Eduard Spelterini

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eduard Spelterini, 1912
Spelterini in front of the Stella balloon , 1904
Spelterini standing on the rim of the basket
Poster with Leona Dare, 1888

Eduard Spelterini , actually Eduard Schweizer (born June 2, 1852 in Bazenheid , Canton St. Gallen , † June 16, 1931 in Vöcklabruck , Upper Austria ), was a Swiss aviation pioneer , balloon captain and photographer. In his 43 years as a pilot, he rose 570 times with 1237 passengers.

Live and act

youth

Spelterini was born Eduard Schweizer on June 2, 1852. His father was the innkeeper and brewer Sigmund Schweizer, his mother was Maria Magdalena, née Sütterli. Where and how Spelterini spent his youth is unclear. According to one version, he is said to have moved to Como with his family around 1860 . At the age of eighteen he moved to Milan and later to Paris, according to this version, to be trained as a singer at the conservatory. In Paris, however, neither a Spelterini nor a Swiss was enrolled at the time in question. After contracting tuberculosis , he went to the south of France to take a cure and was given the opportunity to do his first balloon flight when a fearful passenger gave him his seat.

Colonel Ernst Theodor Santschi, another balloon pioneer who knew Spelterini personally, claimed that Eduard left his hometown at the age of eighteen to begin a commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg. Be that as it may, Eduard Schweizer must have changed his name to Spelterini by the mid-1870s at the latest and started ballooning. It is not known why he came up with the Italian-sounding name Spelterini. Next to him, only one other person bears this name: the tightrope walker Maria Spelterini, who was the first woman to cross Niagara Falls on a rope in 1876 ​​on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the USA . It can be assumed that Eduard Schweizer, who appeared in public for the first time at this time, named himself after her. In 1877 Spelterini was certified as an airship operator by the Académie d 'Aerostation de France in Paris and from then on took paying passengers on his voyages. A well-filled picnic basket with champagne and culinary delicacies was always carried along with the passengers.

Early years

In 1887 he had his own Urania balloon made from yellow silk soaked in linseed oil from the Atelier Surcouf in Paris ; the capacity was 1500 cubic meters of hydrogen . A net of hemp ropes distributed over the balloon ended at the bottom in eight ropes, from which a wicker basket hung below a wooden ring.

With his own balloon Spelterini was no longer bound to Paris and traveled with him around Europe. On September 5, 1887, he started in the Vienna Prater . The paying passenger was Gustav Kálnoky , the foreign minister of Emperor Franz Josef von Habsburg . In 1888 Spelterini was in Leicester and in London's Hyde Park . His collaboration with journalists who accompanied him and with the Spanish-American trapeze artist Leona Dare (1855–1922), who performed acrobatic tricks beneath the balloon, lightly dressed, gave him additional publicity. After a tour of Russia, they parted ways. In 1889 Spelterini started in Bucharest, Saloniki, Athens, Cairo and Naples.

On July 16, 1891, the Urania started for the first time at the Pfauen in Zurich, a play that also attracted large crowds of onlookers in Zurich. Spelterini made dozens of flights from Zurich, Winterthur and St. Gallen. He also visited his home town of Bazenheid.

In addition to paying guests, numerous scientists flew with Spelterini and carried out their experiments during the flight. One of them was Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin , who first thought about a dirigible airship. The army was also interested in Spelterini and his balloon. Various officers rose with him, and in 1895 the Federal Council ordered an airship company to be set up. Towards the end of 1893 Spelterini left Switzerland, traces lead to Belgium and Russia, where he is said to have served as a balloon instructor in the Tsar's army.

Photographs

During this time he began to take photos from the balloon basket and thus became one of the great pioneers of aerial photography . In 1895 he was mentioned in the international press when he flew over Vesuvius for the second time with scientists . Spelterini used Lumière glass plates, which required an exposure time of at least one-thirtieth of a second. He had colored glass slides made from his exposed glass plates and showed them on lecture tours throughout Europe. Not least thanks to his language skills - Spelterini spoke fluent German, French, English and Italian - he had great success with around 600 lectures, which was also reflected in countless press articles.

The NZZ reported : “ Spelterini is a man of a million; whatever he brought down from the voyages in the air besides his whole bones, he now carries around with him in two boxes, ready to show treasures like Aladdin with the magic lamp, conjure up locks and throw pictures on the wall. which will remain indelible to the drunken eye. “The photos he took from the balloon gave people a bird's eye view of the earth for the first time.

A large part of Spelterini's original glass plates as well as his woven balloon basket are now kept in the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne. An exhibition in the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, conceived by the Museum in Bellpark in Kriens, showed original prints and new prints from glass negatives recovered in 2007, as well as other exhibits, including a balloon basket used by Spelterini until August 29, 2010.

Alpine flight

During a balloon ride over Lake Zurich and the Albis chain on September 11, 1891, Albert Heim expressed his wish: “So I would like to look down and into my main observation area, the Alps. We should drive over the Alps once ». An undertaking that until then had been considered impossible. It was believed that the downdrafts would force a balloon back again and again. In January 1897 Spelterini came to Albert Heim and told him that after thorough studies he thought such a flight was possible. He planned to avoid the feared fall winds with a flight at a very high altitude. Albert Heim was keen to put this project in the service of science, and so in March a first circular from Spelterini, in which numerous scientists committed to participate in a scientific advisory board, advertised for funding. Since the Urania was not robust enough for the planned altitude of 6000 meters, Spelterini had a new balloon made, the Vega . The balloon was financed by Fanny Forst from Koblenz. An additional CHF 5,630 had been credited for the travel costs and the one-time filling. Material deliveries were made free of charge or at greatly reduced prices. It was hoped to cover the remaining deficit with the proceeds from the sale of the publication Die Fahrt der Wega .

