ROMAN MARS: The year is 1861, and America is deeply disconnected. From east to west, our nation is the biggest it has ever been. And yet construction of the transcontinental railroad won’t even begin for another two years. On a whistle-stop trip to take the oath of office, it had taken the newly elected Abraham Lincoln 11 whole days to travel from Cincinnati to Washington D.C. by train. Only a genius or a madman would think it was possible to cut that trip down to just one night.
JACK HITT: Thaddeus Sobieski Caulaincourt Lowe. That was his full name. His parents gave him names they pulled out of obscure novels.
ROMAN MARS: This is author and journalist Jack Hitt.
JACK HITT: Thaddeus Lowe was one of these sort of huckster promoters–not quite a con man–part carnival barker, part inventor, part scientist.
ROMAN MARS: And Thaddeus Lowe wore those eccentricities for everyone to see.
JACK HITT: He had long flowing hair and that sort of mustachio that was popular. And at that time he also had what was then called a chin puff. So he had that sort of wizardy look–the look of a great eccentric man of science of that time.
ROMAN MARS: And it was this chin-puffed man of science who had come up with a new scheme that involved traveling from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C. in a single night, carried in the basket of a gas bag.
JACK HITT: Well, we called it a “hot air balloon,” but at the time it was also known as a “gas bag.”
ROMAN MARS: Gas bags had been around for a while at this point, a lot of them just going up and coming back down, tethered to the ground. That was how the first balloon flight had happened near Paris almost 80 years earlier. But in the decades that followed, no one had really discovered what to do with the gas bag.
JACK HITT: I think every new technology enters that sort of liminal period where it’s either a novelty gimmick, it’s going to become silly putty, or it’s going to become the computer, right? And the balloon, at this time, was sort of in that strange sort of twilight space. It was seen as both, like, sort of magical and mystical. We have always wanted to escape Earth’s clutches. And the balloon was the first actual real practical way that we could do it. But it was also just seen as incredibly dangerous and people did float away on these things and nobody ever heard from them again. They were incredibly dangerous.
ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] They already seem dangerous to me now. Like, I would never go in one.
JACK HITT: And remember, this is hydrogen gas. This is the Hindenburg. Okay. So, you know, we have this really clean, lovely floating image of a hot air balloon. And one reason maybe why we should call them “gas bags” is because these were really the beta models of the modern hot air balloon. You know, the very balloon smelled like it came out of the bits of hell.
ROMAN MARS: Gas bags were so dangerous, in fact, that King Louis XVI suggested that if balloons were going to go up untethered, then convicted criminals should be the ones to pilot them. Yet despite the gas bag’s considerable flaws, people were searching for its ultimate purpose.
JACK HITT: But Thaddeus Lowe knew what the real purpose would be. He wanted to invent an overnight male carrier service, sort of the FedEx of 1861. And he believed, as did others, that up in the upper atmosphere, there was supposed to be this consistent west to east wind. This is not necessarily even close to true, but it was the theory at the time.
ROMAN MARS: And if he was right about the wind, then all Thaddeus needed to achieve his dream was money. And so, on April 19th, 1861, he set up an evening of fundraising in what was then known as the ballooning capital of America: Cincinnati.
JACK HITT: Cincinnati became sort of the balloon beginning center. I mean, a lot of balloonists would come there and try out their balloons. The Cincinnati Gazette actually had hired a Mr. J.C. Belman as their first official “balloon editor.”
ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] That’s the golden age of journalism right there. You have a balloon editor on staff!
JACK HITT: You know, when they fired the balloon editor, Roman, that’s when the decline of print journalism began.
ROMAN MARS: And it was in this boom of balloon journalism that Thaddeus Lowe wanted to demonstrate to investors that his gas bag, an aircraft he named The Enterprise, would take him from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C. in a single night.
