Philippe Lesueur, letter from Paris, 22 September 1783, an eyewitness account of the early sixty-foot Montgolfier balloon that was launched at Versailles with a sheep, a cockerel and a duck in the basket, all of which lived to tell the tale (and did so in several pamphlets). (illustration credit ill.1)
‘The Perilous Situation of Major Money’, 1785. John Money’s descent into the sea twenty miles off Lowestoft while gallantly attempting to raise funds for the new Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. (illustration credit ill.2)
Dr Jacques Alexandre Charles, the first successful pilot of a hydrogen balloon, Paris, December 1783. An official portrait by Bailly, commissioned nearly forty years later by the Institut Royal de France, 1820. (illustration credit ill.3)
Jacques Garnerin, the first great French balloon showman after the Montgolfier brothers, in heroic profile, Paris 1802. The modest Latin device reads: ‘Praise the Intrepid Aeronaut who dares to take to the Air’. (illustration credit ill.4)
Sophie Blanchard, the great French female aeronaut, drawn by Jules Porreau at the height of her fame, Paris, 1815. (illustration credit ill.5)
Sophie Blanchard in her tiny silver gondola above Milan in August 1811, to celebrate Napoleon’s arrival in the city and carrying his Imperial standard. (illustration credit ill.6)
‘Mort de Harris’, Croydon, 1824. The gallant death of Lieutenant Harris, and the mysterious survival of his beautiful passenger Miss Stocks. From a popular French balloon collecting-card series, issued by Romanet & Cie, Paris, 1895. (illustration credit ill.7)
Tiberius Cavallo, physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society, the first natural philosopher to inflate soap bubbles with hydrogen gas, and the first serious historian of ballooning in English. Portrait by unknown artist, c. 1790. (illustration credit ill.8)
Charles Green, amateur portrait, 1835. Painted in a ‘tavern sign’ style, when the great British balloonist was still largely known as a ‘novelty’ showman. (illustration credit ill.9)
The Nassau balloon team, 1836, painted by John Hollins. Left to right: Sir William Melbourne James (Lord Justice of Appeal), John Hollins (artist), Walter Prideaux (lawyer), Robert Hollond MP (seated), Monck Mason, Charles Green. (illustration credit ill.10)
The Nassau balloon at night over the industrial foundries of Liège, Belgium, 1836. This was the 480-mile long-distance trip that brought Charles Green an international reputation in Europe and especially America. (illustration credit ill.11)
Charles Green, epic British balloon pilot, painted by John Hollins, mezzotint by G. T. Payne, 1838. The long instrument is Green’s treasured Italian mercury barometer, which served as a precision altimeter on more than five hundred flights. (illustration credit ill.12)
Percy Shelley (illustration credit ill.14)
Edgar Allan Poe (illustration credit ill.15)
Jane Loudon (illustration credit ill.16)
Charles Dickens (illustration credit ill.17)
Henry Mayhew (illustration credit ill.18)
Félix Nadar, cartoonist, balloonist and photographer; a radical and inventive spirit throughout the Second Empire, the siege of Paris and the Third Republic. A characteristically penetrating self-portrait taken c. 1854. (illustration credit ill.19)
‘Mr Glaisher insensible at the height of seven miles’, 1862. This dramatic engraving shows the meteorologist James Glaisher slumped unconscious in the basket of the Mammoth while his pilot Henry Coxwell clambers into the hoop to secure the line of the gas-release valve. On landing they walked seven miles to a country pub for a pint. Their altitude record stood for the rest of the century. (illustration credit ill.20)
‘Paul is swept away in the Leviathan’. Opening image from Les Aventures de Paul, a popular book for children by Jean Bruno‚ 1858. The theme of the small boy in the runaway balloon has become universal. (illustration credit ill.21)
A poster for Le Ballon-poste, the first ever airmail newspaper, published in Paris by Le Figaro, 1870–71. It was flown out weekly by ballon monté (manned balloon) over the Prussian siege lines, and contained ‘a complete Journal of the week’s events, and two columns of Private Correspondence’, price twenty centimes. (illustration credit ill.22)
