Search the Site
The first British person ever to successfully take to the skies in a hot air balloon was none other than a son of the manse from the Angus village of Fern.
James Tylter was born in Fern, near Brechin, on December 17, 1745. His father was the local minister and from an early age, Tytler showed considerable promise. However, with a large family and only a minister's stipend to survive on, Tytler's father could not afford to send his second son to university. So, after being educated at Fern Primary School, Tytler taught himself the rudiments of science and medicine before successfully applying for an apprenticeship with a surgeon in Forfar.
When he was only 18 years old, Tytler left Angus so he could attend medical classes at Edinburgh University. This enabled him to secure a job as ship's surgeon in the Dundee whaling fleet but, after two voyages, he returned to dry land. His attempts to find a position in Edinburgh as a surgeon failed so, instead, he set up in business as a pharmacist.
By now. Tytler was married and, when his pharmacy business failed, he decided to leave his debts behind and fled Edinburgh with his wife and children. A few of years later, he returned, ready to use the vast expanse of knowledge he had been garnering since boyhood in his new post as the editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. While working on the encyclopaedia, Tytler read of the balloon flights being made by the Montgolfier brothers in France and decided to see if he could fly his own hot air balloon.
As a result, and after several attempts, at 5am on August 27, 1784, Tytler's self-designed and self-constructed hot air balloon lifted the inventor 350 feet in the air on above Carlton Hill in Edinburgh.
Although Tytler successfully achieved his feat, his skills lay in creative writing, self publishing and science, rather than sound business practice, and thus the time and money he had devoted to his latest invention had resulted in massive debts. Desperate to make ends meet, he continued to work on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, while also writing extensively about his vision of the world - a world that he felt had never been more interesting or exciting. He even created the concept of "copyright" in Scotland.
Once he became widely-known, Tytler although a poor man was well regarded by some in the late 18th century's Scottish Enlightenment, particularly Robert Burns with whom Tytler collaborated in creating lyrics for Scottish ballads.
However, although he was considered by some contemporaries to be one of the most knowledgeable men and foremost thinkers of his time , Tytler's writing was not as well-received in some quarters as others. In 1792, Tytler, a member of a radical group "Friends of the People" was the first person in Scotland to be arrested under the new Law of Sedition for publishing an anti-Government pamphlet, at the time of the French Revolution Just in time, he fled to Ireland and then across the Atlantic to Salem, Massachusetts, where he continued to express his often-rebellious thoughts on paper, while creating the Universal Geography , an ancestor of the National Geographic.
Tytler remained in exile- and in debt - for the rest of his life, which came to a sorry end in 1804.Tytler disappeared during a violent rain storm and, two days later, his body was found, washed up on the shore.
Until recently, history had more or less forgotten James Tytler - even his record-breaking balloon flight had been overshadowed by the balloon flights made soon after by Vincent Lunardi, a showman who knew how to turn a scientific experiment into money-making enterprise, an achievement Tytler never managed to master. However, in recent years, there has been a flurry of interest in him with a street renamed Tytler Gardens and an Edinburgh Festival Fringe play written about him , it is hoped that this most-overlooked famous son of Angus will soon be accorded the recognition he so rightfully deserves.