JACK HITT: There were several days of festivities, like Lowe gave an address at the opera house and there were parties and so on. But finally this big night comes. He shows up in classic sort of American style. He’s in a stovepipe hat, the kind Lincoln wore. He’s in a broadcloth coat, which we would recognize as, like, tuxedo tails. And late toward the end of the evening, his assistants come in and say, “The winds are moving east. It’s time to go.” So he gets in there with, you know, bottles of water and food and brand new wet, inky copies of the Cincinnati paper so that, when he arrives, he can prove that he was in Cincinnati that morning. And he cuts loose and then poof. He just disappears into the night.
ROMAN MARS: Just like that, Thaddeus vanished. He wouldn’t be seen or heard from again until the next morning, by which point he hoped to have landed on the mall in Washington, D.C. In reality, Thaddeus wouldn’t see the sunrise behind the unfinished Washington Monument. In fact, he wouldn’t even get particularly close. But Thaddeus Lowe’s flight from Cincinnati would prove to be a defining moment in his life. Instead of taking him to the nation’s capital, his foul-smelling balloon would instead lead him to a series of new discoveries, discoveries that continue to shape America to this very day.
From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars. And today, the Enterprise gas back and the birth of the American obsession with pushing higher and higher.
It’s 4 a.m. And Thaddeus Lowe is now alone in the wicker basket of his gas bag, somewhere far above Cincinnati, Ohio. But he isn’t exactly sure where.
JACK HITT: It’s even sort of a mystery to him as to what he would find when he went up this high at night. Of course, remember this is before the invention of the electric bulb. So when night fell, it was night. So, he could look down a mile or two or three. And of course, he saw nothing. And up above him, he just saw stars and some moon. And while he’s up there, he’s doing his tests and measurements in this little basket beneath this hydrogen gas-filled balloon. And out here at the edge of the then known universe for humans, he discovered the oddities of being there.
He is just humming along at these amazing speeds that no one had ever reached at this time. But he’s stunned to discover that, you know, inside his little basket, he’s not moving at all. He says, “Everything around me was perfectly quiet and still–so still that I could have carried a lighted candle without any protection. And I let loose sheets of paper without fear of them being disturbed. The reason for this may not be quite clear to my readers, but I was floating with, as well as in, the undisturbed atmosphere. There was not the slightest sense of motion whatsoever.” So Lowe sort of discovers that he’s not only in the wind, he is the wind, heading who knows where.
ROMAN MARS: Thaddeus had embarked on a kind of journey that nobody had ever been on before. He was suspended in the inky, black sky, all on his own. And in that darkness, Thaddeus had no way to orient himself. He wouldn’t know where he was until the sun came up.
JACK HITT: The next morning, he comes down and sees an open field. And there’s a man at a plow. And he lets off some gas and comes down low enough that he can shout out, “What state is this?” And the man–he looks left, he looks right, far off into the woods, but it doesn’t make any sense that the sound would come from the woods and doesn’t see anybody. And he keeps looking around. Lowe shouts it again. “What state is this?” And he just keeps looking. And Lowe later realizes, of course, the man didn’t look up because no one had ever looked up before. Why would you look up? Sound didn’t come from up. Up hadn’t been invented yet. But the guy does shout. He finally just shouts towards the woods because he wants to answer. And he says, “Virginia!” And then Lowe thinks, “Well, I don’t want to stop here.” So he unties one of his bags and lets the sand out. And it falls near the man who finally looks up. And then when he sees what’s above him, he goes running off into the woods to hide.
ROMAN MARS: The man runs for his life, but Lowe decides to keep going, figuring he must still be close to D.C. In reality, he was much further south.
JACK HITT: So he travels on a little bit further. And he finally does come down into a field in Unionville, South Carolina. Now, you remember I mentioned to you April 19th, 1861–that date might ring a little familiar in your head because April 12th, one week before, is the firing on Fort Sumter.
ROMAN MARS: Thaddeus had found himself in the Deep South, only one week after the first shot of the Civil War.
ROMAN MARS: Did Thaddeus know that the Civil War had started a week before he left on this trip?
JACK HITT: They did. But of course– And this is something he’s going to find out in the next, like, 24 hours. The shot had been fired, but no life had been lost. So yes, the civil war had started, but the Civil War hadn’t started, right? It was kind of like, “You know, maybe this will just go away.” And I think most people sort of believe that. But as Thaddeus is about to learn, that was increasingly not the case.
