The Power-Balloon Man

"Look at the facts…"

“A flying ship, an air blower, punching press, trip hammer, pocket lamp, pocket chair, fog whistle, wire cutter, engine lathe, clothes drier, grain weigher, camera obscura, spring pistol, engine cut off, balanced valve, revolvidal boat, rotary plow, reaction wind wheel, portable house, paint mill, water lifter, odometer, thermo engine, rotary engine, and scores of other inventions.”

Such was the list of creations that Scientific American credited to the genius of Rufus L. Porter upon his death at the age of 92 in 1884. In fact, the magazine itself was his invention! He founded it in 1845.

This most ingenuous man also invented a machine that would make ropes, a gristmill powered by the wind, a device for pressing cheese, a portable home, a fog whistle, a gizmo for shelling corn, and a revolving rifle (a rifle whose bullets rotated in the weapon’s stock). Alas, he sold the rights to his ‘revolver’ for $100 to Samuel Colt who then created…the revolver.

In his early years he was an itinerant mural painter who traveled throughout New England painting scenes of villages and seacoasts in dwellings. “A painter of democracy,” the New York Times called him, and his works may still be seen today some of the region’s older inns.

Porter may have even been the inspiration for Mark Twain’s novel about an ingenious time-traveling inventor “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” (Both men lived in Hartford at the same time.)

Depending on one’s point of view, Porter was either a visionary or a crackpot. Though most of his ideas were down to earth, he spent years trying to raise money to build a massive dirigible that would have been a speedy “Air Line to California.”

The first manned balloon flight had taken place in Europe in 1784. The trouble with balloons was they went where the air pushed them. Porter made his first model dirigible in 1833.  

Tinkerer's Imagination

His tinkerer’s imagination went into overdrive in 1848 when gold was discovered in the territory of California. People couldn’t get there quickly enough. Ultimately, the Gold Rush lured a half million people west.

The problem was getting there. The shortest but perhaps most arduous route was overland by wagon train from Ft. Joseph in western Missouri, a bone-jarring trip that might take seven months.

The safest, but probably most expensive way, was to go around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. That 15,000-mile voyage that took four to eight months.

The speediest way? Sail to the Isthmus of Panama, go overland, and catch a northbound ship on the Pacific side. That 7,000 miles journey would only take two to three months, but travelers risked contracting yellow fever or other deadly diseases in Panama. It wouldn’t be until July 4, 1876, when the transcontinental railroad was completed and could offer travelers the pleasure of making the journey in a mere in four or five days.)

Porter had a better idea. He wanted to build an 800-foot-long 50-foot diameter hydrogen-filled dirigible that could carry as many as 300 people in a wooden passenger ‘saloon’ outfitted with 26 windows. It could cross the continent (or cruise to Europe) in a week or less, possibly in even two days, staying aloft for 12 hours at a time and traveling at the then outrageous speed of 100 miles per hour.

Steam engines would drive twin propellers 20 feet in diameter. Its zeppelin’s construction would require 20,000 feet of spruce rods for the frame and 8,000 yards of cloth coated with India rubber. In case of emergency, the craft’s engines and boilers could be swiftly dropped.

            He dubbed his airship “the aeroport.” Other names for it included the aerial locomotive, the aero-locomotive, and the power balloon. Porter’s thinking was in line with his day’s emerging technology. The first steam-powered dirigible flew in 1852 in Paris.

            Porter had business savvy. He founded the Aerial Navigation Company, and in early 1849 he laid out his plans in a booklet titled—‘Aerial Navigation: The Practicality of Traveling Pleasantly and Safely from New York to California in Three Days.’

            His first indoor ‘test drive’ of a model airship went well. "On a succession of wintry Wednesday nights early in the year 1849, audiences in the cavernous amphitheaters of New York City's Tabernacle Church at Broadway and Worth Street witnessed a curious demonstration,” a New York City newspaper reported.

