James Tytler

James Tytler (1745-1804), balloonist and writer, was born on 17 December 1745 at the manse at Fern, Forfarshire, the son of George Tytler, the minister at Fearn in Angus, and his wife, Janet Robertson. He was a man of extraordinary man at an extraordinary time in an extraordinary city.

Life
After an education at his local parish school, and two or three years as a surgeon’s apprentice in Forfar, Tytler went to Edinburgh to study medicine at the University. The following summer, he worked as ship’s surgeon on the Royal Bounty, a Leith whaler, in which he sailed to Greenland. Then he got married, hastily and unwisely. He could not support his wife, while continuing with his studies impossible, so set up business in Leith as a pharmacist. But business was poor, and in debt he fled to England, out of the reach of his creditors. He returned to Edinburgh, now with five children, and set about making a living from writing and publishing, for which he built his own printing press. About this time his wife, Elizabeth, left him to establish herself as a grocer in the Canongate area (the couple were divorced in 1788, by when Tytler had been involved in two further relationships). After a spell in the debtors' sanctuary at Holyrood Abbey (where he wrote a ballad called ‘The Pleasures of the Abbey’), he found employment in editing the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He went on to compile the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, enlarging it to ten volumes between 1776 and 1784. He spent these years at Duddingston, lodging with a washerwoman, whose upturned tub he used as a writing desk. While researching for an appendix on Air Balloons, his interest piqued by the Montgolfier brothers' successful balloon flight at Versailles in September 1783, and he set about constructing his own ‘Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon’. At that time, Edinburgh had a building nicknamed "the largest pigeon-house in Europe" - the partly built Register House on Princes Street, the unfinished dome of which offered shelter and support for his 40- foot tall balloon. He advertised the public ascent, to be held at Comely Garden on 6 August 1784, but his attempts were foiled by either technical problems or the weather. The press attacked him, and the mob attacked his balloon. He tried again on Wednesday 25 August. He inflated the balloon early in the morning, left the fire burning for another hour, stepped into his basket, and was released. According to the Edinburgh Evening Courant "the balloon, together with the projector himself, and basket in which he sat, were fairly floated". Two days later he had even greater success, "navigating the atmosphere" for about half a mile, and on the 31st he made another ascent, this time crashing before hundreds of paying spectators at Edinburgh's Comely Gardens. Thus were the first flights from British soil, predating both Vincenzo Lunardi (1759 - 1806) and Sadler. Tytler's life after ballooning was no less interesting, with another stay in the Holyrood sanctuary, more writing and publishing, divorce, another wife and more children. Tytler became interested in the radical politics, and his hostility to William Pitt's government and its proclamation against seditious writings, led him to advocate more extreme political reform and he joined the society entitled "Friends of the People". In December 1792, he was arrested and charged with seditious libel, as part of the government's crackdown on Scotland's radical societies. He fled to Ireland in about 1793 and then to the USA in 1796, where at Cat Cove, near Salem Neck, he published a newspaper. He accidentally drowned near Salem (Massachusetts) on 9 January 1804.

Published Works
Tytler was the author of many anonymous works and of popular songs, including " I ha'e laid a Herring in Saut," or '" I canna Come ilka Day to Woo," and " The Pleasures of the Abbey." His publications include "Essays on the Most Important Subjects of Natural and Revealed Religion," which he set in type without manuscript in Holyrood (Edinburgh, 1772) ; "System of Geography" (1788) ; "History of Edinburgh"; "Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar" (2 vols.): " Review of Dritchken's Theory of Inflammation"; " Answer to Paine's 'Age of Reason'";" On the Excise "; "System of Surgery" ; and "Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever" (Salem, 1799)