ROMAN MARS: Despite not really believing in the war yet, the people of South Carolina were still deeply suspicious about Thaddeus and his intentions. Something about him just didn’t seem quite right.
JACK HITT: Once he landed and all these men with guns showed up, he tried to convince them that he was, you know, a human because he wrote at one point, “Many of them thought that I was the inhabit of some ethereal or infernal region who had floated to earth to do them damage and injury.”
ROMAN MARS: Yeah. But it was just Cincinnati.
ROMAN MARS: Thaddeus takes some crackers and butter rolls out of his basket, thinking they might show that he’s human. And finally he pulls out a few rubber hot water bottles.
JACK HITT: He cut one open. They’d frozen being out in the very, very cold. He cut one open to show them that, you know, this was just ice inside. But of course, he later realized that was the worst thing he could have done because one of them immediately said, “How could anyone but a devil put so large a piece of ice through so small a place as that nozzle?”
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLES] That’s an excellent point.
JACK HITT: Got to give it to him. He was not convincing anybody that he was a normal human.
ROMAN MARS: Despite this, Thaddeus does somehow manage to persuade them. But that only creates more problems.
JACK HITT: So of course, they all thought he was some kind of Yankee spy. So at this point, he’s been arrested by these planters and these foremen out in the field. And he’s being taken into Unionville to go to jail because he’s a spy. And when he gets there, they can’t put him in it because it’s already packed with “abolitionists.”
ROMAN MARS: Wow. Okay.
JACK HITT: So they take him to the hotel where they’re going to put him in a room under armed guard. Now they do recognize, because he’s in a top hat and tails, that he might be a man of some means or someone of importance. And somebody does finally find some local sort of erudite person who has heard of Thaddeus Lowe. And so he vouches for him and keeps him out of jail for the day. But word has spread. And there’s, like, a lynch mob there. And they’re out to get him. And so his balloon is put on a train and then he separately has to go back to first Kentucky and then Cincinnati and then back East. And he sort of describes, like, you know, these trains are packed and it’s full of people escaping the South. And he realizes the war is on. Soldiers are going both ways. Everyone was getting ready because suddenly, as Thaddeus realized, it was war.
ROMAN MARS: Heading home on that train, Thaddeus knew his scheme had failed. His balloon had come down nearly 400 miles southwest of his intended destination. In fact, he was almost exactly as far away from Washington as where he began. So the FedEx idea was dead. And on top of that, the world had changed overnight. The war had started. And so if he was ever going to see his aeronautical ambitions come true, Thaddeus Lowe needed to go back to the drawing board.
ROMAN MARS: So how does Thaddeus pivot?
JACK HITT: He pivots beautifully. He just needs a new stunt. And he comes up with it. And it’s only a few weeks later. So that was April. Now it’s June 18th. He has come to D.C. with his gas bag. And he’s inflated it right outside the White House and nailed it to the ground. But this time he puts a telegraph system in the basket and runs a wire straight down to the ground where he has a little messenger boy. And he sends the first airborne telegram. And the return address is “Balloon Enterprise in the air, June 18th, 1861 to His Excellency, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.” You know, this balloon is right outside his window. And so he taps out a telegraph message. The first part of it reads, “I can see nearly 50 miles in diameter. The city with its girdle of encampments presents a superb scene.” So he gets a little poetic, but he is a con man, too. I mean, he’s a carnival barker, too. So he adds in a little LinkedIn sort of jibber jabber, right?
It goes on to say, “And acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the service of this country, I am your excellency’s obedient servant.” So, that message goes into the White House. And believe it or not, Lincoln invites him to dinner because Lincoln, it turns out, is an early adopter. He’s really into new tech. And so he goes into the white house. And he says they talked late into the night. But he explains, “We should use them for spying capability.”
ROMAN MARS: This would be a novel purpose for the gas bag, one that made the whole going up and coming back down thing actually useful. So Thaddeus lays out his sales pitch to Lincoln.
