The Aeronauts
September 1862
AMELIA WREN (Felicity Jones) rides through the streets of London in a carriage looking wistfully skywards. She stops the carriage and tumbles out in a panic. ANTONIA (Phoebe Fox), her sister, reassures her that after all she has been through, it’s not too late to change her mind.
A young boy, CHARLIE (Lewin Lloyd), runs past and sneaks into the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, passing crowds and fairground rides until he sees the Mammoth: an enormous red-and-white-striped silk gas balloon, measuring 93,000 cubic feet, 80 feet tall and 55 feet wide.
JAMES GLAISHER (Eddie Redmayne) is in the balloon basket, checking his scientific apparatus, annoyed that Amelia is late. His old friend and colleague, JOHN TREW (Himesh Patel), is worried about the ominous clouds above, but James is only concerned with getting in the air.
The crowd cheers as Amelia appears, riding on top of her carriage roof. Resplendent in a dress adorned with feathers, she is a star balloon pilot and her fans love her. The show has begun.
She swings onto the stage and cartwheels into the unsuspecting arms of the strait-laced scientist, James. Momentarily distracted by the memory of a man, PIERRE (Vincent Perez), she regains her composure, and whistles her dog Posey onto the stage. Amelia proclaims to the crowd that today a balloon will ascend higher than ever before and history will be made. As the crowd roars and fireworks go off, Amelia throws down a sandbag and the balloon starts to rise. The sky awaits.
400ft. Rising 400ft/min. 25C / 77F
Amelia continues her show from the air, dropping Posey out of the basket in a tiny parachute. She dismisses James’s tutting over her frivolous showmanship on a serious expedition.
As the balloon passes over the Greenwich Observatory, James thinks back to when he and Trew sat on that very roof, watching a balloon in awe and dreaming of one day being in the sky.
He has been trying to lobby the Royal Society for money to undertake a balloon expedition. He is convinced that by analysing atmospheric conditions, there might one day be a way to predict the weather – an idea which many at the Society find ludicrous. His application for funds is rejected.
James’s father ARTHUR GLAISHER (Tom Courtenay) does not feel that James’s weather predictions are the best use of his education, whilst ETHEL GLAISHER (Anne Reid), James’s mother, is more supportive of his work. James and Arthur argue – is James’s theory worth risking his reputation?
5,700 ft. Rising 400 ft/min. 18C / 64F
In the balloon, Amelia changes out of her show costume into oilskins. James is busy taking measurements and sending them back to London attached to carrier pigeons. The balloon is swallowed into a dark cloud, as Amelia remembers Pierre. James admits that the air pressure is changing faster than he had anticipated. A flash of lightning strikes. They are headed into a storm. Thunder jolts the balloon.
7,200 ft. Rising 400ft/min. 10C / 50F
James is flustered that his readings did not predict a storm. The lightning is precariously close. The rain starts lashing down, sending the basket into a spin, but still James continues his work. They are
thrown about in the basket and Amelia hauls James to the floor. James begs for them to continue regardless of the conditions and Amelia reassures him, saying the safest way is to rise above the storm. She slices off some bags of ballast.
9,000ft. Falling 400 ft/min then rising 600ft/min. 7C / 44F
The balloon hits a pocket of cold air and suddenly drops. Amelia, James and the equipment are sent flying. James lands back in the basket but Amelia has been thrown out, and is hanging on for dear life by a rope. James manages to lean over and pull her back to safety. The two take cover as the balloon gradually rises out of the storm, into a beautiful cloudscape.
Back in the Pleasure Gardens, John tries in vain to spot the balloon through a telescope. He has a conversation with Charlie, after which Charlie spots the Mammoth – by now a distant speck.
13,500ft. Rising 350ft/min. 1C / 34F
Thousands of feet above them, Amelia climbs up into the hoop to fix the storm damage. James is mesmerised by the sight of an aureole – a full-circle rainbow. When he points out that they are alone in a silent sky, both aeronauts shout at the clouds in joy. The balloon enters another cloud, which conducts sound from the street below; Amelia is overwhelmed with memories of Pierre.
Amelia and James had first met at a society gathering that Antonia had to persuade her sister to attend, two years after her husband Pierre’s death. James introduces himself to her and tries to persuade her to take him up in a balloon. He wants to conduct ground-breaking experiments in meteorology to prove his belief that weather patterns can be forecast, but he needs a fearless aeronaut to help him. She is dubious, but her interest is sufficiently piqued by James’s passion that she dances with him. She realises that he’s at the party under false pretences, but he persuades her to join his expedition by saying that his discoveries could save lives. Antonia is dismayed at Amelia’s decision to fly again, especially with a man who has never been in a balloon before. She accuses Amelia of using the air as a way of escaping her problems, and says she needs to find a way to be happy on the ground.
19,400ft. Rising 500ft/min. 0C / 32F
Amelia is tending to the cut on James’s forehead when they are surrounded by a swarm of butterflies. It is a sight to behold. Afterwards, Amelia opens up a little about her relationship with Pierre.
In a flashback, Amelia’s conflicted feelings about Pierre’s death cause her to pull out of the expedition, to James’s horror. The same night, he returns to his parents’ house – his father’s mind is failing, and he fails to recognise James at first. The two share a moment of understanding when Arthur allows James to stargaze with his telescope. Arthur gives James a pair of binoculars to use on his expedition – James is too ashamed to admit that Amelia’s decision has put the voyage in jeopardy. Desperate, he appeals to CHARLES GREEN (Thomas Arnold) for help. Green scornfully declines.
