69 pages • 2 hours read
William Pene du BoisThe 21 Balloons
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Travel takes two forms. The first is the direct route, to get from one place to another as quickly as possible. The second is the meandering route, where one wanders about “to see more of what is going on in the world” (3).
In the future, a person will be able to step through a door in one city and come out in another city far away. The best way, though, is by balloon: You decide when to start and when to stop, and the balloon and the wind decide where you go. It’s a good way to travel to school because, more often than not, you have a fine adventure and end up somewhere else besides school.
The book’s hero is a 66-year-old professor of arithmetic from San Francisco, William Waterman Sherman. He retires, builds a balloon, and takes off in it, hoping to see some of the world. He lands on the island of Krakatoa in 1883; it’s a real island that actually blew up that year in the greatest explosion in history. People heard the boom 3,000 miles away; rocks were hurled 17 miles high, and the blast caused 50-foot waves; thousands near and far were injured or killed.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Professor Sherman’s Incredible Loyalty”
Professor William Waterman Sherman takes off in a balloon from San Francisco in August 1883, hoping to be the first person to fly across the Pacific. Three weeks later, he’s found floating in the Atlantic, clinging to debris and 20 deflated balloons. The ship SS Cunningham rescues him, and its captain, doctor, and chef nurse him back to health.
They ask for his story, but Sherman refuses to reveal it to anyone other than the members of his club, San Francisco’s Western American Explorers’ Club (10). They try everything, including drugging him, but Sherman remains steadfast.
The captain notes the rescue in his log. He mentions seeing a red furnace among the balloon debris, which toppled and sank before the ship’s crew could get to it.
In New York, the captain gets Sherman situated at a hotel, then calls the New York Tribune and sells what he knows to that newspaper. Reporters arrive at the hotel, but Sherman remains silent. They publish what little they know, and the San Francisco Tribune gets wind of the story, contacts New York, and tells them about Professor Sherman's recent departure from that city in a large, single balloon. They also send a picture, which the Tribune prints under the headline “PROFESSOR SHERMAN IN WRONG OCEAN WITH TOO MANY BALLOONS” (14).
Millions of readers are thrilled by the story. New York’s mayor presents Sherman with the key to the city, then asks for details of his adventure. Sherman refuses. The US president telegrams Sherman, requesting his presence, but Sherman replies that honor dictates he refrain from speaking about his adventure until he has relayed it to his Explorers’ Club. The president understands and makes his personal train available to whisk Sherman to San Francisco so that the world may finally learn the details of the professor’s adventure.
Chapter 2 Summary: “A Hero’s Welcome Is Prepared”
During the five days of Sherman’s railroad journey across the US, San Franciscans prepare him a hero’s welcome with balloons, bunting, and flags. Grocers dangle watermelons like balloons from ceilings. The city pays the Higgens Balloon Factory, maker of Sherman’s original balloon, to build 1,000 small replicas of it and line the street with them, from the train station to the Explorers’ Club.
One boy unties one of these balloons, attaches it to himself, runs forward, and leaps into the breeze, which carries him aloft for a couple of blocks. His younger brother tries it, and, weighing less, flies away across the city until he grabs onto a church steeple. The fire department rescues him. That night, sparks from chimneys land on some of the miniature balloons, which, filled with hydrogen, promptly explode.
The mayor has patriotic balloons attached to the wooden dome of the Explorers’ Club. The dome is painted to look like the upper half of a globe with an American flag at the North Pole, which the club would like to reach before anyone else. During the night, the balloons gently lift the dome and carry it east, where it lands on an Indian reservation. On waking, residents of the reservation discover the dome and shrug: “Huh! Dumb white man decorate Explorers’ Club of San Francisco with too many balloons” (25). They promptly cut a door in the dome where its map depicts the US and give it to their chief for a new house.
The competing balloon company, Tomes Aeronautical Studios, feels left out of the festivities (26). They decide to assemble a balloon-lifted, horse-drawn couch—a “balloon buggy”—that will carry Sherman and the mayor from the train station to the club.