Le Ballon, celebrated siege painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1870, showing the armed figure of Marianne standing defiantly on the Paris ramparts while a balloon disappears westwards over the Fort Mont-Valérien towards the Prussian lines. (illustration credit ill.23)
The dashing Major-General George Custer, US Army, 1865. One of the few Union officers brave enough to go up in a balloon. He recalled that he preferred to remain ‘sitting in the bottom of the basket’. (illustration credit ill.24)
Thaddeus Lowe with his famous military balloon the Intrepid, which made him the leading Union balloon observer of the American Civil War, and afterwards a legend. A modern drawing by Mort Künstler, 1991. (illustration credit ill.25)
‘In one bound we pass through the thick layer of cloud’. One of a series of sublime balloon engravings and weather studies produced by Albert Tissandier for Travels in the Air, edited by James Glaisher, 1871. (illustration credit ill.26)
The famous pair of French aeronautical brothers, Gaston (right) and Albert Tissandier, with their balloons the Zénith (high-altitude), the Jean Bart (the siege balloon) and La France (a prototype airship powered by a German electrical engine). (illustration credit ill.27)
The mysterious ‘Universum’, or ‘The Pilgrim’, an engraving made by Camille Flammarion to illustrate his book L’Atmosphère (1888), in imitation of a medieval woodcut. It shows the place where heaven and earth may meet. (illustration credit ill.28)
Camille Flammarion, the visionary French balloonist, astronomer, scientist and science-fiction writer, looking every bit the part, at age eighty-two in 1924. (illustration credit ill.29)
Victor Hugo (illustration credit ill.31)
James Glaisher (illustration credit ill.32)
H. G. Wells (illustration credit ill.33)
David Hempleman-Adams (illustration credit ill.34)
Ian McEwan (illustration credit ill.35)
‘The Eagle on the Polar Ice’, a photograph by Nils Strindberg, 14 July 1897, which became a ghost-like symbol of the passing of the age of Romantic ballooning.
The Eagle’s crew. Left to right: Knut Fraenkel, Salomon Andrée and Nils Strindberg, before the departure of the second polar expedition, 1897. (illustration credit ill.36)
‘A Balloon Wedding in the Clouds’. An ultra-fashionable American wedding somewhere above New York, drawn for an Italian magazine in 1911. (illustration credit ill.39)
Fanny Godard, a leading French female balloonist of the Belle Epoque, showing a lot of style and leg, photographed by Nadar in his Paris studio, 1879. (illustration credit ill.37)
Dolly Shepherd, the most celebrated of the Edwardian balloon parachute girls, with her impressive uniform and high boots. In 1908 she saved her friend Louie May’s life, when Louie’s parachute failed at twelve thousand feet. (illustration credit ill.38)
‘Babar and Princess Celeste depart on their honeymoon for Paris’. Cover of the first edition of Le Voyage de Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff, 1932. Perhaps a gentle satire on Jules Verne’s colonial attitudes. (illustration credit ill.40)
Ian McEwan, Enduring Love, 1997, a novel about fate and fatal attraction, brilliantly defined by an unforgettable balloon incident in its haunting opening chapters, subsequently made into an equally haunting film, directed by Roger Michell. ‘He had been on the rope so long that I began to think he might stay there until the balloon drifted down, or the boy came to his senses and found the valve that released the gas, or until some beam, or god, or some other impossible cartoon thing came and gathered him up’ (from Chapter One). (illustration credit ill.41)
‘Airabelle’, the heavenly cow, a regular favourite at the annual Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, New Mexico, a folksy icon of American good humour and goodwill. (illustration credit ill.42)
The renowned ‘mass dawn ascent’ at the Albuquerque Fiesta, photographed by Richard Holmes, 2010.
‘Earthrise’, the famous environmentalist image, this time photographed from Apollo 11, July 1969. ‘The dream of flight is to see the world differently.’
