Balloons

This board holds the pictures gathered for Balloons, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Long before the airplane, the balloon was how people first left the ground, and it caused a sensation everywhere it went.

The first balloon flights carrying people took place in France in 1783. The Montgolfier brothers, paper makers by trade, built a hot-air balloon of cloth and paper, and within weeks other inventors were flying balloons filled with hydrogen. Crowds of thousands came to watch. Prints of these early ascents were sold all over Europe, and the balloon became a fashion, appearing on fans, plates and furniture.

The first balloon flight in America was made by the French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who rose from Philadelphia in January 1793 and landed in New Jersey. President George Washington was in the crowd and gave Blanchard a letter asking anyone he met to help him on his way.

Balloons soon found practical uses. During the Civil War, Thaddeus Lowe led a Union Army balloon corps that sent observers aloft to watch Confederate positions and report by telegraph. During the siege of Paris in 1870, balloons carried mail and passengers out of the surrounded city. For the rest of the century, balloon ascensions were a favorite attraction at fairs and celebrations, often with a parachute jump to finish the show.

The pictures in this collection range from early engravings of the French flights to photographs of Civil War balloons being inflated in the field and crowds gathered around a balloon on fair day. Look at the scale. Many of these balloons were enormous, and the people beside them look tiny. Look also at the baskets, which were often barely big enough to stand in. Every one of these flights was a gamble with the weather.