The pictures England took on the same trip of railways, docks, bridges and cities were rather more important since they enabled the Old World to see for the first time how the New could match it blow for blow.Įngland was only one of a number of British photographers who were showing what could be done with the new medium in the 1850s. The only comparable earlier pictorial exploitation of a sensational event was during the ballooning craze of the 1780s in England and France, when countless prints of the first flights by humans were produced. Those he took of Blondin were by far the most commercially successful, selling in tens of thousands. He used twinned cameras to take almost identical pictures of the same scene which, when viewed in a stereoscope, produced a 3D effect. This is one of the images taken by William England for the London Stereoscopic Company on his visit to the USA and Canada, like that of Washington’s Mausoleum reproduced in inFocus last February. He was reckoned to have crossed Niagara 300 times by his death, in bed in Ealing in 1897, and to have walked 10,000 miles on his various ropes. His career went from strength to strength after this and at its height he was said to be earning $500,000 a year from his performances in many countries. His balancing pole was 30 feet long and weighed 40 pounds – how much his unfortunate manager weighed is not recorded. The 35-year-old Frenchman Jean-François Gravelet, ‘Blondin’, used a manila hemp rope three inches in diameter, strung 160 feet above the water, linking New York State with Ontario, Canada, a little below the Falls, a skein of telegraph wires in the background. They will make the journey several times that summer. Do not attempt to do any balancing yourself.
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Look up, Harry … You are no longer Colcord you are Blondin … be a part of me, mind, body and soul. Here his manager Harry Colcord is carried piggy-back, exhorted beforehand by Blondin: It is now August and he is introducing variations into his act: wearing a blindfold, pushing a wheelbarrow, on stilts, sitting down midway then cooking and eating an omelette. The famous Blondin made his first crossing of Niagara Falls on June 30th, 1859, watched, it was calculated, by 100,000 people.