear the limbs of the trees cracking from the wind down there. Meanwhile, up in the basket, it's dead silent because they are moving with the wind. They are inside the hurricane. And then the balloons start sinking directly into the tempest.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Wise realizes they can be dashed to pieces against the earth. The aerodynamic drag of the wooden boat below them is pulling them down. He orders them to throw everything overboard.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

The psychology of the crew in this crisis is fascinating. You have Hyde, the terrified reporter, sitting in the boat silently scribbling in his notebook, maybe taking notes, maybe writing his last will and testament.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

Honestly, probably the latter.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

You have Lamoun, the pragmatic seaman, who grabs the heavy metal propeller gearing they brought and heaves it overboard. When that isn't enough, Lamoun grabs an axe and starts furiously chopping up the double bottom of the wooden boat they are standing in, throwing the heavy planks overboard to shed weight.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

And Wise, up in the basket, is stripping the ship of every luxury. He throws his personal valise over the side, losing all his clothing and a silver cigar case.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Everything has to go.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

When the balloon plunges again, dipping carelessly close to the violently churning waves of Lake Ontario, he realizes he has to use his absolute last bit of ballast, a heavy case of champagne given to him by a friend in St. Louis, to celebrate when they reach New York.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

But because he's John Wise, before he throws the heavy bottles overboard, he pops one open, takes a massive swig, offers it to Gager, who is too terrified to swallow, and then tosses the bottles into the lake.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Of course he takes a swig first.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

They manage to shed enough weight that Hyde and Le Mountain abandon the shattered remnants of the boat and climb up into the basket with Wise and Gager.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Wise suggests swamping the balloon in the lake, hoping a passing boat will rescue them, because hitting the solid land at 90 miles an hour is going to be catastrophic.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

But the crew protests.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

The Mountain says he's seasick and can't stand the water. Hyde says if they're going to die, they should die on land. Gager agrees they should try to rough it through. It is a democratic decision to face the fury of the shoreline.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

Think about modern safety expectations for a second. We have air traffic control, radar, emergency transponders. What does this decision say about 19th century extreme exploration? There is no radio. There is no abort button left. None. They are completely, totally alone, flying in a canvas bag at 90 miles an hour toward a solid wall of trees. The societal acceptance of public danger and personal risk was fundamentally different.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

It required an acceptance of mortality that is hard for us to fully grasp today. At 1.35 p.m., land looms ahead the shore of Henderson, New York in Jefferson County. Wise tells everyone to take firm hold of the rigging. The wind catches the massive balloon and slams it violently onto the shore.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

LeMuntain throws out the grappling iron to try and anchor them. It catches, but the kinetic energy is so massive that the iron shatters. The balloon rebounds, shoots up over the treetops, and plunges directly into a dense forest. The historical account describes it perfectly. It tore through a mile of heavy timber like a maddened elephant through a jungle.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

The basket is smashing through thick branches. The massive silk bag above them is snagging on trees, swaying furiously and shaking the four men, as Wise wrote, like a puppy shakes a rag.

SPEAKER_01 39:03

Just brutalize.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

They are clinging to the hoop, some hanging upside down, being battered by wood and wind. Finally, a massive squall blows them out of forest and pitches the balloon into the side of a massive high tree. The fabric splits completely open, the gas escapes, and the nightmare ends.

SPEAKER_02 39:19

Miraculously, all four men survive. The wicker basket is wedged in the fork of this giant tree. They climb out, check for broken bones, find none, and wise dusts himself off, looks at the terrified locals who have gathered to watch the spaceship crash into their woods, and proudly announces, and thus ends the greatest balloon voyage that was ever made.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Despite the violent crash, he was absolutely right. It was an unprecedented success. They had traveled from St. Louis to Henderson, New York, a straight line distance of roughly 800 miles, though Wise calculated nearly 1200 miles with deviations in just 19 hours.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

It is incredible.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

It held the world distance record until the year 1900.

SPEAKER_02 39:59

It definitively proved his jet stream theory. It proved balloons could traverse the continent. Wise is at the absolute peak of his career. He finally has the data and the public spectacle to get funding for his transatlantic flight.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Finally.

SPEAKER_02 40:13

But the problem with being a scientist is that you are at the mercy of geopolitics. Just as he perfected his craft, the nation fractured. The year is 1861, the Civil War begins, and suddenly the government doesn't care about the jet stream, they only care about artillery spotting.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

The outbreak of the Civil War shifted the entire focus of American technological development from exploration to military application. Wise, ever the patriot and the opportunist, immediately saw the tactical value of balloons for reconnaissance. He travels to Washington, D.C. to pitch his services to the Union Army.

SPEAKER_02 40:47

He pitches them a heavily armored war balloon. The Lancaster Intelligencer writes this glowing review of his design in July 1861. He's using all his old cabin maker tricks.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

Right, the craftsmanship comes back.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

The balloon is made of raw India silk, double thickness. The envelope is compact Irish linen. The hoops are tough hickory wrapped with linen and fish glue so they are strong as steel. And the car is made of willow and cane, but with a sheet iron bottom to make it bulletproof against Confederate rifle fire.

