For some six months in 1783 Paris was the Cape Canaveral of the eighteenth century as Parisians watched a succession of extraordinary ascents by hot-air balloons. The first successful manned trip took place on 21 November, as reported by Benjamin Franklin, and it started off a long series of speculations about the conquest of the air. Thomas Jefferson was certain that balloon Transportation would lead to the discovery of the north pole "which is but one day's journey in a balloon, from where the ice has hitherto stopped adventurers". Franklin was certain that the new balloons would revolutionize warfare; and L S Mercier added a new chapter to the 1786 edition of his L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; rev 1786; trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772) to show how the "aerostats" were destined to link remote Pekin to Paris in a system of world communications. When the inhabitants of major European cities watched the new balloons drifting above, they thought they saw the beginning of a profound change in human affairs: the assurance of a growing mastery of Nature.
Even before successful manned flights the principles of balloon-flight (something that had been understood since ancient China) were being extrapolated by Proto SF writers: for instance in Die geschwinde Reise auf dem Luft-Schiff nach der Oberen Welt, welche jüngsthin fünf Personen angestellt ["The rapid journey by airship to the upper world, recently taken by five people"] (1744) by Eberhard Christian Kindermann (? -? ), which details a journey to Mars by balloon. In England the vogue for balloon-related tales was in the 1780s and 1790s, with a great many titles published, often anonymously, with such titles as A Journey Lately Performed Through the Air in an Aerostatic Globe (1784) – in which a character flies by balloon all the way to Uranus ("the lately discovered planet Georgium Sidus" as it was then known) – and A Voyage to the Moon, Strongly Recommended to All Lovers of Real Freedom (1793).
For a brief period there were plays, poems and stories about balloon travel – even a space operetta, Die Luftschiffer, performed before Catherine II in the Imperial Court Theatre at St Petersburg. Expectations about the future carried over into occasional stories like The Balloon, or Aerostatic Spy (1786), published anon, the first of the round-the-world stories that ran their course up to Jules Verne's Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; trans as Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869). The balloon proved a most useful marker of the future (as the Rocket was to do in a later period), and was used by early sf writers as a convincing way of establishing the more advanced circumstances of their future worlds. Balloons were also the source of the first visual fantasies of the future: there were engravings of balloon battles, vast transport balloons crossing the Atlantic and airborne troops crossing the Channel. By the 1870s, however, experiments with heavier-than-air flying machines had turned popular attention towards Airships and aircraft of the future.
This was not the end of balloons in sf; in romanticized form, they appear in John Brosnan's The Sky Lords (1988), C C MacApp's Prisoners of the Sky (1969), Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts (1986), and elsewhere. They also became – though to a lesser extent than various forms of retro airship – recurring props in Steampunk scenarios, as demonstrated in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (anth 2004) edited by Jay Lake and David {MOLES}. [IFC/AR]
further reading
- Paul Keen. "The 'Balloonomania': Science and Spectacle in 1780s England" (Summer 2006 Eighteenth-Century Studies) [mag/]
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