Balloonomania

Balloonomania was a strong public interest or fad in hot air balloons that originated in France in the late 18th century and continued into the 19th century, during the advent of hot air balloon flights. The interest began with the first flights of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, and quickly spread in France and across the channel in England.[1]

Origins of Balloonomania

The science of lighter-than-air gasses, and specifically the properties of oxygen, had been discovered as early as 1774 by Joseph Priestley, who noted its lightness and explosive qualities when heated.[2] The chemistry of lighter-than-air and heated gasses was eventually put to the test by the Montgolfier brothers, two paper manufacturers in France, while experimenting with heated air caught in paper bags. Balloonomania saw its true origins, however, in the very first public balloon flight on June 5, 1783, with the launching of a large unmanned paper balloon in the countryside near Annonay. The balloon, which had been constructed by the Mongolfier brothers, was thirty feet tall, made of paper and appears to have been intended as an advertising gimmick for the Montgolfier’s paper manufacturing company. It was effective, as it drew an enormous crowd of onlookers. Later balloonists such as Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Vincent Lunardi exploited this wonder at the novelty of balloons to draw large crowds and gain personal fame, Lunardi going so far as to proclaim himself an “idol of the whole nation [of England]” in a letter to his guardian. [3]

Effects of Balloonomania on Society

Public Responses

Early ballooning was met with mixed responses. Crowds of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic onlookers would turn out for a balloon launch, even threatening to riot if the launch was delayed. Some, however, were not quite as impressed, as shown by the events of August 27, 1783 when professor Jacques Alexandre César Charles, who had been commissioned to build a rival balloon to the Mongolfier’s version using hydrogen, launched his balloon from the Champs de Mars before a large crowd including American scientist Benjamin Franklin. The balloon travelled for “forty-five minutes and fifteen miles to the village of Genoesse, where it was attacked by frightened peasants on landing.” [4]

Regardless of these negative reactions, which were not in the majority, ballooning quickly caught the imagination of the general populace, with a crowd of up to 400,000 clamoring to see Jacques Charles make a manned ascent in Paris on December 1, 1783. Both Blanchard and Lunardi became famous for their ballooning stunts, with Blanchard and his companion Dr. John Jeffries being the first to cross the English channel in a balloon on January 7, 1785.[5]

Academic and Scientific Responses

The public reaction among intellectuals and academics was generally cooler, with some critics of balloonomania including the likes of Sir Joseph Banks and Samuel Johnson, who wrote in a 1783 letter to Hester Thrale, who had inquired about the nature of hot air balloons, “Happy are you, Madam, that have ease and leisure to want intelligence of air balloons. Their existence is, I believe, indubitable, but I know not that they can possibly be of any use.”[6] Sir Joseph Banks, a prominent natural scientist wrote that he was skeptical of the utility of balloons, though he recognized the revolutionary science behind it: “I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania until some experiment like to prove beneficial either to society or to science is proposed.” [7] However, both men and other scientists and academics would express some personal interest in ballooning, and suggest possible practical purposes, with Banks originally suggesting that perhaps balloons could be used as a way of counterbalancing the weight of a cart or coach, making them easier to move over the ground. Even Johnson recognized the potential for exploration, stating, "How easily shall we trace the Nile through all its passages; pass over to distant regions and examine the face of nature, from one extremity of the Earth to the other." [8] Blanchard's companion Dr. John Jeffries considered ballooning to be a major part of an exploration of the secrets of flight, the nature of the upper atmosphere, and the formation of weather, and took instruments such as a mercury barometer, a thermometer, a hydrometer and an electrometer to take different measurements of the upper atmosphere.[9] There were other positive scientific responses, as well. Upon receiving a letter from a friend chronicling a balloon flight, the astronomer William Herschel began to think of hot air balloons as possibly useful for observation, as they might carry telescopes into the upper air, where it was clearer. This idea would eventually evolve into sending telescopes into orbit, which became reality in 1990 with the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope.[10]

Collectibles and cartoons

At its peak, balloonomania triggered a revolution in souvenirs and collectibles, with balloons being featured on “plates, cups, clocks, ivory draughts pieces, snuffboxes, bracelets, tobacco pipes, hairclips, tiepins, even a porcelain bidet with a balloon design painted on the interior." These collectibles proved to be enormously popular among the French populace, starting in the winter of 1783. With the rise of public interest in ballooning, they soon became the subjects of mockery. "Many sexually suggestive cartoons soon appeared: the inevitable balloon-breasted girls lifted off their feet, monstrous aeronauts inflated by gas enemas, or ‘inflammable’ women carrying men off into the clouds.”[11]

Literature

Balloonomania, merely as a novelty, served as the inspiration for various poets, such as Edward Nares, author of the Ballooniad,[12] a street ballad about hot air ballooning, which mentioned the notion of flying to the moon.

“Advent’rous youth! What urged thy distant flight,

Beyond the finite ken of human sight?
Seest thou yon silver orb men call the moon?

Thither now speed thee with thy air balloon.”

[13]

Balloonomania would exert a pull on the imaginations of some of the Romantic poets as well. Ballooning appealed to Romantic writer's ideas of the sublime, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote of balloons as being “an image of human longing and inspiration, both uplifting and terrifying”[14] and William Wordsworth, who opened the poem “Peter Bell” with the image of a balloon boat:


“There’s something in a flying Horse,
There’s something in a huge balloon:
But through the Clouds I’ll never float
Until I have a little Boat

Shaped like the crescent-moon.”