SPEAKER_00 41:19

It was a very advanced design. He even proposed a portable locomotive inflating apparatuses that could be drawn by horses, decomposing water to generate hydrogen gas right on the battlefield in three to four hours.

SPEAKER_02 41:31

He's solving logistical problems.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

He was thinking logistically. He even planned to carry percussion hand grenades to drop on enemy troops or to force them to release the ropes if they tried to capture him.

SPEAKER_02 41:41

But here is the profound irony of John Wise's life. He survived bursting valves, explosive hydrogen fires, falling out of baskets, high altitude asphyxiation, and smashing through a mile of trees at 90 miles an hour. But the one thing that finally grounded him, the obstacle he could not engineer his way around, was government bureaucracy.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

Politics. He wasn't the only aeronaut vying for the position of chief aeronaut of the newly formed Union Army Balloon Corps. He was in fierce competition with Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, who had the backing of the scientific establishment, and had given a highly publicized demonstration directly to President Lincoln on the national mall.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Wow, straight to the top.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

Yeah, and his old co-pilot from the Atlantic, John Lamoun, was also there, and he was highly adept at political propaganda.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

So Wise tries to win the contract the only way he knows how by being economical and practical. He undercuts Lowe and Le Mountain's bids by$200. He secures a commission from the topographical engineers. But Lowe is vastly better at playing the political game.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

This friction between Lowe and Wise reveals a profound dynamic in the military-industrial complex. How much of early technological advancement is driven by pure scientific merit versus political maneuvering in public relations?

SPEAKER_02 42:56

That's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Lowe was a master showman, a networker who understood that the military needed spectacle and confidence just as much as they needed data. Wise was a purist engineer. He just wanted to fly and do the work. And this clash comes to a head at the first battle of Bull Run, also known as Manassas, in July 1861.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

It is a tragicomedy. Union General Irvin McDowell is facing the Confederate forces and desperately needs aerial reconnaissance. He calls for a balloon. The engineers are waiting for Wise, but Wise is delayed, so Thaddeus Lowe is called up to inflate his balloon instead.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Stealing the spotlight.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Just as Lowe is getting ready, Wise comes sprinting up to the front lines, waving his official government commission papers in the air, demanding that Lowe deflate his balloon and step aside because Wise is the legally contracted aeronaut.

SPEAKER_00 43:45

Wise asserts his authority, and Lowe is forced to stand down. But now Wise is in a massive rush. The battle is raging, the artillery is firing, and he needs to get his balloon to the front lines at Centerville immediately.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

So they hitch it to a wagon.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Right. Major Albert J. Meyer and 20 men from the 26th Pennsylvania Volunteers attach the fully inflated balloon to a wagon and start hauling it rapidly down the dirt road.

SPEAKER_02 44:10

And in their frantic haste to get to the battle, Major Meyer steers the wagon too close to the woods. The massive, highly advanced, bulletproof silk war balloon gets hopelessly tangled in the branches of the trees alongside the road.

SPEAKER_00 44:24

The branches just tear through the fabric, completely disabling the craft. The balloon is ruined before it even sees the battlefield.

SPEAKER_02 44:30

With a clumsy maneuver on a dirt road, John Wise's military career ends on the spot. He is dismissed, and Thaddeus Lowe goes on to become the famous commander of the U.S. Balloon Corps. It was a humiliating and abrupt end to his military aspirations.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

The man who discovered the jet stream gets benched because a major couldn't drive a wagon straight.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

It's painful. After the war, Wise keeps flying. He publishes a book in 1873 detailing his 40 years of experience. He's a living legend in the aeronautics community. But he cannot stay on the ground. The sky is an addiction. And that reality pulls us forward to September 28, 1879.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

John Wise is now 71 years old. He has dedicated his entire adult life to the sky. He's made an astonishing 462 ascents.

SPEAKER_02 45:19

Think of the toll on his body.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

His body has taken a severe beating over the decades, but his mind and his passion are undiminished. He is in St. Louis, Missouri, preparing to launch a brand new, untested balloon named the Pathfinder.

SPEAKER_02 45:31

And he's not going alone. A 29-year-old bank teller, interestingly, another bank employee, just like the hijacker McClellan named George Burr, asks to join him. Wise agrees. But the launch from Lindell Park in St. Louis is absolute chaos.

SPEAKER_00 45:43

It's incredibly windy and the crowd is pressing in. As the Pathfinder begins to ascend, some overzealous folks in the crowd foolishly grab onto the balloon's drag rope.

SPEAKER_02 45:51

The drag rope is a critical piece of navigational equipment, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 45:55

Very critical. It's an 1800-foot-long heavy rope that trails far below the basket. It serves two vital purposes. It acts as a visual measuring tool to gauge distance to the ground, and more importantly, it acts as an automatic analog altitude hold.