“A toy-sized model airship, shaped like a long cigar and driven by two small propellers with clockwork motors, rose lightly from the pulpit and to the accompaniment of cheers from the watchers began a wide circle in the air. Following the tilt of its rudder, it made the round of the great chandelier that hung from the center of the dome, then returned obediently to the platform from which it was launched."

            A year later he demonstrated a model at the Merchant’s Exchange in Manhattan.. It circled the building’s rotunda 11 times. A New York City newspaper raved that “Mr. Porter’s ‘flying machine did all that it promised on Wednesday evening. It rose above the audience and went around the hall exactly as he said it would, and the spectators gave three cheers for the successful experiment.”

Ripped It to Shreds

            Investors lent him the money to build his first aeroport. This 240-foot-long dirigible never left the ground and may not have even neared completion. A tornado ripped it to shreds. Porter then began building a 700-foot-long airship. When he let the public view it on Thanksgiving Day, a mob ripped its gasbag to bits.

            To give a sense of the gargantuan and ambitious nature of Porter’s project. consider that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s first dirigible, the gas-engine powered 420-foot-long LZ 1, would not fly until 1900. The largest zeppelin ever constructed, the Hindenburg, was 776 feet long and could only carry as many as 133 passengers and crew at a maximum speed of 85 mph.

            In 1852 he sought funding via a newspaper announcement that read: The “safe and durable aerial ship….will be patronized with abundance of business (more than 50,000 persons are now ready to engage passages) at $200 per passage, which will amount to $30,000 per trip, each way; or $60,000 per week, besides $4,000 for carrying mails.  If this aeroport is owned in shares of $5 each, a single share will produce an income of $20 per week.”

His imagination glowing brightly, Porter added as a P.S.: “It is confidently believed that by this invention unexplored regions may be examined, and the light of civilization and Christianity may be disseminated through benighted lands with faculty; and that the world will honor the names of those who now subscribe to aid the introduction of an invention calculated to confer immense benefits upon the entire human race.”

Porter had his critics. “It would seem as if the gullibility of human nature kept even pace with the wit of knaves, and that nothing could be proposed for an exhibition too preposterous to find believers,” said an editorial in a Philadelphia newspaper. “Now, a flying machine... can never be steered. Yet, as in the analogous instance of perpetual motion, there will be found dolts to believe in it, we suppose, to the end of time.'

Things soon started to fall apart for Porter. In May 1853, he wrote a newspaper “What a world of fools; or rather, what a nation of skeptics and moral cowards. 

“Look at the facts.  More than ten years ago I published , described, illustrated, and demonstrated the practicability of a convenient mode of traveling safely and rapidly through the air, in any required direction; and subsequently have not only refuted all arguments against it, but demonstrated its practicability by the frequently repeated exhibition of an operating aerial steamer…on a small scale, and proved…that this mode of traveling would be incomparatively more safe, as well as more pleasant and expeditious, than nay mode in present use; and that the cost of an aeroport of such size and proportions as to be capable of carrying 200 passengers safely, at a good speed of 100 miles per hour, would be less than that of an ordinary steam ferry boat; and that the earnings of this aeroport would pay more than 200 percent per week on its cost; and that no accident or emergency could possibly occur to subject the passengers to more danger than that of a hotel residence. 

“Yet with these facts before them, and while people are being burned, drowned, smashed and ground up by hundreds, by collisions, overturning and plunging railroad trains, and the burning of steamboats; and while thousands are exposing their lives by land journeys across the thousand miles of desert and wilderness, or submitting to the hardship and dangers of a six months voyage around Cape Horn, such a total apathy, or mental disease of skepticism, and the fear of vulgar sneers pervades the community that not one man of wealth can be found in these United States, willing to furnish the requisite funds for introducing this incomparable and greatly needed improvement.”

 In 1854 he tried again to persuade investors to back him, but for whatever reasons, perhaps including Porter’s visible frustration and anger, he had to abandon the project. He had the right idea—and the courage, but he lived too early to realize his dream.

MORAL: Float the idea, but stay grounded.

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