The Montgolfier Brothers and Their Wonderful Balloon

I don’t know how the Montgolfier Brothers have so long escaped popular notice in the United States. Naturally, we celebrate the Wright Brothers, our own homegrown aeronautical innovators, but it’s not just jingoism for we also give plenty of attention to the Lumière Brothers, French pioneers of cinema. I hereby assert that we ought to pay as much or more homage to the Montgolfiers, who gave birth to the first manned aeronautical flight as early as 1783! They gave us that most romantic of flying conveyances the hot air balloon.

Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740 – 1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745 – 1799) were members of a prosperous paper-making family. As the 12th and 15th of 16th siblings, they no doubt had a bit more freedom than their oldest siblings, with time to explore and experiment. Less interested in business, they were clearly interested in the materials of the family trade. As early as 1775 they were experimenting with parachutes. And — can you imagine — as early as 1783, the first public demonstration of a working hot air balloon! People have been able to fly for 240 years! Granted, only with the arrival of the airplane has manned flight been fast, reliable, and reasonably controllable by the pilot. Balloons are hard to steer, easily affected by weather, and are fatally vulnerable to malfunction. If your plane engine conks out, a skilled pilot has a prayer at least of affecting a safe if bumpy landing. If a balloon loses its gas, it falls straight to earth.

Thus Montgolfier balloons never became a mass transportation medium like airplanes or even blimps or dirigibles. They were used in battle as lookout platforms, employed as meteorological tools (in fact, still are), and were also brought into the service of amusement at amusement parks, carnivals, and fairs. And of course they gave us wonderful fictional moments in The Wizard of Oz, Around the World in 80 Days, and Buster Keaton’s The Balloonatic. And of course, Edgar Allan Poe’s Balloon Hoax, and the daredeviltry of Nellie Bly and Professor Washington H. Donaldson. Going up one of those things is very high on my bucket list!

More tribute to hot air balloons here!

For more whimsical amusement history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,