All Hot Air... Some Very Artistic Balloons

All Hot Air… Some Very Artistic Balloons

The French are still at it, well after the Montgolfier brothers!

Hot Air Balloon Brooch, by Fred Joaillier

This deliciously silly brooch in the shape of a hot-air balloon was on the Live Auctioneers website in January 2019 (from Hampton Estate Auction). You could have had it for an estimated $US900 - $US1,500:

Fred Paris 18k Gold Diamond Enamel Hot Air Balloon

METAL: 18k Gold. MEASUREMENTS: Brooch is 40mm x 26mm. GEMSTONES: Diamonds approx. 0.30ctw, pink tourmaline. MARKED: French gold hallmarks, on heart and brooch stem, FRED. WEIGHT: 17.2 grams.

https://hamptonauction.com/192/155/Fred_Paris_18k_Gold_Diamond_Enamel_Hot_Air_Balloon_Brooch_

Hot-air balloons have a long and very honourable history in France: the French invented them.

“Look!” cried Joseph-Michel as his wife’s chemise, hanging to dry in the fireplace, billowed out, filled with hot air from the fire. “That’ll work better than this new hydrogen gas stuff!”

Well, that’s (more or less) one story. The French Wikipédia is more temperate about it. (“Frères Montgolfier”, Wikipédia).

    Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740-1810) and his brother Jacques-Étienne (1745-1799) came from a family of paper manufacturers in the town of Annonay, France.

    The Montgolfier brothers’ first successful experiments with hot air balloon flight were with unmanned balloons in the 1780s. They got support and funding, and moved from their provincial town to Paris, where with the help of a friend and business colleague, a M. Réveillon who owned a paper-making business, they began constructing better balloons, using his workshop facilities and his yard. The balloons—they had to build more than one—were made primarily of cotton cloth stiffened inside and out with paper. The aim was for a human being to fly.

Duck! Lucy in the sky with… A chook, a sheep and a duck?

Yep, that’s what they sent up at Versailles in front of the king! Legend has it that the poor duck’s beak was crushed when the sheep rolled on it, but otherwise, all came off unscathed. The date was 19th September 1783 (and if you’re thinking maybe Louis XVI should have hopped aboard and escaped while the going was good, you’re not wrong). It was a free flight—that is, with the balloon not tied down—and went up about 500 metres and did about 3 1/2 kilometres in 8 minutes.

    It must have been thrilling at the time, to see the brightly coloured shape sail away into the blue… No, sorry, I can’t stop sniggering. It’s the combo of domestic flesh and fowl!

    Seriously, the Montgolfier brothers had proved beyond doubt that their balloon could lift a considerable weight and that living beings could survive flight—still questioned at this period. Well, remember it was a time before steam trains had even been invented, let alone the motor car. When you think about it it’s extraordinary, really, that humans achieved flight before they’d even travelled as much as twenty miles an hour on the ground.

    —You’ll be really glad to know that the right royal sheep went to the royal menagerie for the rest of its days. History doesn’t record what became of the rooster and the duck.

At the end of his tether… Étienne works his fingers to the bone; Pilâtre de Rozier takes to the skies

As you can imagine, the very lightweight balloons constructed by the Montgolfier brothers were quite fragile, and so successive flights saw the frantic construction of new balloons in M. Réveillon’s yard in what is now the Rue de Montreuil in Paris.

    There’s a lot of work in making a balloon—and it would all have had to be done by hand, of course. You’ll find a fascinating series of carefully drawn contemporary depictions of the process under “Histoire de l'aérostation”, Wikipédia. A huge space was needed, because there had to be room for the balloon to be inflated: it’s like a gigantic barn.