JACK HITT: He explains, “I think we can get up there and we can see things that no one has ever seen before.” And understand in those days, intel was gathered by putting up one or two or three people on individual horses and just sending them off into the woods to sort of scout. Then Lincoln got it. He gave Thaddeus a letter of introduction to Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, who was at that time the head man of the war. So he has this letter of introduction. He goes over there to Winfield’s Scott’s tent. And his assistant, the orderly, says, “Well, the general’s busy right now.” So, Lowe comes back a couple of hours later, and he says, “He’s still busy.” He comes back a few hours later, and he says, “He’s at lunch.” He comes back a little while later. He says, “The general is now sleeping.” So he realizes, “Okay, I’m being blown off.” And here’s one thing you need to know about General Winfield Scott. When the war broke out, he was 75 years old.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, my lord. In 1861, there’s some road miles on 70.
JACK HITT: He was a veteran of the War of 1812. His nickname–just so you know that he wasn’t an early adopter–was Old Fuss and Feathers.
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLES] Oh my goodness.
JACK HITT: So, Lowe goes back to the White House and he tells him that General Scott could not be seen on official business, even at the President’s suggestion. “Lincoln looked at me a moment, laughed. He rose, seized his tall silk hat, and bade me come on.” And so they walked out of the White House. And they walked over to the general’s headquarters. This time, the general’s guard turned and announced, “The President of the United States!” Everybody’s suddenly saluting. And this is Lowe quoting Lincoln: “General, this is my friend, Professor Lowe, who is organizing an aeronautic corps for the Army and is to be its chief. I wish you would facilitate his work in every way and give him all the necessary things to equip his branch of the service on land and on water.” And with that, he leaves. And suddenly, Thaddeus Lowe is the Chief Aeronaut of the United States Balloon Corps, in service to the Federal Army.
ROMAN MARS: Thaddeus gets to work right away. He oversees the building of seven hydrogen balloons specifically for the Army. And he personally takes the first balloon, aptly named “Union,” through extensive testing. By the fall of 1861, the kinks have been worked out and everything is in place. Thaddeus and his Balloon Corps are ready to launch on the battlefield.
ROMAN MARS: How did the soldiers perceive these balloons?
JACK HITT: Well, they were terrifying. When the Confederates realized what these things were–that these were observatory balloons–they would shoot at them. In fact, at first, it was like ignorant Romans perceiving Hannibal’s elephants. “Oh my god, what are these?” And they just unleashed fire on these balloons. But of course their guns couldn’t hit them a mile up. They couldn’t reach anywhere close. And in fact, Lowe sort of took delight in the fact that the Confederates were just using up all their ammo on his balloons.
ROMAN MARS: Just like that, Thaddeus had found a purpose for the purposeless gas bag. And if you can believe it, as chief of the first aerial component of the U.S. military, he was going to have a direct impact on the war. In fact, Thaddeus was regularly breaking new ground. First, there was the time Thaddeus and his men attached one of the balloons to a coal barge.
JACK HITT: And they moved it up and down the Potomac River so they could move their balloon into place up and down in different battles along the edge of this river.
ROMAN MARS: That barge is still referred to by some historians as the first aircraft carrier. Then, one day, when Thaddeus was doing his regular reconnaissance, he rose into the air and, from his vantage point, saw a group of men on horseback, behind Confederate lines.
JACK HITT: Now, what that typically meant was somebody important, right? Officers were on horseback. And so he sent word down the line, “Aim your cannons over here. There’s a bunch of officers over here. Bombard here.” And they do. They come close but miss. And those guys scatter. And years afterwards, in a century war book, General James Longstreet wrote a little passage about how, at one point, they were amazed because President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, General James Longstreet, and probably Stonewall Jackson, too, were all there with their staff at this one moment. And then he writes, “It was impossible for the enemy to see us as we sat on our horses in this little field surrounded by tall heavy timber and thick undergrowth. And yet a battery, by chance, had our range and our exact distance and poured upon us a terrifying fire.”
ROMAN MARS: But it was not by chance.
JACK HITT: And if those shots had connected, the war would have ended.
ROMAN MARS: Oh my God.
