Starting in the late eighteenth century, chemists and physicists vied for flight altitude records, all of the while hoping that these expeditions by balloon to unexplored spaces might yield scientific insights. French chemist and balloonist Joseph Proust, who discovered glucose, held the altitude record for 20 years, stealing it away from Jacques Charles of Charles’ law fame. By the 1930s, the race to get to the stratosphere had captured the public imagination in much the same way that the race to Mars has today. Attempts were supported by governments and private citizens, including The National Geographic Society, as well as chemical companies: Dow Chemical showcased its lightweight alloy — Dowmetal — used to make the capsules, and Union Carbide provided gases*5.

These were risky trips. In the summer of 1934, twenty thousand people watched the balloon Explorer launch in South Dakota. It reached the stratosphere, but the hydrogen gas balloon exploded and the three-person crew bailed out only seconds before impact. Earlier that year, the crew of the Russian balloon Osoaviakhim hadn’t been so lucky: when their gondola tore loose they were unable to open the twelve bolts on the hatch to parachute to safety*6. Unchecked, the capsule plummeted to Earth, killing all aboard. In the face of these disastrous flights, the next expedition into the stratosphere would be piloted by the chemist [and Shipley Class of 1914 alumna] Jeannette [Ridlon] Piccard.

Piccard was not one to be daunted by such long odds. Upon graduating from an all-girls’ high school outside of Chicago, she discovered that her diploma entitled her to attend any college in the country but one: Bryn Mawr College*7. Undeterred, Piccard applied to Bryn Mawr, though she failed almost every entrance exam the first time she took them. After an additional year of preparation [at Shipley], she entered Bryn Mawr as a member of the class of 1918. Although she was never an exceptional student, she made her way through the demanding coursework for a degree in psychology — as well as a significant amount of chemistry and physics — with a combination of ability and endless grit.

Piccard returned to Chicago to pursue graduate work in chemistry at the University of Chicago. In 1919, she defended her master’s dissertation, The Constitution of the meri-Quinoid Salts, and married one of her professors, Jean Felix Piccard. Jean Felix was a Swiss chemist whose twin brother Auguste Piccard made the first successful manned flight to the stratosphere in 1930. This success made Auguste a celebrity and brought him to the United States for a grand tour. While there, a group of Chicago businessmen and Jean tried to (unsuccessfully) convince him to make another flight. The flight, organized by the Chicago association, ultimately went forward in November 1933 without Auguste: it was sponsored by Dow Chemical, Goodyear and the US Navy.

Following the Chicago flight, Jeannette and Jean Felix found themselves in possession of a balloon, a gondola and a desire to aim for the stratosphere themselves. Unfortunately, they didn’t have much more than that, and back then (as now) epic science was not an inexpensive endeavor. The 1933 flight had cost over US$50,000, and even working on a shoestring budget, the Piccards needed to raise almost US$10,000 (US$180,000 in 2016 dollars) to cover the costs of another flight. Unattached to an academic institution, commercial laboratory or military research facility — and at the height of the Great Depression — they had no obvious avenues through which to pursue funding. Jean Felix’s difficult personality and the catastrophic ends to the most recent attempts also did not help.

Undeterred, Jeannette aggressively pursued her family connections in Chicago in an attempt to secure funding and resources. She convinced the Ford Airport outside of Detroit, where the launch was planned, to provide them with free housing and some launch services. With the help of local aviation enthusiasts, she assembled an all-volunteer ground crew of over 300 men to cover the rest of their launch needs. The Edison Manufacturing Company donated the anchor system for the gondola, while the Burdett Oxygen Company supplied the hydrogen for the balloon at a discount. Piccard also ordered ‘covers’ (short pamphlets describing the flight), which she planned to take into the stratosphere and then sell for US$25 a piece upon their return*7. Jean Felix, doing his part, wrote articles for a newspaper syndicate. Long before the rise of the Internet, Jeannette’s fundraising schemes, which handed out rewards such as the covers for small investments, anticipated modern crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter; though by modern crowdfunding standards, she was trying to raise a substantial sum. A similar project, which aimed to launch a drone into Michigan airspace to measure ozone levels, recently sought less than US$2,000 on Experiment, a crowdfunding site for scientific research projects*8.

