Background
John Wise was born on February 24, 1808, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of his father and mother, of German and English descent.
John Wise was born on February 24, 1808, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of his father and mother, of German and English descent.
Wise was educated in the local schools and graduated from the Lancaster high school. At fourteen he read a German newspaper account of a balloon voyage to Italy and developed a definite desire to study aerostatics in practical fashion.
He began his experiments with paper parachutes. Later, with a parachute made of four ox-bladders, he dropped a cat thirty feet from a housetop without injury to the animal. He then experimented with hot-air paper balloons of the Montgolfier type. Watching the ascension of one of these balloons, he was seized with the desire to experience "the sublime feeling of sailing in air, " as he put it. Before this desire was satisfied, however, he served an apprenticeship of four and a half years as cabinetmaker and then worked until 1835 as a pianoforte maker. All this experience was to serve him in good stead when he met with mechanical difficulties in the making of his balloons. Wise's first ascent was made in Philadelphia in 1835 in a balloon of his own design, which he built before he had ever seen a balloon or an ascension. From then on he devoted his life entirely to aerostatics, not as an adventurer but as a scientific pioneer in ballooning. He developed a balloon varnish superior to those in use at the time and attempted to simplify the construction of balloons by cementing the seams, an idea which did not prove practicable. He constantly studied meteorological conditions and the effects of storms. As a result of these studies, he came to believe that a steady wind blew from west to east at an altitude of two to three miles which could be used to advantage by balloonists. During one of his ascents in a thunder-storm, the balloon rose so rapidly as a result of dropping ballast that the gas expanded faster than it could escape through the neck of the balloon and the balloon burst. The bag flared out, however, and acted as a parachute, permitting a safe descent. As a result of this accident, Wise developed a rip panel, and demonstrated several times that a forced descent might be made quickly by pulling the rip cord and using the balloon as a parachute. He also had to his credit one of the first definite proposals in aeronautical tactics, which was a plan to capture the city of Vera Cruz by dropping bombs from a balloon attached to a warship by a five-mile cable. He believed that a trip to Europe could be made by a balloon if it could stay in the air for fifty hours, utilizing the supposedly steady wind from west to east. To test this idea a voyage from St. Louis to New York was projected. The balloon ascended on July 1, 1859, with Wise, three passengers, and a bag of mail, but it was caught in a storm over Lake Ontario, the heavy mail bag had to be thrown overboard, and the balloon finally came to earth near Henderson, New York. In this trip Wise set a distance record of 804 miles which was not surpassed until the year 1900. When two petitions to Congress (1843, 1851) for a grant of money to construct a balloon and make a trip to Europe were rejected, he finally came to an agreement with the Daily Illustrated Graphic of New York for the construction of a balloon to make the voyage.
The balloon, completed in 1873, was 160 feet high, including the car and lifeboat slung underneath, and had a total lift of 14, 000 pounds. Wise quarreled with his backers, however, and the balloon started on its flight to Europe with only Washington H. Donaldson, aeronaut, George A. Lunt, navigator, and Alfred Ford, newspaper correspondent. It crashed at New Canaan, Connecticut, September 29, 1879, while attempting another long voyage in a balloon called the "Pathfinder, " Wise and his companion were drowned in Lake Michigan.