Up and away with the famous Seaford aeronaut

n 1845 Henry was entrusted with the management of a balloon in Brussels and subsequently made many flights both on the continent and in the UK. He was often accompanied by his friend Dr James Glaisher and on the September 5, 1862, they were responsible for reaching the highest altitude any man had ever been. In a balloon sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, they rose from Wolverhampton to a height of about seven miles without the aid of any breathing apparatus and in temperatures reaching -52 degrees.

The balloon was called The Mammoth and was powered by coal-gas. Glaisher wrote: 'On emerging from the cloud at 1hr 17m we came into a flood of light, with a beautiful blue sky without a cloud above us, and a magnificent sea of cloud below.' Two hours later he passed out and Coxwell managed to free the ropes required to make their descent by tugging at them with his teeth as his hands had become frozen. The picture from the Illustrated London News, right, shows this brave act. They eventually landed near Ludlow having become the first humans to enter the stratosphere.

Coxwell lived in Connaught Road, Seaford and had his balloon workshops in Richmond Road. Being a celebrity he made money by taking paid passengers on balloon ascents, firstly in Woolwich and later at the Crystal Palace. During the Franco-German war, Henry managed the war-balloons for the Germans.

In June 1880 Coxwell became the first man to make 1,000 balloon ascents. He made his last flight five years later. He died in 1900 aged 81 and his widow erected a memorial to him in St Peter's Church, Blatchington. The memorial calls him a 'famous aeronaut' and, maybe because of his success at altitude, the memorial is placed quite high up within the church.

So, does Coxwell hold the altitude record for Seaford? The answer is No. As this Sussex Express goes to press, Piers Sellers is orbiting the earth on the Space Station at 140 miles altitude. Last Saturday (July 8) I watched a live broadcast from NASA showing Piers climb out of the Space Station STS-121 for a seven and a half hour space walk.

Piers was born in Crowborough in 1955 and at the age of four attended Tyttenhanger Lodge Pre-Preparatory School on the Eastbourne Road in Seaford. While at the school, he was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up. He firmly replied that he wanted to be a spaceman '“ and how right he was!

After school in Seaford, he went to Cranbrook School in Kent and then onto universities in Edinburgh and Leeds. Sellers and his British-born wife moved to Maryland in 1982 and in order to become an astronaut took US citizenship. He joined NASA in 1996 and six years later undertook his first space mission on board the space-station when he took part in his first space walk.

On his current mission he has to undertake three spacewalks in order to construct and test various items of scientific equipment.

During Saturday's walk he was attached to the end of a long robotic arm (which he described as a fishing-rod) and was able to look back at the space station and marvel as the earth spun slowly underneath him. In his pressurised space-suit he was probably more comfortable than Henry Coxwell had been during his record breaking ascent 144 years ago.