The Run Away Balloon — Centennial For American Ingenuity
Falcon Heene did not ride the winds in a balloon, soaring to over 10,000 feet. The six year old was never in danger, the staged event costing taxpayers 10s of thousands of dollars, stealing the time and abusing the trust of millions of Americans.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Falcon Heene did not ride the winds in a balloon, soaring to over 10,000 feet. The six year old was never in danger, the staged event costing taxpayers 10s of thousands of dollars, stealing the time and abusing the trust of millions of Americans.
But one century ago a man was carried off in a run away balloon, his death reported in the afternoon newspapers in San Francisco. His wife was besieged by reporters eager for the sensational story and were disappointed when he walked in, covered with mud.
On Saturday, Oct. 30, 1909, Arthur C. Pillsbury was looking for new photos to keep the stock in his shop in San Francisco at 174 Geary Street, briskly busy. He had gotten the best photos for the arrival of the White Fleet in 1908 and tried using a balloon, as did Jackson of Chicago. But he wanted better pictures. He wanted to be holding the camera and making the decisions on what to shoot.
Pillsbury had shot the famous panoramas of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, showing the St. Francis Hotel boiling in flames and smoke. The photographs, usually unidentified, of the chaos which went on for days, are usually his work. The circuit panorama camera was his senior project at Stanford where he majored in Mechanical Engineering in 1897.
Our world was changing. The advent of air flight, via balloons and airplanes, was just beginning. Pillsbury’s autobiography reads, “Air pictures had great possibilities and I wanted them. Roy Knabenshue, and Beachey, afterward the star of the airplane, were making a cut-away ascension in what had been a captive balloon. I went with them and made my first air pictures we sailed over the city and the bay crossed the Berkeley hills and landed in a little meadow, all very fine with two such experts, but as it was foggy, the pictures were not so good.”
Pillsbury had purchased the balloon from A. Roy Knabenshue, having learned “that he had a small silk balloon that would lift me and my cameras. It was of fine white Chinese silk, oiled to make it air tight, the net of linen thread, and the basket, about as large as a half barrel, was made of fish line. This complete outfit which weighed seventy pounds, and could be packed in an average suit case, was when inflated, twenty-five feet in diameter, and contained ten thousand feet of gas.”
Pillsbury describes his new balloon as, “the sun shimmering on its white sphere, was one of the most beautiful of mechanical air visitants. The Fairy, I named her, on account of her ethereal beauty.”
In his autobiography Pillsbury recalls filling and moving the balloon to the Bay saying, “we tied it to a launch with about 500 feet of rope. Luck was with us, for it was not only a beautiful day, but what is much more unusual, in San Francisco, a nearly windless one. These conditions were ideal and I made picture after picture as the launch towed the balloon down the water front.”
But the weather, which had been calm, changed suddenly. “I finished my film and signaled the launch to start back; in the mean time the wind had sprung up and the balloon, instead of being vertically over the launch, was blown off on an angle of 45 degrees.
Starting back, against the increasing wind the basket kept diving into the bay. So I was compelled to hold the cameras in the air to keep them dry. The wind increased in force and between the gusts the launch crew hauled in the rope & I passed the cameras to them. The wind had now reached such velocity that the balloon acted as a huge sail and made progress by the launch impossible. Seeing my predicament, a launch was sent to my assistance from a battle ship then in harbor, but before it reached me, the rope parted close to the basket and I, shouting “Goodbye” to the anxious launch crew, shot up into the air in the basket whose sole ballast and equipment was the one small man who was I. Although this was my first solo aerial flight, I realized that to prevent an explosion in the higher air I must open the neck of the balloon which had been tied at its inflation.”
Pillsbury climbed onto the ring above his head to untie the string closing the bag. He reported, “the shivers chasing themselves over me were not all caused by the increasingly cold air. It was about 4:30 it had taken all day to do the things that afterward I could do in an hour and a half. I was wet + cold.”
In his autobiography Pillsbury reports the balloon shot up over 10,000 feet providing, “ a most wonderful sight, the entire peninsula of San Francisco was below me. I could see the cities San Mateo, Palo Alto and San Jose to those south-ward Alameda Oakland & Berkeley across the bay Tamalpais (Mount) and the Golden Gate to the Westward and the Faralines (Farvaijone Islands) in the distance.”
Sitting with his feet over the edge of the basket he caught the sun, making notes every five minutes on what he could see. Drifting low over the Bay he ran into a cloud bank, condensing the gas.
The balloon began to sink towards the water. Then, just before it struck the land breeze caught the balloon and he came down in the tulles a hundred yards in shore, bouncing up 50 feet to land in a slough, plowing through it making a big splash and a thump as the balloon, rising again, went through a fence, knocking it down to continue across the marches as fast as a horse could run. Finally, the basket caught on the edge of a slough so he could sit on it, allowing the remaining gas to escape.
Pillsbury wrote, “this all took less time than it does to write it.” His account of the event goes on to report he looked like a mud hen, without a hat, his having been lost on the first bounce. However, the balloon was not even wet.
Pillsbury then folded up the balloon, weighing 25 pounds, and was just starting off with the balloon on his back when some engineers on the Bumbarton cut off, then just being built, who had seen him come down and then disappear, came out looking for him, providing a ride in their row boat, which the retreating tide stranded. A laborious wade through thick mud followed for all the men. When they at last reached shore a convenient train came along and, thanking his rescuers, Pillsbury sat down in the Smoker car, close to the stove, to thaw out.
The photographs sold briskly at the shop on Geary, and American innovation and enterprise continued. On the anniversary of this Centennial, remember Americans who rescue themselves, and let that be us.
Next Centennial: The First American Air Show — Dominguez Hills, January, 10-20, 1910. Pillsbury was there.
