Sometime in the late 18th century, a bunch of French people got it in their heads that rather than walk around, they’d like to fly around. To accomplish this, they looked towards China where inventors in the 2nd century BCE developed Kongming. Though this sounds like a dynasty of giant apes, it just means ‘sky lantern’. They used hot air to make paper lanterns lighter than air and used them to send military signals. It’s from the idea of Kongming that French wannabe flyboys created the hot air balloon.
Just as space programs sent chimps and dogs into space, balloonists played the same game. On September 19 1983, the Montgolfier brothers loaded the world’s first hot air balloon, a 42-foot-high balloon made of fabric and paper, with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The sheep was a stand-in for a its perceived nearness to human physiology. The duck was a control accustomed to high altitudes. The rooster was to test the effects of altitude on a flightless bird. We can only hope the rooster enjoyed irony. The flight lasted 8 minutes. There is no record as to the animals’ reaction.
The first manned fight took place on November 21 1783 in a paper and silk balloon. Francois Pilatrê de Rozier and Francois Laurent stood on a circular platform and fed wood into a fire through openings on either side of the balloon’s skirt. The balloon reached an altitude of 500 feet and travelled about 5½ miles before landing in a farm field. However, the sight of a fire-breathing behemoth landing near their homes had startled the locals, and the two Frenchmen were being charged by literally pitchfork-wielding villagers. The balloonists had no choice but to soothe the terrified villagers by offering the champagne they’d brought along. The world’s first in-flight drink was enjoyed a month later when Jacques Charles poured a glass of champagne for his fellow passenger while floating above France. Thus began the era of drinking in the sky.
In the 1920s–1930s a lot of that sky drinking was done on giant hydrogen-filled airships called dirigibles. Zeppelins. Airplanes existed as an air travel option, but they were unpressurized, turbulent terror machines that flew so low that one could frantically wave to people in tall buildings. Dirigibles offered the day’s elite a much calmer – and much more lavish – experience. Dirigible travel took time (Brazil to Europe took three days) so there wasn’t much else to do but eat, drink, talk, and look out the window. The range of cocktails served on the Hindenburg, the world’s most dubiously famed dirigible, was impressive and categorized under sours, flips, fizzes, cobblers and cocktails. So much drinking was done on dirigibles that the menu offered hangover cures. With the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, dirigible air travel literally went up in flames. It seemed that televised footage of air catastrophe along with the shrieking pleas of a commentator stayed alive in people’s nightmares no matter how much booze they drank.
So, we moved on to drinking on airplanes. The Douglas DC-3 pressurized cabins in the mid-1930s, but things really changed when the Civil Aeronautics Board regulated prices and seating. This limited airlines’ competitive strategy to offering luxury services – i.e. good food and alcohol. Airlines created unique menus and signature drinks. Pan Am went luxury with coursed meals and fine wines. Delta’s Royal Service offered free Champagne, canapés and cocktails. Mini-liquor bottles became ubiquitous in the home bars of businessmen all across America. Others went slightly more off brand. In the 1960s, Mohawk Airlines places were decorated like rail cars, with stewardesses dressed as dance hall ladies serving free beer, cigars, and pretzels. Western Airlines served Margaritas on Mexico routes. Continental Airlines became the tiki-lounge in the skies, serving passengers with Mai Tais and Dungeness crab. The jet age brought lounges and piano bars. The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser featured a spiral staircase to a downstairs cocktail lounge. American Airlines even installed a piano bar. From 1969, the Boeing 747 could fit more than 1 ½ passengers than any plane up till then, potentially getting 400 passengers shitcanned in their 30,000-foot-high bars and lounges. The party ended with the Deregulation Act of 1978, which removed price and route controls. And from there it’s a slippery slope to Ryanair charging passengers for carryon bags and, no doubt at some point, to be on planes with windows.
While this was happening, another air revolution was taking place: the space race. In order to get a man into space before the Russians, NASA enlisted the first team of astronauts: the Mercury Seven. These men were confident, combat-tested, vigorous test pilots and engineers. Part of their confidence surely relied on the fact that they had moved faster than any humans ever had in the history of the world. In World War II, the piston-driven propellers brought pilots to average speeds of 450 mph. In Korea, the first-generational jet engines in the F-86 Sabre brought pilots up to 680 mph. But in the late 1950s, men were flying supersonic jets that reached 1500 miles per hour.
They had been chosen to go into space. They trained at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and then they would go and party at the nearby towns with hotels and pubs – like Cocoa Beach. They followed the pilot code, which was evidently ‘flying and drinking and drinking and driving’. Cocoa Beach became their unofficial playground, particularly the Holiday Inn Cocktail Lounge. After 10–12-hour days at the Cape, they drank at the Holiday Inn, ‘evened out the strain’ in the words of Tom Wolfe. The Cape was off-limits to the wives, so you can probably do some of the liver-drenched horizontal math involved in ‘evening out.’ The Mercury guys never drank and flew, but legend had it that they had stowed a bottle of scotch in the capsules for the astronaut to take a nip after splashdown.
But in 1962, Kennedy said ‘we choose to go to the moon’ and so air travel and space travel took another turn. No word if Kennedy enlisted Stanley Kubrick as a Plan B back then. We all know how the next part goes. July 20, 1969. Apollo 11 approached the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the lunar module down to the surface of the moon. Michael Collins began what would be thirty orbits around the moon. Neil Armstrong then stepped onto the moon, becoming the first human to walk on it, and delivered one hell of an iconic line. Aldrin followed. My grandfather cried and then (presumably) went back to complaining about the Phillies.
Perhaps less well-known is that before Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module onto the moon, he poured some communion wine he had secretly stowed and, after a eucharistic prayer, washed down the body of Christ with the blood of Christ. He had become the first person to drink alcohol or eat food on the moon, thus continuing a long tradition of booze and flight. One small sip for man, one giant transubstantiation for mankind.
So, what to drink? While there doesn’t seem to be one specific drink enjoyed by these pilots-turned-astronauts, they drank it all: beer, whiskey, martinis. When astronaut fever swept the land, the Air Force became obsessed with landing more astronauts. As a result, they came up with something like an Astronaut Charm School. The Air Force’s best candidates for NASA were flown to Washington DC and took lectures on points ranging from how to impress in an interview to how to sit with your legs crossed and other things that seem ridiculous for a person who has gone almost 2000 miles an hour to learn about. Their rule about drinking – a rule that would never go completely against flying and drinking and drinking and driving – was to have one drink. That drink: the Highball. The candidates’ autonomy limited to choosing bourbon or scotch. We are doing bourbon highball.
Ingredients
- 2 ounces bourbon (you choose, I’d go Maker’s Mark or anything you chose)
- 4–6 ounces ginger ale or club soda
- Ice
- A glass
Instructions
First the ice, then the bourbon, next the ginger ale or club soda. Our only instruction is to have more than one – you’re not in astronaut charm school after all. Drink another to the sky jockeys who went supersonic, then to space. Drink a third for Buzz Aldrin’s wine on another celestial body and let’s all thank God he didn’t see aliens there, because he didn’t have any champagne to calm them down with.
