Epilogue

Jean and Jeannette Piccard ultimately were able to find a long-term situation at the University of Minnesota in 1936. John D. Ackerman, the head of the Aeronautical Engineering department in the university’s Institute of Technology, was an admirer of the Piccards’ work. He offered Jean a position that would allow him to both teach and conduct further research. Piccard worked there until his death in 1963.¹ Albert W. Stevens would pilot the new “Explorer II” balloon to a world’s record altitude of 72,395 feet in 1935,² thus giving this early round of the Space Race to the United States over the Soviet Union. Stevens’s record stood for over twenty years. In 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the basketball-sized satellite Sputnik into orbit, taking round 2 of the Race.

The cutting-edge technology invented by Jean Piccard for the Piccard Gondola in 1934 would have uses in World War II and beyond. The frost-free windows, for instance, that he invented for the portals of the capsule were later adopted by high-flying American bombers in the war, and then for higher altitude jet travel after the war. The latter surprised him very little; he had predicted it. Jeannette Piccard earned her PhD at the University of Minnesota during the war, in 1942. All of their sons served in World War II. And the youngest of them, Donald Piccard, would go on to pioneer the sport of hot air ballooning. Looking back at his childhood, he once remarked of his mother, “she was fun.” She liked to chop wood in the back yard, and always had projects going.³

To its credit, the United States looked forward, not backward, after the war. Its willingness to continue to embrace a progressive futuristic vision for America and the world set it apart. Perhaps the fact that the American homeland had escaped destruction enabled the nation to more readily move on from the slaughter. Whatever the case, with the advent of the jet engine and advanced rocket technology first pioneered by the defeated Germans, the United States continued to look skyward. Wernher von Braun, who had once enjoyed attending Auguste Piccard’s lectures, was brought to Huntsville, Alabama, in 1958 to lead the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s space rocket program. He had been a member of the Nazi Party (the American military had prioritized his talents over punishing him for his crimes—which included working slave laborers to death). American pilots such as Chuck Yaeger assumed the mantle of the prewar aviators willing to push ever faster, ever higher. In architecture, the United Nations headquarters building in New York was a giant, permanent expression of the vision and conception of the style that first manifested itself on such a breathtaking scale at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Cold War rivalries certainly played a role driving the Space Race in the 1950s and 1960s, with Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and John Glenn becoming household names. But it was more than this that inspired President John F. Kennedy to call for a moonshot by the end of the Sixties. Americans still believed in the promise of the future, of the heavens above, of outer space. Popular culture continued to equate technology and the future with the earlier, progressive vision of the 1933 Fair. And Gene Roddenberry’s groundbreaking science-fiction series, Star Trek, continued to popularize this vision of the future.

There was a direct line between the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and the Apollo XI moonshot in 1969, pushing the limits of the possible ever further. NASA seemed to be doing what Roddenberry wrote for his fictional starship’s mission: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” The two World’s Fairs of the decade, in Seattle in 1962 and in New York in 1964, renewed America’s outward- and forward-looking vision. The Space Needle’s spire, reaching ever skyward toward the stars, was an expression of faith. And then something happened . . .

The cynicism of the 1970s infected interest in the future. In its place, nostalgia for a mythologized past caught the popular mood. Even space-based science fiction occurred “a long, long time ago,” in “a galaxy far, far away.” The last moonshot occurred in 1972. Even the more pragmatically minded space shuttle program has now been abandoned. The United States hasn’t staged a World’s Fair of consequence since 1965. Over eighty years on, we’re now further away from the future envisioned on the shores of Lake Michigan than we were fifty years ago. We first rejected, then defeated, fascism, and the world was better for it. But, still, where are the Balbos, Eckeners, and Piccards today—those that inspire us to look upward, outward, forward?