SPEAKER_02 46:12

So it acts almost like the flate valve in a toilet tank. The lower he gets, the more rope rests on the ground, taking that weight off the balloon, making it lighter so it naturally bobs back up.

SPEAKER_00 46:22

That is exactly the mechanical principle. It maintains a steady, low altitude without the pilot having to constantly drop sandballasts or vent gas.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

Super clever.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

But as they launch, the crowd is holding tightly onto this rope, effectively anchoring the balloon while the strong wind is trying to blow it away. The basket is shaking violently, snapping back and forth.

SPEAKER_02 46:41

Wise and Burr are just being thrown around inside the wicker.

SPEAKER_00 46:44

To save the airship from tearing apart under the structural stress, Wise is forced to pull out his knife and cut the drag rope completely free.

SPEAKER_02 46:51

The moment he cuts that rope, he dooms the voyage. The damaged pathfinder shoots up into the sky, caught in a high-speed gale blowing toward the northeast. They are now flying an untested craft in severe weather without their primary stabilizing tool.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

They vanish into the sky. The historical accounts of the final sightings are incredibly eerie. They are spotted flying high over Alton, Illinois. Later, they are seen over Carlinville.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

And then nightfalls.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

The last confirmed sighting of the Pathfinder is around midnight. It is pitch black. Observers near Miller Station, what is now Miller Beach, Indiana, about 35 miles from Chicago, see the dark shape of the balloon drifting rapidly northeastward. It is heading directly out over the dark, freezing, immense expanse of Lake Michigan.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Why didn't they descend before reaching the water? They had the rip panel, they knew how to land.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

It remains a profound mystery. Perhaps the valve or the rip panel mechanism was damaged during the chaotic launch and the violent shaking. That makes sense. Perhaps they were too high to see the unlit lake in the darkness until it was too late. Without the drag rope to stabilize a gradual low-altitude approach, plunging into the water was inevitable. Whatever mechanical failure occurred, the balloon went down in the freezing lake.

SPEAKER_02 48:04

Nearly a month later, on October 24th, the body of young George Burr washes up on the beach. Based on where he was found, it's theorized he survived the initial crash and tried to swim for sure, but the freezing waters of Lake Michigan took him. He was identified by his brother and brought back to St. Louis.

SPEAKER_00 48:21

But John Wise, the 71-year-old pioneer who had spent 44 years documenting every cloud, every current, and every atmospheric pressure drop, well, he was never found. Neither was a single scrap of the Pathfinder.

SPEAKER_02 48:35

When we look at the totality of his life, there is a deeply poetic, if profoundly tragic, nature to his disappearance. The sky, which he had studied so intimately, which he had fought and conquered time and time again, finally claimed him.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

It's a haunting end. It makes you think about legacy. When we talk about the pioneers of aviation, the Wright brothers are household names. Neil Armstrong is a household name.

SPEAKER_02 48:57

John Wise is not.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Yet as we synthesize all these sources, it becomes clear that his engineering fingerprints are everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 49:04

The mechanisms he perfected, the rip panel, the practical application of the inverted parachute, were fundamental safety paradigms that saved countless lives in the decades that followed.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

His discovery and meteorological documentation of the jet stream laid the foundational groundwork for modern transcontinental jet travel. His vision of high-altitude commercial highways was completely accurate.

SPEAKER_02 49:26

The military eventually recognized his foresight, right? During World War I, the U.S. Army established Camp John Wise in Texas as a war balloon training center.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

There is a bronze monument to him right now in Musser Park, in Lancaster, near where he lived, placed by the Lancaster County Historical Society in 1955. It's topped with a stone sphere representing a balloon, quietly honoring a man who made 462 ascents and lies somewhere at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

To you, listening right now, the next time you get on a commercial flight, and the pilot comes on the intercom to say they've caught a tailwind and will be arriving in New York an hour early, think about John Weiss.

SPEAKER_00 50:04

Think about the safety redundancies when you fly today.

SPEAKER_02 50:07

The fail-safes, the structural integrity, the weather routing. Those conveniences, those assurances of safety were paid for in blood, in burned skin, in broken bones, and in the relentless obsession of eccentric, fearless engineers who refuse to stay on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 50:24

The progress of human knowledge always requires someone willing to take the first, most dangerous step into the unknown. Wise took 462 of those steps.

SPEAKER_02 50:32

We often romanticize these pioneers of science as noble individuals who conquer nature for the betterment of mankind. But looking at Wise's final flight, a 71-year-old man launching a damaged, untested balloon into a violent gale, flying in the dark over the Great Lakes, we really have to ask ourselves a difficult question. We do. At what point does a scientific pursuit stop being about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and start becoming an inescapable addiction to the very danger you are trying to engineer away? Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive.