James Tytler

Published on Saturday 14 October 2006 00:41

JAMES Tytler (1745-1804), balloonist and writer, was born on 17 December 1745 at the manse at Fern, Forfarshire, the son of George Tytler, and his wife, Janet Robertson. He was educated at Edinburgh University, where he gained a lifelong interest in experimental chemistry. Funds for his education were raised by work as a surgeon on a whaling ship, in which he sailed to Greenland in 1765.

Tytler now began the first of several periods of piecemeal work, financial hardship and exile in Newcastle Upon Tyne to escape the debtors' prison. In 1772 he and his family returned to Edinburgh, where Tytler bolstered his meagre income with small-scale publishing ventures. He produced these on a home-made printing press, evidence of the resourcefulness he brought to many of his scientific, often unsuccessful, money-making schemes over the next three decades. About this time his wife, Elizabeth, left to establish herself as a grocer in the Canongate area. The couple were divorced in 1788, by when Tytler had been involved in two further relationships.

In 1776, through his literary connections, Tytler was appointed editor of the second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The collection was enlarged from three to ten volumes (many of the new entries being written by Tytler) and published between 1777 and 1784. Though steady work, the editorship was not well paid. Tytler now lodged at Duddingston near Edinburgh in the home of a washerwoman on whose upturned tub he composed hundreds of articles.

Tytler's enterprise next found expression in the balloon mania which swept Britain following the Montgolfier brothers' successful flight at Versailles in September 1783. Though now virtually unknown in the history of ballooning, Tytler was the first Briton to make a successful ascent (27 August 1784), predating by several weeks the flights of the Italian Vincenzo Lunardi in London and the English aeronaut, James Sadler from Oxford. Tytler's obscurity undoubtedly owes much to the mixed fortunes he enjoyed during his four attempts at manned flight, the relatively short ground distance covered, and the conclusion of his final flight (11 October 1784), when his balloon crashed before hundreds of paying spectators at Edinburgh's Comely Gardens.

Nevertheless, by this date Tytler had twice left the ground in a craft of his own design and construction, becoming on 27 August, as the Edinburgh Advertiser reported next day, the "first person in Great Britain to have navigated the air" when at a height of 350ft he flew for half a mile across the city. Subsequent discussions of ballooning in the Scots Magazine (November 1805) made no reference to Tytler, though his achievement was recognised in Lunardi's Account of Five Aerial Voyages in Scotland (1786).

After his brief career as an aeronaut Tytler returned to a life of scientific invention, hack-journalism and debt. In 1788 he fled again to England, and disappeared for three years before returning to Edinburgh. Born perhaps of his long-running belief in religious liberty or a sense of injustice surrounding his literary and scientific career, Tytler now became increasingly interested in the radical cause in Scotland. His hostility to William Pitt's government, notably its proclamation against seditious writings, led him to advocate more extreme political reform. In December 1792 Tytler was arrested and charged with seditious libel, the first person in Edinburgh to be detained as part of the government's crackdown on Scotland's radical societies. Faced with a court appearance, Tytler left the city for Belfast.

His final years were spent in Salem, Massachusetts, where he emigrated in 1795. At Cat Cove, near Salem Neck, he eked out a living through journalism. Disappointment led to drink, and, inebriated, he fell and drowned near his home on 9 January 1804.

• Extracted from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Meg Russell. Copyright Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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