Victorians who flew as high as jumbo jets | Hacker News Reader

Victorians who flew as high as jumbo jets

bbc.com

159 pointsotoolep37 comments

Great piece! It's a nice reminder that the real world was a lot more fantastic and steampunk-like than a conventional presentation of history would lead one to believe.

In an article from April 2016 they mention Felix Baumgartner but not Alan Eustace? Don't the BBC have google and wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace

I didn't know either. I bet Alan Eustace didn't have the PR of an energy drink company.

Probably because Baumgartner did something new, not Eustace.

When you talk about the Everest, Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay deserve a word for their performance, not the flock of execs which climb it each year.

Reminds me of lawn chair larry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters

my hero

I will admit. I have a hard time believing victorian ballooners achieved 37k feet without dying.

Considering that some have climbed Mount Everest (29k feet, and requiring much more physical exertion) without supplementary oxygen, it doesn't seem too far-fetched.

People who climb Everest carefully (and slowly) acclimatize prior to any summit attempt. Expeditions can spend 40-60 days going up (and down) to help the body adjust to harsh conditions. Also, the 8k feet difference between Everest summit and 37k isn't nothing. There will be ~30% less oxygen at 37k feet than there is at 29k feet and, according to the Wikipedia entry for Mt Everest, someone accustomed to sea level air pressure would pass out within 2-3 minutes at 29k. So even if they made it to 29k and were still awake, they wouldn't be when they reached 37k without going upwards in a hurry (3000 ft/min is over 30 mph).

I have to agree with the poster you're replying to...37k seems like an exaggeration. Somewhere in the mid-20ks seems more likely.

This is a relevant and good read:

* https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/861

A relevant Gutenberg search:

* https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=s.balloon

How did they estimate their height?

They likely had a barometer. The very same method we use today to supplement the rather unsteady altitude reading from GPS.

If they did this, the next question would be how accurate their calibration was. Barometric altimetry was only about 20 to 50 years old at that time.

I guess that raises another question: how do they calibrate the barometer at all? I assume by taking one up a mountain. (And how do they know the height of the mountain? Using a sextant and simple trigonometry).

They could use a mountain. They could equally use a balloon (just not to 20k feet). British scientists by that time were knowledgable enough to extrapolate.

You can read about the height of Everest and other Himalayas. There are some interesting stories about the lengths people (mostly British and Europeans) went to precisely determine their heights from ground stations. Once, they thought Everest was exactly 29,000 feet but thought this figure lacked gravitas so added two feet to make it sound precise. So you can imagine the British ballooners might have played with the truth a bit too.

Why is altitude from GPS unsteady? Do you mean unsteady compared to latitude and longitude? Why would one dimension be less precise than the others? Something to do with the position of the satellites being in a kind of domed plane rather than all around you?

My tactical GPS has a separate digital barometer to help it establish a GPS location more quickly. I've always wondered why.

Yes, compared to lat and long. A good 2D GPS fix is easiest when you have a few satellites in different compass directions, say one at each of N,S,E,W. But for 3D, it is impossible to see a satellite underneath you. You have a bunch of them above you, and you need to difference the times of their signals' arrival.

For more, see here: http://gpsinformation.net/main/altitude.htm

I kind of giggled when i read "tactical GPS." I imagine the device is all black and is made by a company whose motto is some variant of "high speed low drag." Other than that what is the difference between a "tactical GPS" and a run of the mill GPS?

It's a small, ruggedised GPS that interfaces with personal military radio systems such as Bowman. Tactical meaning used on a person, as opposed to something on a vehicle with a big antenna. These didn't say they had a barometer, which is why I made the distinction. I used them when I was in the Army. What is there to giggle about in any of that?

Full respect if you used it in the army. The giggling was probably because the GPS was thought to be "tacticool" (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tacticool) as opposed to tactical.

This is exactly what I was thinking. You do not see many comments from Tommy Tacticool on HN.

I wonder if Victorian balloonists experienced an analogue to the Overview Effect astronauts experience. I can't imagine what being the first people to see from high above would have been like.

Think about how we view the ocean today, versus how people viewed the ocean hundreds of years ago. The same phenomena meant really different things to different groups of people in different cultural contexts and historical moments. The same is true with the view of the earth from space. "The Overview Effect" is the product of cold war total-system thinking; a combination of the gaia hypothsis, the blue marble, and "spaceship earth". Here is a really good paper--Bimm, "Rethinking The Overview Effect" (2014)--about the historical specificity of "overview" an how it is a cultural, rather than natural, product. https://www.academia.edu/5995107/Rethinking_the_Overview_Eff...

I will give that a read. I've never been comfortable with the "physical effect" argument, but I've only ever seen it presented in pop media as a fait accompli, so it's a relief that there's serious consideration of other explanations.

The "cold and lack of oxygen"? How about just altitude sickness?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness

How is that different from "lack of oxygen"? Altitude sickness is just a name for its symptoms...

Great article, its amazing how back in the days so many aristocrats and rich people were actually conquering the world, breaking the limits and sponsoring life saving experiments.

It was much different than we have today - get as much money, give %% of them to charity, hands clean.

Plenty of modern innovation and experiments are funded by billionaires today. Most relevant to HN, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Elon Musk are all ready examples.

Well not many of them get their hands dirty though, do they? Helping with money is one thing, but actually as a person diving in to the project and work on it without dozens of cameras and security guards is different thing.

Getting one's hands dirty at a technical level is incredibly difficult. Bill Gates's training and experience is in computer science and business; to develop the background needed to understand the details of treatment for Malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc would take many many years of intense, focused effort.

Someone like Bill Gates could hire someone with the technical expertise while spending his own time on more productive things that are likely to yield more good for the world--networking with other billionaires to convince them to donate money, working to manage the overall structure of the B&M Gates Foundation, etc.

Complex systems are complex. 200 years ago, the amount that we knew was significantly smaller; one could get to the edge of human knowledge with just a few years of intense work. In contrast, it takes significantly longer to get to a level of expertise at which one can productively contribute.

All evidence points to the people I mentioned getting deeply engaged in many of the experiments they're funding. Friends who work at Space X have confirmed that Elon at least is intimately involved in the projects.

I agree, but that is just handful of them, isnt it?

History tends to distort things. The present is an era. The 1990's is an era. The 1800's is a era. The renaissance is an era. The stone age is an era.

Of course accomplishments per era could decrease when we're judging the last few years against much larger time spans of the past.

It's always just been a handful. That goes for any good-doers of the world. Out of a pool of X people who are fortunate enough to have the capacity to do Y good thing, only a handful actually do it.

Works well enough.

Perhaps, but I think there's only ever been a few.

>actually conquering the world, breaking the limits and sponsoring life saving experiments.

Richard Branson and Elon Musk are doing that today.

Well ... Richard Branson sponsored balloon flights primarily as a cheap form of SEO for his young companies. He rode as a passenger with a qualified pilot.

Branson has had more than one near death experience over his 30 years of ballooning. He might be a great marketeer but don't confuse him for someone who lets others do the crazy stuff.

See here for just one of many stories. His biography has more than a few: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/world/2-trans-atlantic-bal...

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