The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

by Richard Holmes

Ballooning produced a new, and wholly unexpected, vision of the earth. It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above, but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature. For the first time the impact of man on nature was clearly revealed: the ever-expanding relationship of towns to countryside, roads to rivers, cultivated fields to forests, and the development of industry. It was comparable to the first views of the earth from space by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s, producing a new concept of a ‘single blue planet’ with its delicate membrane of atmosphere. The famous photograph ‘Earthrise’ was taken from lunar orbit in December 1968.