The city’s interest in the professor begins to flag until a boy figures out that, if Sherman really has traveled around the world, he’ll arrive in San Francisco about 40 days after he left, which cuts in half the record set by the adventurers in the book Around the World in Eighty Days.
Tomes Studios finishes its balloon buggy. Joseph Tomes and his company director sit on the floating couch as horses pull the contraption to the mayor’s office. It works so well that Tomes forgets himself and lights a cigar. A spark ignites one of the balloons; it explodes, dumping the two men onto the street while the horses, panicked, gallop away, dragging the couch behind them. Tomes and the director walk sadly back to their studio.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
The first two chapters describe the rescue of balloonist William Sherman—who refuses to tell his story to anyone other than the members of his Explorers’ Club—and the grand preparations for his arrival back in San Francisco.
In the introduction, the author imagines a future in which people travel by walking through doors from one place to another. He supposes this will involve transforming a person’s body from atoms to radio waves, which are picked up at the other end and remade into the atoms of the person’s body. This idea anticipates by nearly 20 years the Star Trek transporter room. (“Beam me up, Scotty!”)
Sherman is named for the author’s mother, fashion designer Florence Sherman Pène du Bois. The fictitious Western American Explorers’ Club of San Francisco has its own pedigree: It calls to mind a real club with a similar name, the Adventurers’ Club of New York. That club got started in the early 1900s with several famous members, including authors Zane Grey and Sinclair Lewis, journalist-adventurer Lowell Thomas, hunter and film star Frank Buck, a governor of New Jersey, and balloonist Captain Tom Baldwin. The club is no longer active, but several branches opened in Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Denmark and are still active.
Professor Sherman’s refusal to speak until he gets back to his club makes his adventure all the more mysterious and fascinating to millions of impatient citizens everywhere. Had he simply informed the captain of the SS Cunningham about his journey, it might have become news for a few days and then faded. Sherman’s insistence on secrecy instead drives everyone wild with curiosity. The lesson here is that anything, important or not, when kept secret, causes people to fear being left out of all the fuss, and they clamor for more information. In short, Sherman’s refusal to talk causes world interest to—ahem—balloon.
One problem with the balloons of the late 1800s was hydrogen, the gas used to inflate them. Lightest of all the atoms, hydrogen has great lifting power, but it is also highly flammable. In 1937, a hydrogen-filled airship that carried passengers, the Hindenburg, exploded during a visit to New York. This disaster turned the airship industry toward helium, a heavier atom that also can lift objects, if not as strongly, and is absolutely non-flammable: A match inserted into helium will simply go out. Helium, though, is rare and expensive: It leaks out of certain mines and rock formations and must be gathered carefully.
Today’s blimps and dirigibles all are filled with helium. For casual sightseeing, hot-air balloons replace both hydrogen and helium with regular air heated by a flame sustained by a propane tank. The balloon’s hot air is less dense, and therefore more buoyant, than the cooler air around it. This system controls altitude by heating the balloon’s air to rise or by releasing some of the air to drop down.
Chapter 2 describes a dome, painted to look like a map of the Northern Hemisphere, that accidentally gets carried to an Indian reservation, where the residents promptly convert it into housing with a door shaped like the US. The entire scene is the author’s sly critique of the way American immigrants displaced the original residents, leaving them with almost nothing of the continent that had been theirs for centuries.
Scenes of San Francisco’s frantic preparations for Sherman’s arrival are themselves wry commentaries on the foolishness of humanity. Sherman’s original departure, though clearly the beginning of a tremendous adventure, is largely ignored, despite the fact that he’s a passenger on the second-largest balloon ever launched. People remember the biggest and best but forget the also-rans: For example, Michael Phelps won a record number of Olympic medals, but few people can name the swimmers who came in second behind him.
Interest in Sherman abruptly increases, though, when he returns and won’t speak until he addresses his club. Everyone goes nuts: They assume that, simply because he’s holding his tongue, his adventure must be extraordinary. For all they know, Sherman is a dishonest lunatic. People thus have strange ways of valuing things. Fortunately, Sherman really does have a remarkable experience to relate to the world.
