The Helmet His Wife Made

Auguste Piccard was a Swiss physicist, six foot six, all neck and beard, the tall thin man at the back of the 1927 Solvay portrait with Einstein and Marie Curie. He invented the pressurized cabin so he could breathe at the edge of space, which is why your airliner doesn't kill you. On 27 May 1931, he and his assistant climbed into a 7-foot aluminum sphere beneath a hydrogen balloon and went up.

German law required aeronauts to wear helmets. Madame Piccard had made theirs out of upside-down wicker fruit baskets, padded with cushions that doubled as life vests.

The ground crew released the ropes an hour early, without warning. The release valve froze shut. The sphere had been dropped during prep, and at over 50,000 feet a crack in the hull began to whistle. Piccard reached into his pocket and produced a pre-mixed glob of Vaseline and cotton fibers that he had brought along for exactly this contingency, and packed the breach by hand.

What kind of man brings that, you cannot really say. The barometer then shattered, spilling mercury, which eats aluminum. He hooked a hose to a valve and used outer space as a vacuum cleaner.

They landed on a glacier. A search party, sent to find their bodies, found them walking.