Mystery at Ashbridge

by Don Piccard

If you land at Heathrow, rent a car and drive west on the InterShire to make your pilgrimage to Bristol you may see a turn off ("Slip Road") to Ashbridge. At Bristol you would find the great British balloon works, where they make beautiful balloons with bulbous gores. I coined the word lobular for those voluptuous curves when Rudy Aurez first lofted them for me at Hanna Sailmakers in 1964. Of course Sturtevant had made a similar deployment of fabric in an underwater buoy design at Goodyear Rubber Company (Not Goodyear Aircraft) years before. Well "Lobular" never caught on but the gores did. There is no mystery about that.

If you take the slip road at Ashbridge (left exit, keep left) and delay your pilgrimage, you may find a quaint Elizabethan style building across from the carpark housing a small provincial museum. When you wander up to the second floor (or should it be the first floor, being one flight up?) you will see a balloon basket suspended from the ceiling and a circa 1930 hot air balloon burner mounted on the wall beside it. Studying the photographs, letters patent and the burner itself you will come to the Mystery at Ashbridge.

The burner is a reproduction built for the display by the same company that made the original burner depicted in the photographs of the balloon flying there two thirds of a century ago and the letters patent framed on the wall. It is a twin vaporizing coil liquid petroleum burner using pressurized fuel. It is well designed and crafted - a beautiful object of industrial design. The balloon shown in flight in the photographs seems a little lumpy, but does have great stars and sunburst stripes emanating from the burner mouth emblazoned on its flanks. It must have been colorful, indeed.

So now we come to the mystery. This balloon system was designed and built by or for one Reverend Bacon. I didn't see anything indicating that he was related to Sir Francis Bacon. It was built and flown, at least in captive flight from the photographs, during the heyday of sport ballooning in a country ideally suited for hot air ballooning. It is little mystery to me why Brenner's hot air balloon in Germany never caught on because of its complicated acetylene and diesel burner system and the efficiency of the competitive gas balloons in the wide open spaces on the continent. But why didn't the Reverend Bacon's balloon catch on in Britain where limited land mass leads to favorable conditions for the economy of hot air ballooning? It obviously wasn't just that it wanted the sexy curves of my lobular gores.

To be continued.