    Unlike our modern hot-air balloons, the new balloon Étienne Montgolfier designed to lift a human being into the air was more egg-shaped—well, a bit pointy-pointy:

    The balloon was first trialled successfully for manned uplift while tethered by very long ropes. This was in Paris during October 1783, with Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier aboard. He was a French scientist who, after a rocky start as a rebellious student, had done really well for himself in Paris, under the protection of various extremely eminent persons including the “Monsieur” of the day (the King’s brother) and, er, the widow of another important person… (“Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier”, Wikipédia).

    Pilâtre de Rozier has the distinction of being the first human to mount into the air.

Where no man has gone before… The King loses his nerve; the intrepid balloonists hold firm

The new balloon design was again trialled successfully, tethered, with two men aboard.

    But they hadn’t yet taken off. They wanted the King’s permission to risk human lives, but Louis XVI lost his nerve and tried to insist that the first men to float free in the sky had to be a couple of condemned criminals. No way! Keen as mustard, Pilâtre de Rozier and a new volunteer, the Marquis d’Arlandes, put themselves forward. The Marquis had been obsessed with the air and flight since his youth—he’d nearly killed himself trying a parachute jump off a tower—and he’d known Joseph Montgolfier for a while, and was a fervent supporter. Reading between the lines, he must have been an adrenalin junkie. (“François Laurent d’Arlandes”, Wikipédia)

    Louis XVI gave in. (The whole story is throwing a horrid light on his character, yes: little wonder that the country pretty soon got rid of him; the words “spineless” and “shilly-shallying” do come to mind, at this juncture.)

Take-off! One giant step for mankind! Et vivent les Français!

Hurray! They’ve done it! The first free flight with human beings aboard, in the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon, le Réveillon!

    Nice, isn’t it, that they named their balloon after their friend and supporter? As the word “réveillon” can also mean “awakening”—it’s the modern word for the New Year, “faire réveillon” meaning to see the New Year in—it was more than appropriate for this huge scientific achievement.

    The great excitement of free flight came on 21st November 1783. Those aboard were, of course, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes. They took off at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and floated across Paris, reaching a height of 1,000 metres above the Jardin des Tuileries, right in the centre of the city on the Right Bank of the Seine, with the Place de la Concorde (then called the Place Louis XV) at one end of it and the Louvre palace at the other.

    Losing height, they eventually came to earth in the 13th arrondissement, over on the Left Bank of the Seine, in what today is the Place Paul-Verlaine. They’d travelled 9 kilometres in 25 minutes. Totally astounding, in an age when no-one had gone faster than a horse could gallop.

    Of the many surviving depictions of the Montgolfier brothers’ successful experiments with flight, this one, held by the Library of Congress, is the most informative, though not the prettiest.

Balloon fever spreads… The crowds go wild; Balloons sprout like mushrooms

“The invention of the balloon struck the men and women of the late 18th century like a thunderbolt. Enormous crowds gathered in Paris to watch one balloon after another rise above the city rooftops, carrying the first human beings into the air in the closing months of 1783.The excitement quickly spread to other European cities where the first generation of aeronauts demonstrated the wonder of flight. Everywhere the reaction was the same. In an age when men and women could fly, what other wonders might they achieve.

    “‘Among all our circle of friends,’ one observer noted, ‘at all our meals, in the antechambers of our lovely women, as in the academic schools, all one hears is talk of experiments, atmospheric air, inflammable gas, flying cars, journeys in the sky.’ Single sheet prints illustrating the great events and personalities in the early history of ballooning were produced and sold across Europe. The balloon sparked new fashion trends and inspired new fads and products. Hair and clothing styles, jewelry, snuffboxes, wallpaper, chandeliers, bird cages, fans, clocks, chairs, armoires, hats, and other items, were designed with balloon motifs.”

(Tom D. Crouch, Senior Curator, Aeronautics, National Air and Space Museum),

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/montgolfiers-balloon-presence-king-and-queen

“Up, up and awa-ay, in my beautiful balloon…” Woo your lady with a balloon? Pourquoi pas?

