The Ups and Downs of Ballooning

Balloon ascensions were an exciting part of the nineteenth century. Some daring individual would set up a balloon in a public space like Hyde Park, and crowds would gather to watch the intrepid adventurer take off and ascend into the skies. In most cases, the balloon would fly a short distance and come down in some field. In a few cases, the event was an attempt to set a record. For example, in 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries left Dover in the first successful attempt to cross the Channel by balloon.

But sometimes, things did not go as planned.

I discovered the following 1895 graphic not too long ago. It was originally an uncut set of 10 cards showing the early history of ballooning. As you can see, the emphasis appears to be on disasters!

Starting from top left, we have Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Jean-Baptise Biot, who ascended to 4,000 meters to conduct scientific experiments on gas. They lived. So did the second fellow, André-Jacques Garnerin, who, despite the illustration, made the first successful parachute jump from a balloon in 1797. He owed much to the third fellow, Louis-Sebastien Lenormand, who had conceived the idea of a parachute and jumped from a building with his umbrella-like contraption in 1783.

The fourth card on the top row has ideas for every steampunk author! These are purportedly utopian dreams of flight from the “last century.” Some very interesting flights of fancy! Next to it we have Commander Jean-Marie Coutelle at the Siege of Mainz in 1795, where he used a balloon for reconnaissance (and seems to have earned the wrath of the enemy in the process!).

The first card on the bottom row is a balloon commemorating Napoleon’s achievements. Interesting that he is still revered nearly 80 years after his ultimate defeat. I was both delighted and saddened to see my beloved Sophie Blanchard featured on the next card. Of course the artist had to include the queen of aeronauts. But perhaps they might have shown something besides her fiery death!

Next to her is Count Franceso Zambeccari, who flew the first unoccupied balloon in England in 1783, but instead of commemorating that achievement, the artist decided to cover his crash in the Adriatic in 1804. A number of balloons took off from the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, but the artist chose to depict the one from which Thomas Harris fell in 1824. Finally, we have the rescue of Francois Arban by Italian fishers in 1846, after he too had crashed into the Adriatic Sea.

Doesn’t exactly make you want to jump into the next balloon, doesn’t it?