#W. D. Saull

[sophiesballoonblog]

Oh my god, look at this ridiculous eagle-drawn airship:

I found this in the Scrapbook of Early Aeronautica, by the collector William Upcott (1779-1845)

It's so stupid and so beautiful.

The italics at the bottom say "Mr. Mackintosh proposes to construct a Balloon, of the form represented above, large enough to carry two persons, and to attach to it a sufficient number of Eagles, Hawks, Pigeons, or other large Birds, and in this manner, he is satisfied, from experiments he has made, that, in moderately calm weather the Balloon may be conducted in any direction that is desired." Kudos to the lithographer, Pocock, btw.

(also, Paternoster Row? My inner Doctor Who nerd was excited, so I checked, and this was designed in 1935, while the Paternoster Gang were around towards the end of the Victorian era. (The Crimson Horror takes place in 1893) So they probably wouldn't have met Mr. Mackintosh. kinda disappointed.)

I had a quick Google of "airship eagle mackintosh", but only found copies of the above image, and an aircraft carrier called the HMS Eagle, with a Capt. L. D. Mackintosh. HOWEVER, googling "Thomas Simmons Mackintosh" yielded this:

And doesn't "a faculty for vivid and humorous scientific illustration" sound like our Mackintosh? The time period seems to fit. I like the polite phrasing of this quote that is clearly saying his book was nonsense. "seemed true to those who did not understand it," owch. Also, it suggest that his Eagle-drawn ship may have been a joke?

And now I've found this in the citations of a book called "Reign of the Beast - The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution"

Saull was an opponent of creationism, and a geologist and collector with an interest in palaeontology who was a supporter of "radical causes." (He supported liberalisation of divorce, and lectured on the theory of people being descended from apes in 1833, 26 years before the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Pretty ahead of his time. Anyway, I'll try to extricate myself from that rabbit hole (but go read his Wikipedia or The Reign of the Beast (for free!) if you want a wayyyy longer read. This is getting away from me.)

ANYWAY! Thomas Simmons Mackintosh was apparently aligned with Saull, and they lectured together: "He told them at Watson's Mechanics' Hall of Science, in a six-lecture series in 1836, running concurrently with Saull’s lectures, that electricity was the most potent agent in the physical world, and “the ultimate source of motion”" (From Reign of the Beast)

He was involved in the then-cutting-edge science of electricity, and "he toed the Owen line that humans shaped by circumstance should not be judged, and he attacked Christianity for downplaying man’s social duty to man in the here-and-now in favour of the Kingdom to come." So he didn't believe in Heaven. These people were very controversial at the time for their blasphemy, and some of them got into serious legal trouble for publishing their views.

"Mack", as was his nickname apparently, believed the Earth had had five moons, four of which had crashed into the Earth already, causing extinctions, and the final moon would do the same one day.

Finally, I found Kristen A. Rieger's paper, which explains his Electrical Theory of the Universe and, uh... it's something. The sun is a vast conductor of electricity, it expels comets, which turn into planets, and eventually fall back into the sun, and his crashing moon theory was trying to explain disturbances in geological strata (fair enough).

Also, he was once a cotton-weaver in Gasgow, then shopman and silk trader, so he was an artisan, not upper-class, but well-off. He was involved with Richard Carlisle, a "notorious working-class reformer"

"Beginning in the 1820s, the British Home Office, alongside the Society for the Suppression of Vice, waged an underhanded attack against Carlile, intending to put an end to his prodigious radical publishing operation."

-Rieger

"Society for the Suppression of Vice" is a pretty badass name for an organisation, i must admit. But they sucked, because Carlisle was put in jail in the 1820s, and Mackintosh was one of the volunteers who distributed Carlisle's books and risked arrest. Cool dude.

THEN, I finally saw a mention of the fucking bird airship that started this off:

Googling the exact title of the pamphlet yielded this monstrosity:

The paper is so thin, it's hard to make out the text. But I'll do my best to decipher it. Let's see.

For one thing, the illustration provided with the pamphlet is not bird-steered:

I then realised that this is not Thomas Mackintosh's design, but his design seems to have been in response to this one. In the pamphlet, we see The Eagle introduced: 160 feet long, 50 feet high, 40 feet wide. Apparently, it has been built and is on display at a dock in Kensington. It will make a journey to Paris and back again. There are dreams of flying to Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid! Hilariously, the design is based on a French 1796 design by Campenas, which he proposed to Napoleon:

"there will issue an Aerial Vessel, capable of carrying up with you more than 200 persons, and which may be directed to any point on the compass. I, myself, will be your pilot. You can thus, without any danger, hover above the fleets of enemies jealous of our happiness, and thunder against them like a new Jupiter, merely by throwing perpendicularly downwards firebrands [...]; or perhaps you may think it more prudent to begin at once, by forcing the British cabinet to capitulate, which you may easily do, as you will have it in your power to set fire to the city of London[...]"

This absolute MADMAN Campenas was proposing this to Napoleon Bonaparte. My inner steampunk fan is delighted. My inner London fan is glad it never worked out.

Anyway, we finally hear from TS Mackintosh himself in this pamphlet. He is commenting on the effectiveness of the airship. He envisions wings that fold like a bird's so they don't drag the ship on the backstroke (pretty reasonable, actually), and criticises the airship for not implementing this and a foldable or retractable rudder.

"I did not "recommend the employment of pigeons for the conductors of the aerial ship to Paris," as your correspondent "Fog" asserts." AHA! We're getting somewhere. He does say even Geese would be better at steering the ship than the wings it has got, yeesh. He clarifies:

"I do not propose to build an aerial ship large enough to carry a garrison for the purpose of compelling cabinets to submit to the fiat of a "new Jupiter"" -Thomas "Mack" Mackintosh, mad lad

Instead he proposes a small ship, enough to carry two people, to which would be attached forty, sixty, or even a hundred pigeons. He describes this design as "modest." He says they could steer this ballon in any direction if the weather was calm. So. There we have it. The origin of the ridiculous eagle-drawn airship design, the brainchild of one Thomas Simmons Mackintosh, who was annoyed at a flawed airship. I honestly still can't tell if he was joking with his alternative design, but this has been a fun journey.

There's only one question left: What happened to the Eagle?

Well, after being exhibited in the grounds of the Aeronautical Society in Kensington, it found it's way to the Champ de Mars, Paris. Unclear how it got there, but I presume it didn't fly, because when it tried to lift off in Paris, it was too heavy, and the disappointed crowd destroyed it. This was not uncommon during failed balloon demonstrations at the time.

"However, I venture to give this opion [sic], that, in no very great length of time, it will be nothing uncommon for a gentleman to call for his balloon and his birds as he now calls for his carriage and horses.

Yours, &c T. S. Mackintosh"