[15]

Their point was not lost on the balloonists themselves, as Dr. Alexandre Charles found himself making the first solo voyage in a hot air balloon on December 1, 1783, an unplanned accident after Dr. Charles' companion stepped out of the balloon, which then relaunched itself with only Charles inside. He wrote, "Never has a man felt so solitary, so sublime-and so utterly terrified." Dr. Charles never went up in a balloon again.[16]

Percy Shelley also wrote of balloons, saying, “It would seem a mere toy, a feather, in comparison with the splendid anticipations of the philosophical chemist. Yet it ought not to be altogether condemned, It promises prodigious faculties for locomotion, and will allow us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we so ignorant of the interior of Africa?—Why do we not dispatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon… as it glided over that unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever.” [17] Shelley also wrote a sonnet entitled “To a balloon, laden with Knowledge” which reads:


“Bright ball of flame that thro the gloom of even
Silently takest thine etherial way
And with surpassing glory dimmst each ray
Twinkling amid the dark blue Depths of Heaven
Unlike the Fire thou bearest, soon shall thou
Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom
Whilst that unquencheable is doomed to glow
A watch light by the patriots lonely tomb
A ray of courage to the opprest & poor,
A spark tho' gleaming on the hovel's hearth
Which thro the tyrants gilded domes shall roar
A beacon in the darkness of the Earth
A Sun which oer the renovated scene
Shall dart like Truth where Falshood yet has been”

[1]
  1. ^ Rabbe, Felix, Shelley: The Man and the Poet, A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1888, pg. 166, http://books.google.com/books?id=NYj8TjiJuDkC&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=%22bright+ball+of+flame+that+thro+the+gloom+of+even%22&source=bl&ots=S3LmOcUCC8&sig=QSvDBbiXqWcdUqnpj0fpPo1Hacw&hl=en&ei=u61xS-LKA4SqNorW-fsJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22bright%20ball%20of%20flame%20that%20thro%20the%20gloom%20of%20even%22&f=false

Balloonomania was not universal amongst the Romantic poets, however. In contrast to Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, William Blake mocked and satirized the idea of manned flight in his unfinished prose work “An Island in the Moon”[18]

Even after the end of the Romantic period, Balloonomania continued to have an effect on later literary work, including on the early science fiction writer Jules Verne who wrote the book Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863, about the ballooning adventures of two explorers and their manservant in Africa.[19]

Military

The military applications of hot air balloons were recognized early, with Joseph Montgolfier jokingly suggesting in 1782 that the French could fly an entire army suspended underneath hundreds of paper bags into Gibraltar to seize it from the British.[20] Military leaders and political leaders soon began to see a more practical potential for balloons to be used in warfare; specifically in the role of reconnaissance. The first recorded use of a balloon in warfare was the deployment of a balloon called L'Entrepremant by the French at the battle of Fleurus in 1794, which resulted in a French victory over a coalition of British and Austrian forces.[21] After that victory, Napoleon started an air balloon corps based in Meudon, and there were fears in England of an aerial invasion, though this never came to pass. Napoleon took his balloon corps to Egypt in 1798, but their equipment was destroyed by Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Aboukir, and Napoleon disbanded his balloon corps in 1799.[22] Balloons would later be used in the American Civil War for reconnaissance and directing artillery barrages on foes that were out of view of the artillerymen on the ground.[23]

References

  1. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008
  2. ↑ Schofield, Robert E. The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-271-02459-3., pg. 107
  3. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 140
  4. ↑ Wragg, David, Flight before Flying, Frederick Fell Publishers, New York, 1974 pg. 24
  5. ↑ Wragg, David, Flight before Flying, Frederick Fell Publishers, New York, 1974 pg. 28
  6. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 134
  7. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 126
  8. ↑ Hodgson, J.E, History of Aeronautics in Great Britain, Oxford University Press, 1924, pg. 66
  9. ↑ Jeffries, John, Narrative of Two Aerial Voyages with M. Blanchard as Presented to the Royal Society, London, 1786, pg. 10
  10. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 135
  11. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 132
  12. ↑ Nicolson, Marjorie, Thomas Paine, Edward Nares, and Mrs. Piozzi's Marginalia, The Huntington Library Bulletin University of California Press 1936 . pg. 104
  13. ↑ The ballooniad. In two cantos. The second edition. Birmingham, Printed in the Year M,DCC,LXXXV. [1785]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Wisconsin - Madison. 8 February 2010 <http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/ecco/infomark.do?&contentSet=ECCOArticles&type=multipage&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&docId=CW116659434&source=gale&userGroupName=wisc_madison&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE>.
  14. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 161
  15. ↑ Wordsworth, William, Peter Bell, Strahan and Spottiswoode, London, 1819 http://books.google.com/books?id=cFkJAAAAQAAJ&dq=peter+bell+wordsworth&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=PpVxS4W4IJOANum5tfgJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
  16. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 132
  17. ↑ Hogg, Thomas Jefferson Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Routledge and Sons, London, 1906
  18. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 143
  19. ↑ Verne, Jules, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Sutton Publishing, 1995
  20. ↑ Rolt, L.T.C., The Aeronauts, Walker & Co., New York, 1966
  21. ↑ http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Lighter_than_air/Napoleon's_wars/LTA3.htm
  22. ↑ Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, pg. 156
  23. ↑ Evans, Charles M., The War of the Aeronauts: a history of ballooning during the Civil War, Stackpole books, 2002
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