An aerial photographer who hates closures
Nadar, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (Paris, April 6, 1820 – March 21, 1910)
The word 'nadar fence' or 'nadar fence' came from Flanders with the French adventurer, caricaturist, writer, photographer and balloonist Nadar, the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The man lived and worked in Paris in the nineteenth century.
The Flemish know the word, the Dutch do not; French-speaking Belgians know it as 'barrier Nadar', the French do not. A purely Belgian word.
Nadar – as a young man he changed his name from Tournachon to Tournadard (dard = sting, sting) and then to Nadar – was an incredible wild man and he hated that those strange Belgians had given his name to a crush barrier.
When he was eighty years old, he wrote a pro-test note from Paris to the Brussels liberal daily Le Petit Bleu du Matin to explain that he had nothing to do with that word.
He literally wrote: 'Dear Sir, please understand how hard it is for me to forever be the godfather of that closure. Me, a man who never, anywhere, wanted closure.
At least allow me to protest against this enforced baptism.' The language users on both sides of the Belgian language border decided differently a hundred years ago.
Nadar had founded an association in Paris in 1863 with the aim of promoting the invention of the airplane. As the first aerial photographer in the world, he knew the hot air balloon well. He came to the conclusion that the balloon would only be controllable if it was heavier than air.
To raise funds for his experiments, he paradoxically invented the 40-metre-high giant balloon Le Géant (The Giant), with a capacity of 6,000 cubic meters of gas.
The ascents with that colossal balloon around the world were supposed to feed the coffers to boost the costs of airships.
On October 4, 1863, the first flight took place in Paris with thirteen men on board. Emperor Napoleon III waved him goodbye. The balloon quickly lost altitude and landed in Meaux less than a hundred kilometers from Paris. He left again on October 18. His wife insisted on accompanying him.
Near Hanover, they crashed and the balloon was endlessly carried away by the wind. Both Nadar and his wife suffered serious injuries.
But Nadar did not give up. On September 14, 1864 he tried it in Amsterdam. An hour later the colossus was grounded in the Haarlemmermeerpolder. Two weeks later he started a fourth ascent, this time in Brussels, at the Schaerbeekse gate, near the Botanic Garden.
Even the old King Leopold I came to watch. The dialogue between the two men has become legendary. The king jokingly asks Nadar, "Mr. Nadar, is it true that you are opposed to the monarchy?"
And says Nadar, "What about you yourself, Sire?" To which the king is said to have replied: 'My profession does not allow that!'
Because it was dangerous to get close to the balloon and the crowd could be very intrusive, Nadar had the area fenced off with easy to move fences. The next day the word 'barriers Nadar' immediately appeared in the Brussels press.
As with the previous flights, Le Géant did not fly to Austria or Turkey, as Nadar had hoped, but landed near Ypres the same night. The whole balloon history turned into a fiasco.
Although his balloon had been stormed by hundreds of thousands of people everywhere, and although he had made a lot of money, he was left with nothing but debt.
One more time Nadar brought out all his ballooning skills, namely during the German siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871, when he himself founded a company of military balloonists. At their own expense.
The team used the balloons for military espionage and to carry eleven tons of mail, two and a half million letters, in and out of the capital. He sent his own reports about the situation in Paris by balloon mail to Belgian and British studio recording of Nadar in a balloon
newspapers.
Nadar had practiced so many disciplines in the course of his life that a later friend, who did not know him at the time, thought that there was a whole regiment of Nadars, including a balloonist, a photographer, a prose writer and a caricaturist.
Today, Nadar is certainly recognized as the most important portrait photographer of the nineteenth century. Just think of the famous portraits of his friend Charles Baudelaire or Sarah Bernhardt.
He was the first to take photographs from the air, which was not easy because the process of wet collodion plates at that time necessitated a portable darkroom in the balloon basket.
He also quickly learned that the escaping gases from the balloon disrupted the chemical photoprocesses. Not to mention rocking the basket. Nevertheless, from 1858 he made the first aerial photographs of Paris and patented 'aerostatic photography'.
During the summer and autumn of 1861 he went underground: first in the Catacombs of Paris, then in the new network of sewers. He was also the pioneer of artificial lighting, with magnesium light.
He had the stature of a giant with long arms and legs and an immense torso topped by a head with fiery red hair and lively, bright, sparkling eyes. His friend Jules Verne immortalized him as the figure Ardan in his Voyage to the Moon (1865).
Ardan is in the book 'a true destroyer of sacred cows'. And the poet Baudelaire wrote: 'Nadar's vitality is astonishing.
He has two copies of each internal organ.' Many years after Nadar's visit to Brussels, 'giant omelet Nadar' and 'giant pancake Nadar' were still on the menu in countless restaurants.
When the official art fair in Paris in 1874 expelled a group of painters, he offered them his studios. This is how the first exhibition of the Impressionists was born. Nadar, an enemy of every afen exclusion.
At the end of his life he could still see the aviation pioneers providing proof of his visionary ideas about the 'heavier-than-air' principle. On July 25, 1909, Louis Blériot – a Frenchman – managed to cross the Channel in a flight of 37 minutes.
Nadar sent him a congratulatory telegram which all the newspapers eagerly published.
Nadar died on March 15, 1910, three weeks short of his ninetieth birthday—with only his dogs and cats in the company. His grave can still be seen in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
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