ROMAN MARS: In fact, the gas bag was so successful that the South tried to copy it.
JACK HITT: The South had to respond. You know, there was an arms race of sorts, right? Now, of course, they didn’t have trade with the South. There was no more foreign trade, so they couldn’t get materials easily. And so rather scandalously, they appropriated–or it was donated–all of the petticoat material by the ladies of the South. So all the foundation garments and other bits would have to be sacrificed for the greater good.
ROMAN MARS: So they didn’t have any silk. And so therefore they made their underwear balloons.
JACK HITT: It was the underwear balloon. The Southerners claim… I mean they got angry about this, by the way, later. “Not a single Southern belle was asked to give up her Sunday best for the cause!” said one.
And of course these were bolts of dress material before they were made into actual clothes. But this petticoat balloon finally gets launched. The arms race is on. They bring the balloon up to Richmond in 1862. And they put it in action. And Lowe’s balloon was also in that fight. So they had two observation balloons at the same time. Your official military historians will say this is the first air-to-air combat.
ROMAN MARS: The Union eventually captured the balloon and gave it to Thaddeus.
JACK HITT: And they cut him up into little squares and every congressman in the North was given one of these little squares of the petticoat. You know, it’s another stunt to sort of, like, increase the funding for the Balloon Corps.
ROMAN MARS: Despite the failure of the petticoat balloon, Thaddeus’ corps remained incredibly successful.
JACK HITT: No Union balloon was ever shot down, and no Balloon Corps aeronaut was ever killed. But strangely–and this is true of all new sort of inventions–there’s a set of people that just simply don’t care how good it is. They like the old ways. And strangely, despite all of its successes, it just kind of faded from use by 1863 and kind of disappears.
ROMAN MARS: Like, still in the war, it faded from use?
JACK HITT: Oh, yeah. Yeah, by the end of ’62, it was pretty much out of business.
ROMAN MARS: After all that, Thaddeus’ balloons were grounded. But he carried on doing what he did best, using his failures as a launching pad to the next big thing.
JACK HITT: At this point, the war ends. And Thaddeus does what you do in peace time, which is he decides to make money.
ROMAN MARS: Some people decide to make money during wartime, too.
JACK HITT: Oh, they did. That’s true. Very famously, there are those.
ROMAN MARS: Thaddeus took everything he learned from his balloonist days and turned them into two huge money-making opportunities. First, Thaddeus took what he learned about heating up gas on the fly for the battlefield and turned that into what would become the first home gas heaters.
JACK HITT: He brought gas into the house to heat homes better than firewood and better than coal. And so the Lowe’s gas works made a fortune.
ROMAN MARS: Then Thaddeus turned his sights from heating to cooling. Remember that Cincinnati balloon ride? In the strange world of the upper atmosphere, Thaddeus observed a phenomenon up there that he couldn’t explain.
JACK HITT: At night, the balloon would groan and sort of almost breathe. And occasionally, when it did, sort of a bushel of ice would come crashing down on his head. And he later discovered, as the balloon would go up and down, moisture would freeze on the inside of the balloon, attaches like a glass of iced tea out on a summer porch. Moisture inside the balloon would stick to the balloon. And then when it got a little closer to the Earth or warmed up in some way, all of that would loosen and come showering down on Thaddeus Lowe’s head. So that gave him the idea that maybe you could make ice on land. And so he starts the Citizens Ice Company. And I think it’s the first public ice company. And of course that makes a fortune. He became so fabulously rich, he started the Citizens Bank of Los Angeles. Needless to say, he’d moved to the West Coast, where everybody goes once they make their money or want to make even more money.
ROMAN MARS: In California, he uses that money in a distinctly Thaddeus way–not to buy a house or a boat, but to take over an entire mountain, Oak Mountain, just north of Los Angeles, which even becomes known as Mount Lowe. Seriously. Look at a map. It’s still called that today. His plan was to create something that would bring the sky high experience to the masses: a resort on the top of the world.
