Ballooning

The first people to fly were not pilots. They were passengers in a basket under a bag of hot air, and they went up over Paris in November 1783 while a crowd watched from below.

The balloon was a French invention. Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, sons of a papermaker, worked out that a bag filled with heated air would rise, and they gave a public demonstration in the summer of 1783. Within months a sheep, a duck and a rooster had made a flight, and then Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes made the first free flight with people aboard. Days later the physicist Jacques Charles flew a balloon filled with hydrogen, which became the standard method for the next century.

The craze spread fast. Paris went balloon mad, and printmakers turned out views of every ascent along with fans, snuffboxes and furniture decorated with balloons. Vincenzo Lunardi made the first flight in England in 1784. In January 1793 Jean-Pierre Blanchard went up from Philadelphia in the first balloon flight in America, with President Washington in the crowd.

Balloons had serious uses as well. During the Civil War, Thaddeus Lowe ran a balloon corps that sent observers aloft to watch Confederate positions. During the siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871, balloons carried mail and passengers out of the surrounded city. Much of the early French material in the Library of Congress came from the collection of the French aeronaut Gaston Tissandier.

Worth noticing in the prints is the crowd. The balloon is the subject, but the artist almost always shows thousands of people watching, in gardens, on rooftops and in the streets. An ascent was a public event, like a fireworks show. Look too at the decoration of the balloons themselves. The early French ones were painted and gilded like court furniture, while the later ones are plain, practical and built for science and weather.