On October 3, 1898, Spelterini took off at 10:53 in the morning from Sion in the canton of Valais to fly over the Alps; The passenger was Professor Albert Heim, along with others. « The passengers got on. The silence in the square, filled with a large crowd, became oppressive. The audience was touched, many cried. The last ropes were untied and the men were placed at the gondola. Nothing is missing anymore - do you have everything? 'Attention - lâchez tout!' And the huge golden-brown ball was already floating calmly up, "a newspaper described the start. After five and a half hour flight over the summit of the Diablerets that landed Wega in a meadow in Besançon (France), 229 km away from Sion.

With the balloons Sirius , Stella and Jupiter , around ten more trips to the Alps followed in different directions in the following years. In 1904 Spelterini returned to Egypt to photograph the buildings of the ancient Egyptians. In 1911 he traveled to South Africa and photographed Johannesburg and the Transvaal gold mines .

  • Matterhorn 1910

  • The Giza pyramids , February 1904

  • Al-Ashraf Mosque (center) and Al Barkuk near Cairo , January 1904

  • North side of the Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland, September 1904

Marriage, war and post-war period

On January 28, 1914, Spelterini married Emma Karpf from Bavaria, 35 years his junior, in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. During the First World War, Spelterini moved to Coppet near Geneva with Emma . With them lived a young man named Robert Zuber as a servant as well as his wife Alexandrine and their newborn child Alexius. For financial reasons - there was no income - Spelterini had to sell his aerial photographs and glass plates.

After the war, Spelterini was gradually forgotten; Donors and passengers stayed away, the emerging motorized flight dominated the headlines. In the summer of 1922 Spelterini hired himself out at the Tivoli amusement park in Copenhagen, where he posed in front of a balloon with paying visitors. In early 1923 he settled with Emma and the Zubers in a small house in Zipf near Vöcklabruck in Upper Austria. He kept 300 chickens and, since he could no longer fly, lived on selling eggs.

  • ???

  • Gold mines in the Transvaal, July 1911

  • St. Gallen 1893

  • Andermatt undated, around 1903

  • Tivoli Copenhagen, 1922

Last ride and death

On September 16, 1926, Spelterini took off from the Schlieren gasworks near Zurich for his last balloon ride with passengers. However, the 74-year-old was no longer physically up to the exertion and passed out while driving. The driverless balloon landed in the thick fog on the rock face of the Hohen Ifen in Vorarlberg at an altitude of 2000 meters. Spelterini returned to Zipf.

After a successful eye operation - Spelterini suffered from cataracts - he traveled to the Côte d'Azur for the last time in the spring of 1929 . Since he ran out of money after a few days, he had to return.

On June 16, 1931, two weeks after his 79th birthday, Spelterini died shortly before midnight in his house in Zipf. So that a few people would accompany Spelterini on his last journey, a few churchgoers were called in. At his request, a local band played the “Serenade” by Enrico Toselli in the church and the “Largo” by Georg Friedrich Handel at the grave . On July 31, 1932, a Spelterini memorial ceremony took place in Bazenheid.

The widow Emma Spelterini lived in Zipf for another seven years, married the family doctor Henri Duruz in Yverdon-les-Bains in 1939 and died on October 27, 1963.

various

In 2005, the SBB christened an ICN tilting train with the name "Eduard Spelterini".

A school building and a parking lot in St. Gallen are named after Spelterini . In Bern and Bazenheid , streets are named for Spelterini, and in Lucerne there is a Spelterini path.

literature

Web links

Commons : Eduard Spelterini  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Official homepage of the Swiss Air Force : The balloon troops of the Swiss Army 1893–1937 ( Memento of December 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) , accessed on December 29, 2008
  2. ↑ Eduard Spelterini - Photographs of the balloon pioneer on fotointern.ch, accessed on June 14, 2010
  3. ↑ 1898 The Vega in the service of science
  4. ^ Das Magazin (September 21, 2007): dasmagazin.ch ( memento of March 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , accessed on December 29, 2008
  5. ↑ Eduard Spelterini, Albert Heim, Julius Maurer: The journey of the "Wega" over the Alps and Jura . Benno Schwabe, publishing bookstore (1899)
  6. ↑ Newspaper article
  7. ↑ SBB Revue: Commemoration. Retrieved December 16, 2019 .
  8. ↑ List of train names ( Memento from February 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ http://www.ps-spelterini.stadt.sg.ch
  10. ↑ Parking lot ( Memento from November 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ^ Spelterinistrasse in Bern
  12. ↑ Spelteriniweg in Lucerne
  13. ↑ Spelteriniweg in Bazenheid
personal data
SURNAME Spelterini, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Swiss, Eduard (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss aviation pioneer and balloon captain
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1852
PLACE OF BIRTH Bazenheid , Canton of St. Gallen , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH June 16, 1931
Place of death Vöcklabruck , Upper Austria , Austria