JACK HITT: What’s really cool about the Mount Lowe Resort is getting to the top of a mountain was not something most people ever did. I think Thaddeus wanted to share that balloon experience of being at the edge of the world, the outer edge. And so he created this large funicular train, the kind that goes up this steep slope. And I’ve seen pictures of this funicular. I feel perfectly safe for some reason in a funicular. But this trolley car… Oh my God. I mean, Dr. Seuss could not have drawn it more rickety. I would never even get anywhere close to this trolley car. But it would take you to Mount Lowe’s Alpine Tavern Hotel. And there was a casino there. There was a zoo up there. At night, there was this massive searchlight that they had appropriated from a world’s fair that they could shine and you could see downtown Los Angeles. You know, daytime, you could see the Pacific Ocean from up there. And he sort of democratized the entire sort of experience of what he had done in that balloon.
ROMAN MARS: But building a mountaintop resort isn’t cheap, no matter what you’ve invented. And before long, Thaddeus’ relentless ambition had once again gotten the better of him.
JACK HITT: He went bankrupt sort of right around the turn of the 20th century. He lost all of his money. You know, he longed to be buried at Arlington for his service in the war. And they said, “You know, that’s only for enlisted soldiers and you were just some made up dude called an aeronaut, so no.” And so he’s kind of fading at the turn of the century, but his image as to who he was–this icon of invention and kind of eccentricity–was very much in the air. And you won’t find this in any history book, but I’ll put this to you.
ROMAN MARS: Okay.
JACK HITT: So 1900 is the year that L. Frank Baum wrote his book, The Wizard of Oz. So the titular character is, in the beginning of the book, this old man in white hair with insane mustaches–sort of half scientist, half crackpot con man. And then in the dream world of that book, he becomes the showman who invents this whole world and then, in the end, jumps in this balloon and flies off. And his last words are, “I don’t know how to steer this thing.”
ROMAN MARS: I can see it!
JACK HITT: You can see it, right?
ROMAN MARS: Absolutely, I can see it.
ROMAN MARS: Thaddeus Lowe’s legacy is hard to pin down. Despite his mountain, his many inventions, or even his apparent influence on classic literature, most of us have never heard his name. But I think you can make the argument that his gas pack–his dream–planted the seed for every future attempt to fly higher, from the airplane to the space shuttle. Stay with me here. When we think of air flight, we think about the Wright brothers. But when the Wright brothers thought of air flight, they thought of Thaddeus Lowe. And in 1910, only seven years after their own pioneering flight, the Wright brothers were hosting the first major air show in the U.S. And they specifically invite Thaddeus Lowe to come.
JACK HITT: You know, because he’s the grand old man of air flight, right? And he had sort of institutionalized this longing to get out to the farthest, the longest, the fastest. He is the Ben Franklin of the air, and they want him to come and to honor him. And so he goes. And he has a granddaughter named Florence Leontine Lowe. She is eight years old. And in one of the exhibits, there is this sort of cartoon-like display with movable airplanes. And they knew that Thaddeus Lowe was going to bring his granddaughter, so they had a cartoon cutout of Florence in the airplane as the pilot.
ROMAN MARS: Before long, Florence would pick up where her grandfather left off. And it’s through Florence that I’m going to let Jack just trace the long tale of Thaddeus’ legacy. Though by her adulthood, she wasn’t called Florence anymore. She was called Pancho Barnes.
JACK HITT: She dressed as a man, smoked cigars, and gets her pilot’s license in 1928. And at that time, a lot of air experimentation was done by women as much as men. It’s not just Amelia Earhart whom we’ve all heard about. In fact, Pancho, we’ll now call her, became the first female stunt pilot in Hollywood. She broke Amelia Earhart’s speed record. She clocked 196.19 miles per hour.
ROMAN MARS: That’s amazing.
ROMAN MARS: And after breaking that record, Pancho turned a patch of land in the desert into the destination for Hollywood starlets, test pilots, and anybody else who wanted to land their plane somewhere where they would be guaranteed a good time. The resort quickly became a notorious party destination that Pancho named the Happy Bottom Riding Club.
