Balloonomania Part I: Putting the mania in, well, balloonomania
A collection of my balloonomania posts got more notes than I expected them to (see: more than, like, 10) and a fair few tags of people saying they wanted to hear more.
I can’t deny people who want to hear about balloons anything, so I thought I wanted to do a little series for whenever I maybe have an hour and don’t want to Draw. (This is a long post but I promise there's a dirty balloon joke at the end if that's what you're into).
Why do I care about the early days of ballooning so much?
Well, one thing about me, is I’m a little guy who LOVES when history is silly. And hot air balloon history is extremely silly.
This was a time of SO much fuss. Here are some highlights
Humans took to the skies powered by the smell of burning old shoes and rotten meat.
The Montgolfier brothers launched the first ever hot air balloon in 1783 (in front of an audience at least). It worked very well all things considered, but it’s worth nothing that the Montgolfier brothers were the sons of an affluent paper-maker, NOT scientists. They had figured out that hot air had the capacity for lifting pieces of paper and cloth, but not actually why. What they thought was going on was that a particularly thick and solid smoke was able to induce the lift-off they needed.
So they ‘invented’ what they named ‘Montgolfier gas’, a particularly vile recipe for thick black smoke. Burn some wet straw, old shoes and spoiled meat and bob’s your uncle. Take-off!
(Hydrogen had been discovered like 20 years prior and other actual scientists basically immediately starting implementing hydrogen in their balloons, but the first launches? Stinky)
Hot air balloons were all the rage, right away
It’s hard to understate the absolute strangle-hold hot air balloons had on particularly France and England very early on. Sept. 19, 1783, the brothers launched their famous ‘manned’ hot air balloon (the passengers were a sheep, a duck and a rooster, who, yes, were all fine in the end) to an audience of yes, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and a whopping 130.000 spectators.
When Vincenzo Lunardi (gentleman, heartbreaker, lover of cats) launched his first balloon on british soil in 1784, it was to an audience of 150.000 people. Again, this was in the late 1700’s. An estimated 1 million people lived in London at the time. Not all balloon launches in the coming years would have such wild accumulations of crowd come witness them, but they were often times still very big, very anticipated events.
Anywhere you look? BALLOONS
Contemporary accounts describe it as the balloon madness. The frenzy. The rage.
And aside from the staggering number of people willing to stand around and watch a balloon take off (or fail to) I think a lot of these adjectives are the result of an interesting overlap between an early culture of consumerism and Balloonomania.
Not only was being a balloonist an entire business model. Charging subscriptions for people to come see your launches, branding yourself as a rockstar personality (again, VIncenzo Lunardi would have women come up to him and tell him they had written his names on their garters) - there was also balloon merch. Fucking. Everywhere.
Balloon images were appearing on almanacs, on waistcoats, in bonnets, in sleeves and in hairstyles. Dishes were being named after balloonists as well as aerial concepts .
And if you were bored of buying physical things? Hey, you could sing one of the songs about balloons. Or read a poem about balloons (for all the goths out there Percy Shelley wrote at least one poem about balloons). Or why not pick up a book heavily featuring balloons as a plotpoint. Or go to the theatre! Where they will awkwardly incorporate balloons into their plays, just to draw in an audience. One play even marketed themselves as having a real inflated balloon on stage. Of course, this particular play was canceled on opening night due to it’s ‘offensive and dangerous nature’, turns out having an open fire burning consistently in a small, crowded room is a bad idea (especially if that fire was made according to the recipe of Montgolfier gas).
And of course… the riots.
The problem with the fact that if a balloon launch didn’t take off successfully, it would often-time instigate a riot is that I don’t have time to get into the details of all the many, many balloon launch riots. This will require an entire post onto itself, honestly. So sit tight - but the balloon riots were real, and not a one-off events.
The funniest and silliest thing about balloons (and gods, there are so many to choose from) is the way they were actually pretty useless.
So much of Europe was daydreaming about how balloons would revolutionise travel, military and social life. Girls would be able to sneak out of their houses to MAKE OUT WITH BOYS. Boys would be able to sneak into girls houses to MAKE OUT WITH GIRLS. You would need to instate balloon police to catch all the robbers fleeing in their balloons! Balloons would make the basis of crafts taking scientists to the most remote corners of the earth, and armies would be able to flood cities over night.
Well, you might have noticed, this world was never one we got to live in. Most of all because balloons are so incredibly difficult to steer, even today.To the extent that when they first invented a balloon you could navigate with, they literally named it ‘balloon we can actually navigate with’ (dirigible balloon). How do you sneak out for your hot make out session with your boy if even just having the balloon take off isn’t a given, let alone directing its path?
So for a couple of very interesting years, the people of northern europe were gripped in the balloon frenzy, but what balloons really did was spark imagination. Human flight was possible! What on earth could be next?
Anyway, as a treat for making it all this way down, here's a drawing of Vincenzo Lunardi looking exactly like the kind of 18th century heartthrob that would make people write his name on their underwear
And here's a contemporary drawing aimed at him which is, yes, a dick joke