With backing finally secured, early in the morning of October 23, 1934, Jeannette made sure that desiccant had been placed in the cosmic ray apparatus, that lunch and a snack of bananas and milk were onboard, and that Fleur-de-lis — her son Don’s pet turtle — along with her husband Jean Felix were safely stowed in the spherical capsule*9. By 6:27 am, the capsule was nearly through the cloud deck, climbing at 200 feet per minute. Her notes show the capsule was revolving, at first slowly, but then she strikes that out and writes ‘rapidly’. Rapid rotation of the capsule had played a role in the crash of the Russian stratospheric attempt, so this must have been worrying.

By 8:21 am the Piccard’s balloon had risen to roughly 10,000 metres and Jean Felix began to make the cosmic ray measurements that Robert Millikan had suggested. Three hours later, uncertain as to their location because of continued cloud cover, and concerned that if they travelled too far east they would come down in the ocean, Jeannette decided to descend. It took three hours for them to reach the ground from their final altitude of 17.8 km, touching down in Cadiz, Ohio — 300 km from their starting point.

The landing was rough enough to break bones (Jean suffered a cracked rib) and shred the balloon, but the capsule remained intact and the Piccards alive*5. Still, Jeannette was distressed, writing in The New York Times that her “most vivid sensation with regard to [the] flight was one of shame,” and that she didn’t offload the ballast quickly enough to clear the trees*10. However, given the disastrous outcomes of the previous two attempts that year, we would count it a brilliant success. She set an altitude record for women, which would not be broken until Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 space flight.

Jean Felix Piccard had pitched this flight as a chance to investigate the identity and source of the mysterious cosmic rays, gathering data for Millikan and for physicist William Swann. In reality, none of the data Jean Felix gathered was usable, in large part because of failures on his part to follow the correct protocols and to keep accurate records. Despite this, the Piccards’ work would indirectly leave its mark on extraplanetary science. Their technical report discusses the design of apparatus to remove carbon dioxide from the balloon capsule’s air, and in an eerie foreshadowing of the disastrous failure of Apollo 13’s carbon dioxide scrubbers, notes that they had rejected the idea of reconditioning the air by blowing it over granulated KOH as “something may go wrong which will need repair”*11. As a result of her high-altitude piloting experiences, Jeannette Piccard would go on to consult with NASA in the 1960s on capsule design*12. Lunar material brought back by the Apollo missions that Jeannette Piccard’s work helped make possible would aptly be returned to her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, for analysis by the petrologist Maria Luisa Crawford*13.

Perhaps the Piccards’ most enduring legacy might be in science fiction rather than science. Star Trek showrunner Gene Roddenberry named the captain of the Starship Enterprise ‘Jean-Luc Picard’, purportedly inspired by the exploits of Piccard’s husband Jean Felix or his twin brother Auguste, though we’d like to believe it is stratospheric pilot Jeannette Piccard that he really had in mind, rather than the maladroit Jean Felix.

About the Authors

Michelle Francl is in the Department of Chemistry at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010-2899, USA and at the Vatican Observatory, Vatican City State. Michael Donnay is a recent graduate of Georgetown University in history and a research associate at Bryn Mawr College.


1. https://twitter.com/sciencegeist/status/768519436303077376
2. Selecting the right houseplant could improve indoor air (animation). American Chemical Society (24 August 2016); http://go.nature. com/2fxflca 3. Effective Chemistry Communication in Informal Environments (National Academies of Sciences, 2016). 4. Lyall, S. Green water lingers in Olympic pools as the excuses pile up. The New York Times (12 August 2016); http://go.nature. com/2g12FpU 5. DeVorkin, D. H. Race to the Stratosphere: Manned Scientific Ballooning in America (Springer, 1989). 6. Shayler, D. Disasters and Accidents in Manned Spaceflight 21 (Springer, 2000).
7. Hill, S. “Until I Have Won” Vestiges of Coverture and the Invisibility of Women in the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Jeannette Ridlon Piccard PhD Thesis Univ. Ohio (2009).
8. Edwards, G. & Haskin, C. Measurements of atmospheric pollution profiles using drones. Experiment (2015); http://doi.org/bt2d
9. Piccard, J. Log of flight (Jeannette Piccard Papers, 1934). 10. Piccard, J. The New York Times (24 October 1934). 11. Piccard, J. & Piccard, J. Ind. Eng. Chem. 27, 122–128 (1935). 12. Piccard, J. Notes on Capsule Design (Jeannette Piccard Papers, 1964). 13. Crawford, M. L. & Weigand, P. W. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 37, 815–823 (1973).