Some would counter this pessimism by pointing to billionaire space flight pioneers Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos in the early twenty-first century. Reminiscent of billionaire-aviator Howard Hughes in the 1920s and 1930s, they are using giant fortunes to push the limits of aviation and rocket technology in the private sector. Then, of course, there is the splendid Mars “Perseverance” Rover produced and successfully landed on the “red planet” by NASA in 2020. There is even talk of the United States returning to the moon. But what would President Kennedy have said about this half a century after Apollo XI? Why haven’t we already put human beings on Mars? Kennedy once said that we do the hard things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”⁴ Italo Balbo, Hugo Eckener, Auguste Piccard, Jean Piccard, and Jeannette Ridlon Piccard would all have understood this. We need their example now.

Hugo Eckener lived through World War II and the military occupation that followed, to see the imminent advent of commercial jet travel. Even so, he never fully gave up his dream of zeppelins playing an important role in the future of aviation. After the war, J. Gordon Vaeth—himself a naval officer associated with lighter-than-air aviation—was sent by his superiors to locate the whereabouts of the once-famous commander of the Graf Zeppelin. He found him living in a village on Lake Constance, largely forgotten by his neighbors; a ghost from another time. Similar to Alberto Santos-Dumont, whom he so closely resembled in his worldview, he had become a relic of the past while he was still living. Seemingly flattered, but not surprised that the U.S. Navy had sent someone to find and question him, he suggested to Vaeth that “we talk in English. It will be easier for you. I am naturally out of practice.”⁵ He liked Americans. One of his favorite stories of his time in the United States was riding the subway around New York City, taking in art exhibits and other sights. At the time a universally recognized celebrity, he was always humored by how easily he could put his fellow subway riders off his trail by claiming, when asked if he was Hugo Eckener, “No, I’m his twin brother.”⁶

Vaeth returned to the United States and reported to his superiors on his interactions with Dr. Eckener. One of those being briefed was T. G. W. “Tex” Settle, now risen to the rank of Admiral in the U.S. Navy. Goodyear also was interested in what Eckener might have to say. Eventually, the seventy-eight-year-old zeppelin captain was invited to return to America. He still believed a lighter-than-air ship, using helium for lift, could be an attractive alternative to the loud engines of commercial airliners. Vaeth left us a memorable description of Eckener in his twilight years: “In his favorite haunt, a small pavilion near the shore, the old man would sit by the hour, puffing on a cigar, and looking out over the lake. Nighttime passersby knew he was there by the red glow which alternately brightened and subsided as he sat smoking, thinking, reminiscing.”⁷ Did he regret the path he followed after his country was highjacked by Adolf Hitler? Should he have emigrated to the United States to maintain his independence of thought, speech, and action? Albert Einstein and Marlene Dietrich, for instance, were other famous residents of Germany who refused to live under the hooked cross. Eckener was well connected and viewed in a favorable light by powerful people—none more so than President Roosevelt himself. However, though Hugo Eckener was an internationalist, he was also a German patriot. He didn’t feel these two things were incompatible. The Nazi era taught him otherwise. And he had a family. His now-grown children would have careers, families of their own back in Germany. Might they not face retribution if their famous émigré father made forceful anti-Hitler statements from the safety of New York or Washington? Given the Nazis’ track record, it would appear likely. No, where he had gone astray was in refusing simply to let go of his “dream.” The Nazis would twist it into a nightmare. But for a moment in the late 1920s and early 1930s . . . it had been beautiful.

There is still a place one can go to share in the vision of that fair nearly ninety years ago. Walt Disney’s “Experimental City of Tomorrow” incorporates both the cultural mélange of the earlier fair his father helped build, and the refreshing optimism and technological wonder of the fair he personally witnessed himself as a young man. Millions of people from both the United States and abroad pass through EPCOT’s gates each year, experiencing a French boulangerie or a simulated flight to Mars. At the park’s entrance is the giant, futuristic geodesic dome enclosing “Spaceship Earth.” In the evenings, the vast, centrally located lagoon is the site of a spectacular light and fireworks display emphasizing our common humanity and the distance we have come as a species, not just in time, but technologically. The selective use of colored lighting lends an unearthly aspect to the setting, harkening back to the “Rainbow City.” Walt Disney’s gift to the country and the world is that he never lost faith in that future he glimpsed in Chicago. Perhaps we need to recapture it.

