The First Person to Reach the Stratosphere Ascended in a Balloon

In May 1931, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard elevated humankind higher than ever before when he designed and flew a pressurized balloon gondola up to 15,781 meters (51,775 feet). Piccard’s flight was groundbreaking not just for the record itself, but because it was one of the first to carry people safely into the stratosphere. The craft he designed for the journey was a sealed, pressurized cabin—technology that later helped advance aviation and space travel.

If one were to design an archetypal eccentric scientist, one might begin with Piccard. The Swiss physicist stood 6 feet, 6 inches tall, and his gangly frame was topped with round glasses, a high forehead and tufts of hair sprouting sideways.

From a young age, Piccard developed a keen interest in ballooning, serving in the Swiss Army Observation Balloon Corps and hatching plans for a balloon that could reach extremely high altitudes and provide a stable platform for atmospheric research.

Piccard’s first major balloon ride in service of science was in 1926, when he ascended to 15,000 feet to conduct experiments that confirmed Einstein’s controversial assertion that the speed of light remained constant, no matter where it was measured.

Within a few years, he had risen even further, hoping to settle another debate.

In 1912, Austrian physicist Victor Hess had detected a new form of radiation in the atmosphere, which he correctly deduced was of extraterrestrial origin. Thirteen years later, American Robert Millikan—the president of Caltech and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics for measuring the charge of the electron—called this radiation “cosmic rays.” That remains the term used today, though scientists now know cosmic rays are high-energy charged particles originating from the sun, supernovae in the Milky Way and supermassive black holes at the centers of other galaxies.

Millikan, however, held a different view. He believed cosmic rays were photons and resulted from atoms newly forming in space.

“He said that they are the birth cries of atoms being born in interstellar space,” says Alexis Pedrick, chief storyteller and podcast host at the Science History Institute. “Which is lovely, beautiful and poetic, but what does it even mean?”

Millikan’s statement led to a full-scale argument over the nexus of science and religion. If new atoms were being constantly created in space, then notions of the universe having a finite age were wrong. But what really drew the battle lines was a comment by pioneering science journalist William Leonard Laurence that Millikan’s theory provided “the first experimental evidence that the Creator is still on the job.”

To investigate further, Piccard decided to build a balloon that would take him to the edge of space to measure cosmic rays as they reached Earth’s atmosphere.

It was a spectacularly dangerous plan. Air in the stratosphere, or upper atmosphere, is extremely thin. Few had attempted to reach such heights before, and one of those who had come closest had died.

“Hawthorne Gray was an American military pilot who made several high-altitude flights, testing various cold-weather equipment, flying gear, things like that,” explains Thomas Paone, who curates the Lighter-Than-Air Collection at the National Air and Space Museum. Gray made three balloon flights in 1927 that took him as high as 42,000 feet, but on the third, he perished.

“The biggest dangers with such heights are the extreme cold and the lack of oxygen,” Paone explains. “Gray tried to counteract both of those with special equipment, but it wasn’t enough. Which is why Piccard reasoned that if the human was the weak link in such flights, then the key was protecting the human.”

To that end, Piccard created a sealed, pressurized container, which he called a gondola. Made from aluminum, it was roughly 7 feet tall—enough space for the lanky Piccard to stand upright inside. It was painted white on one side and black on the other and equipped with a motor to rotate the black side toward the sun when the gondola needed to be heated and the white side toward the sun when it needed to be cooled.

The launch was set for May 27, 1931, from the village of Augsburg in Germany. Almost immediately that day, Piccard and his co-pilot, Paul Kipfer, encountered a succession of challenges.

Shortly after they entered the craft, Kipfer looked through a porthole and exclaimed, “A factory chimney is passing beneath us.” Piccard later wrote, “They had let the balloon go and forgotten to give us the signal of departure that had been agreed upon.”

As the craft soared upward, Piccard tried to control the ascent by releasing air from the balloon, only to find that the release valve was frozen shut. Already, in Piccard’s own words, they were “prisoners of the atmosphere.”

Then things got worse. The gondola motor broke down, resulting in the black side constantly facing the sun. Temperatures inside the gondola soared above 100 degrees, and the water they had brought with them evaporated. Luckily, they noticed condensation on the gondola wall. “There was not much of it,” Piccard later wrote, “but it sufficed to wet our tongues from time to time.”

Next, Piccard noticed the gondola had sprung a small leak, and their pressurized air was escaping. It could have spelled their doom if Piccard had not located the hole and quickly sealed it with some Vaseline and cloth.

Still, the adventurers weren’t in the clear. A barometer fell and broke, spilling mercury that could have potentially eaten through the shell. Once again, Piccard found the answer. He grabbed a rubber hose, attached it to a valve connected to the outside and used it to suck the mercury into the vacuum of the stratosphere.

In time, the sun set, the air in the balloon cooled, and they descended, eventually crash-landing on an Alpine glacier in Austria after 17 hours of flight that had carried them as high as 51,775 feet. After a night of fitful sleep, they began to hike down the glacier, only to bump into a search party that had been dispatched in expectation of recovering the two men’s bodies.

Such were the demands of staying alive that Piccard had had significantly less time than planned to conduct any experiments, though what he was able to accomplish appeared to confirm that cosmic rays were indeed charged particles. A second, less eventful flight the following year reached an even greater height—53,153 feet—and allowed Piccard to gather significantly more data that helped disprove Millikan’s theories. While Millikan hypothesized that cosmic rays were high-energy photons, Piccard’s data suggested they were charged particles influenced by Earth’s magnetic field.

Piccard continued to undertake balloon flights for science and later developed a pressurized container for undersea exploration, called a bathyscaphe; in 1960, his son Jacques piloted it to the depths of the Mariana Trench. In 1999, Auguste’s grandson and Jacques’ son, Bertrand, made the first nonstop round-the-world balloon flight.

Auguste Piccard died in 1996 at age 78. An explorer to the very end, he was working on plans for a new diving vessel at the time of his death.