JACK HITT: It became the hangout after World War II. And people would come out there and go horseback riding. But there would also be these wild parties at night. And anyone who broke a record got a free steak dinner in the restaurant. It was that kind of thing. So everybody hung out there. Chuck Yeager was one of the big attendees there.
ROMAN MARS: Chuck Yeager: the first pilot in history to break the sound barrier.
JACK HITT: By the way–a great little story that, I think, he tells years later–but the night before he broke the sound barrier, he went for a midnight ride with Pancho and some others at the Happy Bottom Riding Club. And someone had closed the gate, and they couldn’t see it on the way back. So the horse hit it, and he flew off and broke a couple of his ribs. And so when he did his famous test flight the next day, he had several broken ribs. If he had told anybody, he would not have been allowed to fly. And when he got into the cockpit, I think somebody noticed that he closed the thing with his left hand because he couldn’t use his right hand.
ROMAN MARS: Despite the groundbreaking achievement, Yeager wouldn’t become an astronaut like the other test pilots, largely because he didn’t have a college degree. But he did train them. In fact, he trained one of the ones that went to the moon.
JACK HITT: When I was little, of course, we all loved Neil Armstrong. He was handsome and tall and brave. And Buzz Aldrin–he was talkative and cocky.
ROMAN MARS: He was called Buzz. [CHUCKLES]
ROMAN MARS: But it wasn’t Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin that Yeager trained. It was Jack Hitt’s personal favorite, the one almost everyone forgets.
JACK HITT: There’s a third guy, Mike Collins. The other guy. And it’s interesting that, all of his life, he explained that there was only one question that he ever got asked. And it was what it was like to be as far away from Earth as anyone has ever been because that was his achievement. Right? That was his thing.
ROMAN MARS: As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left to walk on the moon, Mike Collins was the one who had to stay behind on the spacecraft. And in the module, he would orbit the moon, traveling the farthest from Earth that anyone ever had. And he did so alone.
JACK HITT: Because remember, when he turns the corner, when he goes around to the dark side of the moon, he’s out of radio contact and there’s no light, right? There is nothing. You can see nothing. He’s in this tin can. And he originally answered the question, “Outside my window, I can see stars and that is all. Where I know the moon will be, there is simply a black void. The moon’s presence is defined solely by the absence of the stars. I am alone now. Truly alone and absolutely isolated from any known life, I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be 3 billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”
ROMAN MARS: Collins was alone, surrounded by an inky blackness punctuated only by stars.
ROMAN MARS: Wow. I mean, what you’re describing is very much the scene of Thaddeus Lowe taking off an unelectrified world for his flight.
JACK HITT: Absolutely. Lowe’s description of the sky and the sensation of being out there–you know–three and a half, four miles above the Earth seems so very close to what Mike Collins is describing hundreds of thousands of miles above the Earth.
ROMAN MARS: Collins was weightless in his gravity-free capsule, floating like Thaddeus in his balloon all those years earlier. Despite being separated by more than a century, these two men were experiencing the same thing, one in a wicker basket over Cincinnati and the other in a tin can on the dark side of the moon. And it was the exact same instinct that had led both the aeronaut and the astronaut to take to the skies.
JACK HITT: It seems like specifically a very American obsession to try to push their way to the outer edge of something, that whole frontier mentality that has kind of been with us from the beginning.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, this is great, Jack. Thank you so much for talking with me. I just had a delightful time.
JACK HITT: Great. Me too. [CHUCKLES]
ROMAN MARS: Jack Hitt is an author and contributing editor of Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and This American Life.
And if you liked this story about Thaddeus Lowe, you should check out Jack’s book, Bunch of Amateurs, which is an inside look at the inventors, tinkerers, and other eccentrics whose creations have made America what it is today.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.
This episode was produced by Isaac Fisher.
Our other producers are Ellie Lightfoot, Brenna Daldorph, and Priscilla Alabi.
The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell.
Mixing by Charlie Brandon-King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.
From 99% Invisible, our Executive producer is Kathy Tu.
From BBC Studios, our Executive Producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our Production coordinator is Shan Pill-ay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.
99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
BBC studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.
If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected]
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