This picture shows just one example of the way balloon fever cropped up in all sorts of contexts. The writing on the pieces of paper fluttering from the gentleman’s hand reads: “Rapport sur le premier voyage aërien du Citoyen Garnerin avec la Citoyenne Henri.” (Report on the first aerial journey of Mr Garnerin with Mrs Henri.) André-Jacques Garnerin (1769-1823) was another early French balloon enthusiast, who was also a parachute designer. He was interested in both gas-filled and hot-air balloons and made several notable long-range trips in a Montgolfier-style balloon in the early 1800s, travelling 300K in 1803 during a trip in Russia, and 395K in 1807 from Paris to Germany. His wife was also a keen balloonist.

    The lady accompanying M. Garnerin in the picture is not, however, his wife, but has been identified as Célestine Henri. Their aerial voyage took place on 10th July 1798, taking off from the Parc Monceau in Paris. (“Célestine Henri”, Wikipédia.) History doesn’t record how he knew her or why she was chosen for the ascent.

    She wasn’t the first woman in a balloon, though sometimes credited as such: the honour goes to Élisabeth Tible (sometimes Thible), who went up with a balloonist in Lyon on 4 June 1784. (“Élisabeth Tible”, Wikipédia.)

Spreading over the Channel… And into the wild blue yonder

Once the Montgolfier brothers had shown the way, there was no stopping the eager balloonists of the late 18th century. Contemporary pictures record flights in Germany, Austria, Spain, England and even in America!

    On 7 January 1785, only just over a year after the first free flight, the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809) accompanied by a keen American, a Dr John Jeffries, achieved the further astounding feat of crossing the English Channel in his gas balloon.

    Blanchard toured widely giving ballooning demonstrations, eventually going all the way to America, where he flew on 9 January 1793 before President George Washington and the future presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. (“Jean-Pierre Blanchard”, Wikipédia.)

Cross-Channel balloon fever continues… Sadler rises into the air; the crowds go wild; the University doesn’t want to know

The charming picture below by Robert Havell showing a balloon flight by James Sadler is only one of the many English depictions of ballooning, as balloon fever took over there, too.

“Balloon fever had struck England … in 1784 when Sadler had become the first ever Englishman to fly. Back then, his hot air balloon drifted off from the vast fields by Merton College, Oxford, early on 4 October and rose about 3,600 ft... Sadler had been warned he might collide with Heaven, and that sky dragons might come and attack him.” (Linda Serck. “James Sadler: The Oxford balloon man history forgot”. BBC News, 12 July 2014.)

    This article makes it clear that James Sadler (1753-1828), an uneducated man who started off in life as a pastry cook, was a brilliant natural scientist. His achievements, beside constructing his own hot air balloon from scratch, included the patenting of a rotary steam engine, the improvement of naval cannons and rifles, patenting of a double-cylinder engine, erecting the Admiralty’s first steam engine at Portsmouth, and, amazing at a time when the gas hadn’t even been named, making hydrogen gas.

    Linda Serck notes that:

 “Oxford University’s newspaper however marked his death with one sentence: ‘Mr James Sadler, elder brother of Mr Sadler of Rose Hill, Oxford, has died.’ This is remarkable considering his scientific discoveries in other fields, such as cannon design, for which he was praised by none other than Lord Nelson.” (Ibid.)

    Sadler worked out that the naval guns were missing their targets by over 5 feet (one and a half metres), and optimised efficiency and accuracy by changing the smelting process, the length of the barrel and the size and weight of the shot.

Still rising… The French remember; the English forget; the balloonists carry on regardless

Well, sucks to the toffee-nosed gits who infested Oxford University in poor Mr Sadler’s time. How come the French celebrated and still celebrate their ballooning heroes while the English forget them?

    However, even in the 21st century enthusiasts are still ballooning—and artists are still recording the wonder of balloons for posterity! The two pictures below were on the  Live Auctioneers website in January 2019. Apologies to the artists, who weren’t credited.