Lancastrian tried, failed to deliver nation’s first mail by air
By Jack Brubaker
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:40
By hot-air balloon.
On his first try, he failed spectacularly, crashing his balloon in New York and destroying all the mail.
The second time he failed in more mundane fashion, floating the wrong direction in Indiana and causing the mail to be delivered extremely late.
A brief article in the August issue of Smithsonian Magazine describes Wise’s flights as a way of introducing to readers the only piece of mail known to survive these early efforts.
Held today in the collections of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, the surviving letter was sent to W.H. Munn of New York City.
On Aug. 17, 1859, Wise had set off from Lafayette, Ind., in a balloon named Jupiter with the intention of delivering Munn’s and other letters to New York City.
But in August the air was still and Wise had to ascend to 14,000 feet before locating a breeze.
That breeze blew him south instead of east.
He descended five hours and 30 miles later in Crawfordsville, a town in the same county as Lafayette. Wise put the mail on an eastbound train.
The Smithsonian article doesn’t say much more about Wise, except that he later flew observation balloons for the Union Army and expired when his balloon plummeted into Lake Michigan.
Lancastrians should know more about the man.
John Wise was born here on Feb. 24, 1808.
At age 14 he read about a balloon trip in Italy and decided to go aloft himself.
In an initial, unmanned experiment, he tied together four inflated ox bladders.
Then he attached a cat and propelled bladders and cat from an upper-story window. The fall was precipitous. The cat survived, but not the bladders.
Wise made his first ascent by himself in Philadelphia in the spring of 1835. He went up several thousand feet and remained there for over an hour, landing safely near Haddonfield, N.J.
He flew several more flights from other cities before making his first Lancaster ascent on Oct. 1, 1835. That trip ended in disaster.
The balloon lurched into a house. Wise escaped to the roof, watching his balloon disappear eastward. Eventually it exploded, with remnants descending on Bordentown, N.J.
But Wise continued making flights here and elsewhere. Thousands of people turned out to watch. A well-known photo shows a large crowd gathered around Wise’s balloon before it ascended from Penn Square in 1869.
Early in that decade, Wise had persuaded the U.S. War Department to take him on during the Civil War. During early campaigns, he provided assistance in tracking enemy forces.
But that job ended badly when telegraph wires cut his balloon’s tethers. Wise instructed Yankee soldiers to shoot holes in the balloon to keep it from falling into enemy hands.
Wise went on flying into his 70s.
In the early autumn of 1879, he and James Downey, also of Lancaster, set off from Lindell Park, St. Louis, with George Burr, a local bank teller, as a passenger.
Burr paid $60 to take his first and last balloon ride.
Observers saw the trio sail over Lake Michigan and that was the end of balloon and passengers.
It’s hard to know who kept count, but Wise supposedly ascended in balloons more than 250 times before his fateful final journey.
(The Scribbler’s e-mail address is: jbrubaker@lnpnews.com.)
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