Plan to honour forgotten Scots hero isn't full of hot air

It was late summer 1784, when the notion of being lifted skyward in a basket suspended precariously beneath a balloon was all the rage across Europe but had not yet been realised in Britain.

The thrill of flight gripped Tytler, too. Before a crowd of curious city folks, the man whose fortunes had already swung from whaling ship surgeon to languishing in the debtors' prison, from prolific wordsmith and now to aviation pioneer, lit a fire in a stove beneath his Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon and became the first man to view Edinburgh from above. That, argues hot air balloonist Graeme Houston, should have been enough to earn Tytler a cockpit place in the Scottish aviation "hall of fame".

Instead – partly because his final flight was disastrous, plunging earthwards and ending with the navigator in a stinking dung heap – Tytler's achievements are unknown to most; his lasting legacy one of ridicule as the man whose exploits earned him the nickname "Balloon Tytler" and generated the derogatory expression: "You're a balloon".

Now, an ambitious plan has been launched to give James Tytler his rightful place in aviation history.

In a sprawling aerodrome 60km north-west of Barcelona, the 18th-century aviator's Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon is to be recreated using original drawings and plans, carefully tweaked to incorporate the latest in balloon fabric and burner systems.

Eventually, Houston will bring it to Edinburgh where he will fire up its burner and, just like Tytler, soar into the city skies.

"It's exactly the same shape," says Tytler Project director Houston, 44. "We've got a drawing of the original – the only image there is. I took it to the factory in Spain and said 'can you create it?'."

A straightforward replica, he explains, isn't possible. Partly because today's balloons need high-tech controls to navigate modern perils such as power lines, pylons and phone masts.

But tweaks to the design are necessary mostly because, in theory at least, Tytler's distinctive beer barrel design would probably never have flown.

"The physics couldn't have worked," explains Houston, who flies hot air balloons for a living with his Biggar-based business, ScotAir. "A balloon is tear-shaped, the natural shape a bubble makes as it travels upwards through oil."

The ropes dropping to the gondola from outside panels couldn't have worked, either – instead they would have pulled the balloon to a tight point.

"The weight in the gondola would cause the sides to pull in at the bottom unless he built a structure to retain the shape," muses Houston. "However, that would have added excess weight."

Which makes the fact that Tytler actually took off all the more remarkable.

News had come from France in November 1783 of the first untethered manned flight in a hot air balloon. At the time, Tytler was living alone in humble digs trying to write 9,000 pages of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for even humbler wages.

The appendix was to note the achievements of brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-tienne Montgolfier, designers of that successful hot air balloon which had taken France and Europe by storm. As he wrote, Tytler's mind worked on how he, too, might fly.

"He was a remarkable man," says Houston, who stumbled across Tytler when he started ballooning in the 1980s and noticed an Edinburgh University Balloon Club balloon bearing his name.

"It's always amazed me that he's not better known. It hit me last year during the Homecoming. There was this huge event to celebrate Scotland and yet no plan to mention Tytler."

Within months of the Montgolfier brothers' achievement, Tytler was exhibiting his balloon beneath the uncompleted dome of Robert Adam's Register House.

The first flight would take place at Comely Gardens, near Holyrood, in August 1784, when, watched by a mostly fee-paying crowd, Tytler donned a cork jacket for protection and seated himself in the basket for lift-off.

Early attempts to fly were unimpressive, the balloon grounded by technical blips or weather. As the local press grew impatient, locals lost interest, too, at one point attacking his balloon.

On one occasion, the lift-off turned into near farce. "The balloon set off from the ground with the swiftness of an arrow but could not ascend more than a few feet when it was stopped by a rope," Tytler said at the time.

"This broke, and when freed from this, it flew with such rapidity that several of the spectators, terrified at the sight, endeavoured to drag it downwards. Thus my career was stopped and I arose only a very small way, some say 350 feet, others 500 feet."

Better was the attempt on 27 August, 1784, when Tytler flew for about half a mile from Abbeyhill to Restalrig, followed two days later by another ascent.

"Unfortunately, on his last attempt, he made a bit of a hash of things," says Houston. "He landed somewhere stupid and people started to refer to him as 'Balloon Tytler' – it's where the expression 'you're a balloon' comes from."

The Scotsman reported: "The balloon only moved so high and so far as to carry him over the garden wall and deposit him softly on an adjoining dunghill."

While locals sniggered, Londoners were about to embrace the efforts of Italian Vincenzo Lunardi, who managed a more impressive 24-mile flight, gaining fame and probably a degree of fortune denied to his predecessor.

Life went downhill for Tytler after that, says Houston. "He printed salacious comment against the government and had to leg it out of the country. He ended up in Massachusetts."

He turned to writing, journalism and drink. He was out walking when he fell and drowned on 9 January, 1804.

Recreating his balloon dream would, says Houston, be a fitting memorial to a forgotten hero.

But first Houston needs sponsors to help cover the 75,000 costs of having the balloon manufactured and tested, and transported to Edinburgh for its inaugural flight which he hopes would take place at the Meadows.

"Imagine the spectacle," he adds. "It will be amazing."

To find out more about the Tytler Project, go to www.scotair.com/tytlerproject.

The curious demise of an intellectual

JAMES Tytler, a minister's son from Angus, combined episodes of impressive intellect with drink, womanising and crippling debt.

After studying medicine at Edinburgh University, he joined the Leith-based whaler, The Royal Bounty, as ship's surgeon. Later he returned to Leith to become a pharmacist.

Marriage and five children left him with a mountain of debts which resulted in a spell in the debtors' jail at Holyrood.

His marriage collapsed and he ended up in digs, single-handedly writing the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and dreaming of making a fortune from inventions including a printing machine, a method of bleaching linen and a failed attempt at unravelling the secret of perpetual motion.

He also composed songs, poems and bagpipe tunes and even wrote a guide to Edinburgh's prostitutes which rated their performance, looks and condition of their teeth.

He was listed in the Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen in 1856 – 52 years after his death.