23,000 ft. Rising 600ft/min. -6C / 21F
The Mammoth is coated in a thin layer of ice as the two aeronauts break the height record – they have reached higher than anyone has ever been before. They are overawed with their achievement. As the balloon continues to rise, James admits that he did not pack his extreme weather gear having
prioritised his instruments for the weight allowance. Amelia is stunned. She insists that they start their descent, but James is desperate to set their record so high as to be unbreakable. Amelia is concerned for James’s wellbeing having already seen one man, Pierre, die in the air. She argues that his mission is not purely about science but about proving himself to his doubters. Regardless she is convinced to continue.
She is reminded of the moment John persuaded her to change her mind and fly with James. He brought her a copy of James’s book on the formation of snowflakes, and told her she had a responsibility to help him – not everyone gets the chance to change the world.
Amelia then visited Pierre’s grave. As snow started falling, she reconsidered the flight.
27,600ft. Rising 600ft /min. -15C / 5F
James tries to conceal how terribly cold he really is. Amelia now must help him take measurements. She is concerned that the silk balloon could rip at any time. Heedless of the dangers, James – who is now showing signs of high-altitude hypoxia – begins to throw things from the balloon in an attempt to go even higher. The two fight in the basket.
29,600ft. Rising 700ft/min. -18C / 0F
James begins to bleed from the nose. Amelia says that she does not want to die today but James retorts that her own husband once put her life at risk. At least the risk they are taking today is not for pure spectacle, but for science. Amelia slaps James; he knows nothing about Pierre’s death. She was the pilot of the balloon in which Pierre died and it was she who pushed for them to go higher. The balloon ripped, causing the balloon to plummet. In order to make the basket light enough to save Amelia’s life, Pierre jumped to his death. She fought hard for her position, but James should not repeat her mistakes and be responsible for another’s death.
James is struggling to breathe and passes out from hypoxia. Amelia tries to pull on the valve line, but it is frozen. Her only option is to climb to the top of the balloon to release the valve.
32,400ft. Rising 1000ft/min. -22C / -8F
With huge difficulty, Amelia pulls herself up onto the hoop from where she tries to reach up to the rigging. Her hands are rigid and black with frostbite but she hooks them over the rigging and hauls herself up. She begins to climb up the side of the balloon, now totally exposed. Pierre’s voice comes to her warning against it. She loses her grip and falls backwards but is saved by one ankle hooking onto the rigging.
35,800ft. Rising 1200ft/min. -28C / -18F
Amelia pulls herself upright and with incredible determination continues to climb, inch by inch.
37,000ft. Rising 1200ft/min. -30C / -22F
Amelia summits the balloon: she is on top of the world. She breaks the frozen valve with her foot and lodges the valve open with her boot. She then collapses off the side of the balloon.
On the ground, a worried Antonia waits for news of the flight. Across town, Charles Green and other Royal Society members scan the skies for them without success.
31,000ft. Falling 1000ft/min. -26C / -15F
Amelia regains consciousness, and finds herself dangling by a rope more than 30,000 feet up. With a titanic effort, she swings until she can grab the basket, and sees that James is in a terrible condition.
32,000ft. Falling 100ft.min. -22C / -8F
As they drop, mercifully James comes around and even begins to retake readings. Seeing Amelia’s blackened hands, he pours brandy over them and pays tribute to her immense courage. The two discuss their voyage, and what it might mean for those on the ground.
16,00ft. Falling 3500ft/min. -1C / 30F
Because the boot has kept the valve open and too much gas has escaped, the balloon is now descending too fast – such that the snow around them is falling upwards. They need to lose weight. James starts throwing everything out of the basket, but it’s not enough. He tells Amelia to climb up to the hoop. They need to cut away the basket.
7,500ft. Falling 4,500ft/min. 5C / 41F
James cuts the ropes and perilously the basket drops.
2,500ft. Falling 2000ft/min. 15C / 59F
They need to lose still more weight and Amelia even proposes sacrificing herself. James is horrified and has an idea: they must turn the balloon into a huge parachute. They wrap their arms and legs amongst the ropes, James cuts them free of the hoops and they are wrenched upwards.
800ft. Falling 100ft/min. 20C / 68Ft
Even with their makeshift parachute, the wind is carrying them at high speed and the ground is coming at them far too fast. As they reach the treeline, James is thrown off. Amelia clings on for dear life until she emerges from the forest and crashes to the ground.
Coming to, battered and bruised, Amelia retraces their path in a desperate search for James. She finds him, in very bad shape but conscious. As they hobble off in search of civilisation, Amelia, in voiceover, explains some of the legacy of the expedition.
James’s discovery of atmospheric bands of pressure formed the basis of our modern understanding of the weather. He was elected President of the Royal Meteorological Society 5 years later. Amelia, finally free from the burden of guilt over Pierre’s death, lived a more contented life on Earth, but both she and James returned to the skies, in search of new adventures.
On 5 September 1862, the Mammoth rose to the height of 37,000 feet James Glaisher’s altitude record stood for 45 years
The record also stands today as the highest ascension level anyone has undertaken without the aid of bottled oxygen
