![Felicity Jones [image courtesy Dick Thomas Johnson wikimedia commons]](https://staticr1.blastingcdn.com/media/photogallery/2017/11/27/660x290/b_502x220x82/felicity-jones-image-courtesy-dick-thomas-johnson-wikimedia-commons_1709437.jpg "Felicity Jones [image courtesy Dick Thomas Johnson wikimedia commons]")
Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones are in negotiations to star in a new Amazon.com original movie “The Aeronauts.” The film will be based on a real-life story of a pair of Victorian adventurers who took a Hot Air Balloon into the stratosphere in 1862, the highest anyone ever flew until well after the adventure of the airplane. However, Hollywood seems to have altered history for purposes of drama and even, one might suggest, political correctness, as it tends to do.
What the movie will be about
“The Aeronauts” will depict the adventures of Amelia Wren, a hot air balloonist to be played by Jones, and James Glaisher.
an Aeronaut, a scientist, who take a hot air balloon higher than anything built by humans had ever flown, with a result that they will have to fight for their lives.
Redmayne and Jones previously appeared together in “The Theory of Everything,” a film about the early life of Stephen Hawkins. Jones is most famous for being in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” Redmayne is known to most for his appearance in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” He is currently filming the sequel to that film.
What really happened
James Glaisher was a real person, a fellow of the Royal Society, a meteorologist, astronomer, and an Aeronaut. He conducted a series of hot air balloon flights starting in 1862 to study the upper atmosphere.
In a July 17, 1862, flight he and his companion reached 26,000 feet. In a subsequent flight on September 5, 1862, they rose to 30,000 feet and nearly lost their lives due to the lack of oxygen at that height where jumbo jets fly currently. Had his companion not climbed into the rigging to free a tangled valve line they would not have made it back safely to the ground.
Glaisher’s flying companion, by the way, was not a woman named Amelia Wren, but a man named Henry Coxwell, an experienced balloonist and scientist. However, the requirements of 21st Century drama require that a woman shares in the adventure, even if she did not.
Glaisher made a number of subsequent flights above 23,000 feet in which he took measurements of the decrease in air pressure, atmospheric inversions at night, and the chemical composition of the upper air.
He and Coxwell hold altitude records that have not, to this date, been broken.
Coxwell went on, by the way, to become an advocate for the use of balloons for military operations, something that was tried during the American Civil War but never really caught on until the First World War.