Hugo Eckener (center) in better days, at a reception (1928) with his daughter Lotte (with curly blonde hair) on his left. Getty Images.

In 1963, Jean Piccard died on the birthday he shared with Auguste. Auguste had died the year before. Jean’s son, Donald, and Auguste’s son, Jacques, had followed in their fathers’ footsteps, embracing lives of science and exploration. Jacques had worked with his father to design a bathyscape to descend to the deepest depths of the ocean. Donald, of course, as a balloon pilot, was also following in his mother’s, not just his father’s, footsteps. By this time, he was a famous aeronaut in his own right. In that same year—1963—Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova broke his mother’s altitude record inside a capsule launched into orbit around the earth on a Soviet R-7 rocket.

Jean Piccard had wanted to return to the stratosphere after 1934. His work at the University of Minnesota was closely linked to his interest in ballooning and high-altitude aviation. In the late 1930s, his work on the Pleiades project hoped to achieve flights of one hundred thousand feet using a lightweight gondola carried aloft by double clusters of small balloons. On October 18, 1937, Piccard made an experimental flight more modest in scale than what he ultimately hoped to achieve. It was the only flight, but it stirred people’s imaginations. Films such as The Red Balloon and Up featured these same cluster balloons taking the protagonists aloft. For all of the noise he had to contend with in Chicago in 1933, Jean Piccard’s life’s work stands as the best testament and response. Robert Gilruth, the first director of NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center, was Piccard’s aeronautical engineering student at the University of Minnesota: “I learned many things from him, ways of looking at problems. He had a way of simplifying things, in talking [about how his devices worked] . . . learning about the gondola and how he managed it, [which was] just 20 years ahead of designing the Mercury capsule.”⁸ Considering the source, this was high praise indeed. Piccard was named one of Minnesota’s greatest living men. A speaker at the ceremony honoring him finished his remarks thus, “I think one of his colleagues has summed up the feelings of us all when he said, ‘Jean Piccard is simple, mild,—and brilliant.’”⁹

Gilruth, whose respect for Jean was equaled by his respect for Jeannette, hired her as a consultant to the burgeoning NASA program after Jean’s death. In addition, she became a spokesperson for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs: supporting the feasibility of manned space flight, generating interest in the moonshot. Jeannette Ridlon Piccard was America’s first priestess of space travel. She spent long, idyllic summers in a cabin on an island that she had purchased with Jean in 1935 on a remote lake in Minnesota. Her children and grandchildren often joined her for weeks at a time. In all, five generations of her family spent time on the island. Her granddaughter, Mary Louise, recalled long afterward looking up at the Milky Way at night talking with her about life, the stars, the future. She never forgot her grandmother telling her more than once: “Darling, never forget that women are the stronger sex.”¹⁰ Throughout her life she was a champion for the rights of women and their capacity to achieve anything that a man could achieve. Mary Louise Piccard grew up as part of her father Donald Piccard’s ground crew, while ballooning nearly every weekend . . . earning a place next to her father in the basket while working toward her balloon pilot’s license. Later, she worked as a stuntwoman in New York.¹¹

In 1963, Donald Piccard attended the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Conference in Mexico City. His mother was unable to attend. The world’s first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, however, was in attendance. He later recounted telling her:

“Comrade Tereshkova when I told my mother I was perhaps going to meet you. She asked me to greet you.” Tereshkova said, “Thank you, very much.” I replied, “Perhaps you don’t know who my mother is. My mother is Jeannette Piccard, who piloted a balloon to 57,579 feet in 1934, more than two miles into physiological Space. And she wanted me to congratulate you on your marvelous achievement, and on behalf of all the women in America to welcome you to Space.” Tereshkova said, “I know very well who your mother is.”¹²

Author’s photo.