Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

two brothers concluded that if they could build a bag large enough and fill it with heated air, it might be possible to lift a man into the sky.
    After nearly a year of experimentation, on June 4, 1783, they succeeded in building an unmanned balloon that rose more than a mile into the air, and within a few months they succeeded in lifting a man off the ground.
    The accomplishment spawned a period of something approaching balloon-mania among the public, and soon dozens of other Frenchmen were not only copying the brothers, but trying to improve upon their design. These early balloonists soon discovered that not only could they rise in the air, but once aloft the balloon could be driven by the winds and provide an utterly new way to travel. After a series of successful flights on land, for these early balloonists a trip across the English Channel became the obvious and undeniable goal.
    Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard succeeded in doing just that. After building his own balloon and making a series of land-based flights, he traveled to England to make his attempt. On January 7, 1785, with another balloonist on the French side of the Channel waiting for favorable weather to launch his own balloon and make his own crossing, Blanchard and an American doctor, John Jeffries, who had served as a British Army surgeon during the Revolutionary War, took to the air at Dover Castle.
    Catching the prevailing wind, the balloon floated eastward and success seemed certain. Then the balloon suddenly began losing air and plummeted toward the sea. For a time the two men feared that they would land in the Channel and drown, for neither could swim, and the cold Channel waters promised a quick death.
    They saved themselves. The two had filled the passenger basket with ballast and all sorts of memorial cargo, including a packet of mail to be delivered from England to France. As the balloon dropped they started tossing items overboard as quickly as possible, including most of their own heavy clothing, which they had needed to stay warm on the long crossing. Not until the two men were stripped down to street clothes did the balloon stop dropping and begin a slow but steady rise into the air. Everything else, save the packet of mail, had been thrown overboard.
    Two and a half hours after they first took to the air the balloon finally came back to earth in France, landing roughly in the Fellmores Forest. The Channel had not only been crossed, but crossing the Channel—by any means—now became the world standard of adventure, an accomplishment that all but guaranteed fame and fortune.
    Balloonists on each side of the Channel scrambled first to match Blanchard's achievement, then better it by building bigger balloons that could rise higher and drift both farther and more quickly, or carry more cargo and more and more passengers. In only a few decades crossing the Channel by balloon became nearly as safe and commonplace as crossing the waters by boat.
    Adventurers on both coasts looked across the Channel and soon began to dream of yet another challenge.

3. Highlands
     
    T RUDY DID NOT like it, not one little bit.
    Standing in the sand looking at her sisters, Helen and Meg, laugh and splash about and swim in the warm waters and gentle surf of the Shrewsbury River estuary in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Trudy's face was fixed in a deep pout, a frown upon her lips.
    Just a few months before, her father, Heiner Ederle, a successful Manhattan butcher, had purchased a small summer cottage in Atlantic Highlands. The Highlands was virtually surrounded by water, hemmed in by the ocean on one side and the Navesink River and Shrewsbury River estuary on the other, with Sandy Hook, a barrier beach, protecting the Highlands from the turbid waters of the open ocean. From the front porch of the Ederles' small cottage, which was only a few dozen yards from the water, one could not help but see the ocean, and the beach was only a few steps away.
    Yet for Trudy Ederle,