Although most of John Wise’s aviation endeavours came to naught, he deserves full marks for effort. His motive was neither commercial nor to impress the public. Instead, he was driven by pure science. That is why his ascents were remarkable for his attention to detail, the intelligent observations and the ultimate scientific value.

The United States has been the world’s undisputed leader in aviation and aerospace technology for a century. And yet there was a time when it woefully lagged behind Europe. Modern aviation ostensibly began on November 21, 1783, with the first untethered lighter-than-air flight by two Frenchmen in a Montgolfier hot air balloon, but America remained practically free of human flight for another half a century. That changed when John Wise began ballooning in 1835. Over his 44-year career, he made 463 ascents mainly for scientific purposes.

John Wise was born on February 24, 1808, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The young John was adventurous and inquisitive. Fascinated by the immense possibilities aviation offered, he began to conduct experiments on his own. He may not have endeared himself to animal rights activists because, according to legend, he dropped his cat from the local church steeple. The animal, secured to a homemade parachute, thankfully emerged unscathed from the flight trial.

In 1835, Wise fashioned his first human-carrying balloon, using his own money. It was a homemade affair: a muslin sheet coated with a mixture of birdlime suspended in linseed oil to make the sheet impermeable. It rose up gradually and descended safely. But on his second flight on America’s Independence Day, as he attempted to open the valve on the top of the balloon, he lost control. The balloon burst, bringing him back to earth with a bump, but without injury. More adventures followed. In October 1835, he fell out from the balloon car and was rendered unconscious while the balloon drifted away. In May 1836, while he was emptying cargo from the balloon’s car, the gas exploded, burning him severely. On another occasion he alighted in a river and had to be rescued from drowning.

His many near misses got him thinking. In 1838, he developed a balloon that if deflated aloft would collapse to form a parachute (the bottom half folding upwards into the top to form the classic parachute shape). The idea had been proposed before, but Wise was the first to build a working version. And just in time. On a flight on August 11, 1838, in bad weather, his balloon suddenly punctured at 13,000 feet. It descended like a parachute and hit the earth. Although Wise was thrown from the car, he survived unscathed.

A keen proponent of balloon transportation, Wise planned to cross the Atlantic in 1843. However, the US Congress refused to provide the $15,000 he needed. During the Mexican War, he devised an elaborate plan to take the city of Vera Cruz, by constructing a huge gas balloon, attaching it to a eight-kilometrelong cable and flying the craft over the city’s fortress in order to drop 18,000 pounds of explosives on it. This too was rejected. However, during the American Civil War, Wise successfully made an ascent over Arlington where he noted the presence of Confederate forces and supposedly fired the first hostile shot from an airborne device in history.

Each ascent gave Wise a chance to investigate the atmosphere, pneumatics and hydrostatics. He developed the parachute ripcord safety mechanism. He was the first to postulate the existence of “a great river of air which always blows from west to east” in the higher regions of the atmosphere. Today this is called the jet stream. He attempted the first airmail flight in the US from Lafayette to Crawfordsville in Indiana state. On August 17, 1859, he went aloft in a balloon named Jupiter carrying 123 letters and 23 circulars. However, after covering just 40 kilometres, he was forced to land for lack of buoyancy. The mail was unceremoniously put on a train to New York City and was delivered safely to the addressees. And a second attempt a month later fared even worse. After flying nearly 1,280 kilometres, a storm caused a crash, and the mail was unrecoverable. Indeed, it was not until 1911 that the first genuine airmail flight in the US occurred when three letters were carried a few kilometres in California—by aeroplane.