Lighter Than Air: A Lecture in Barcelona

On Tuesday, July 21, I will deliver a lecture at the Consulate General of Argentina in Barcelona marking the 110th anniversary of the first crossing of the Andes by hydrogen balloon, accomplished in 1916 by Eduardo Bradley and Ángel María Zuloaga. With Zuloaga I share no family ties; with Bradley, it would be impossible for me to deny them.

Commemorative stamp dedicated to Eduardo Bradley

The flight took place during the celebrations of the centennial of Argentine independence — which requires a clarification. Argentina has, strictly speaking, two dates marking its independence: May 25 (1810), generally sealed with empanadas, and July 9 (1816), the occasion of family asados.

We know there cannot be two independence days, but we accept it the way we accept the goals of Messi or Maradona. They are for the team.

1916 was not an easy year to look up at the sky. Europe was consumed by what we now call the First World War — at the time simply the Great War, since no one imagined we would be foolish enough to need a number. Verdun would claim 700,000 lives; the Brusilov offensive, a million more. Yet from that carnage came technological advances, among them the use of hydrogen to lift observation balloons above the trenches. That same development — illuminating gas and hydrogen — is what allowed Bradley and Zuloaga to ascend and remain suspended long enough to clear the cordillera between Santiago and the Uspallata valley.

That same year, La Cumparsita premiered in Montevideo — though I doubt Bradley and Zuloaga would have welcomed it as their soundtrack; tango was not yet the business of respectable men. And Rubén Darío died, leaving his mark on the poetic prose with which Bradley, the hero of the journey, would recount his feat a year after claiming his laurels.

Readers of this journal will recall that while preparing this lecture I returned to the research archive my father left behind for his book Más liviano que el aire, and completed, after more than half a century, the 1969 La Nación comic series Bradley y Zuloaga. Those pages — a storyboard drawn long before I became a filmmaker — have inevitably shaped what I will present in Barcelona.

I have suffered from compulsive documentarism since I was fourteen: when there is a story worth telling, I want to tell it, preferably as a film. This story belongs to another category. On July 21, it will be told the older way — in conversation, before an audience, about a moment when technological optimism, scientific ingenuity, and a certain disregard for impossible odds converged above the highest mountains in the Americas.

I hope to see some of you there.