User:J.B. Stewart/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.

Origins of Balloonomania:
The Montgolfier brothers kicked off balloonomania on June 5th 1783 when they constructed a large paper balloon in the open countryside near Annonay. The balloon was thirty feet tall, and 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.

Balloonomania in Society:
Public and Academic 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 27th, 1783: “The eminent professor, Jacques Alexander Cesar Charles (1746-1823) was commissioned to build a suitable rival to the Montgolfiere, using hydrogen…A small hydrogen balloon was launched from the Champ de Mars on 27th August 1783, before a large crowd, which included the illustrious American scientist, Benjamin Franklin. It travelled for forty-five minutes and fifteen miles to the village of Genoesse, where it was attacked by frightened peasants on landing.”

Some critics of balloonomania included the likes of Samuel Johnson, who wrote in a 1783 letter to Hester Thrale, “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.”

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.”

Regardless of these negative responses, ballooning quickly caught the imagination of the general populace, with a crowd of up to 400,000 clamoring to see Jacques Charles make an ascent in Paris in December 1st, 1783.

Souvenirs At its peak, balloonomania triggered a revolution in souvenirs, 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… 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.”

Literature Balloonomania served as the inspiration for various poets, such as author of the Ballooniad, 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.”

Balloonomania would exert a pull on the imaginations of some of the Romantic poets as well, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote of balloons as being “an image of human longing and inspiration, both uplifting and terrifying” 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.”

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.” 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”

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”

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.

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 Gibralter to seize it from the British. 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. 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. 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.

Astronomy 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 1997 with the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope.