Creation Date
14 January 1784
Medium
Genre
Description
This image highlights the efforts of early experimenters to find ways to develop balloons that could be steered through the air as part of a concerted effort to demonstrate the usefulness of balloons. It offered readers a glimpse of new ideas about balloon navigation using a rudder and paddle-wheels.
This image, like Cavallo’s image of the process for inflating hot air balloons, was a popular element of accounts of balloon in late eighteenth-century print culture. Its focus on the means by which balloons might be steered responded to one of the leading objections to the balloonomania: the question of how they could possibly be of any use, given that they were at the mercy of the winds once they ascended. Cavallo’s The History and Practice of Aerostation (1785) confidently suggested that aerial navigation, “far from being complicated or troublesome, is perhaps as simple as might have been wished by the warmest imagination; and so easy for the aeronaut, that he has absolutely much less trouble with the machine, than a sailor with a ship in the most favourable circumstances.” Anticipating the objection that “those machines cannot be guided against the wind, or in every direction at pleasure,” Cavallo offered the parallel of sailing vessels’ ability to steer upwind."
The fascination with ballooning had been triggered by the efforts of the Montgolfier brothers in France. In June 1783, they bhad launched the first ever flight, carrying a sheep, a cock, and a duck, in front of 60,000 spectators and the Royal Family. On October 15, 1783, they launched the first ever human flight, this time in front of 100, 000 spectators and the Royal family. Numerous flights soon followed, both in France, England, and elsewhere.
Early aeronauts tried to respond to this challenge in two ways. On the one hand, many early balloons included a rudder and oars (much wider than the oars used in boats today) intended to enable the aeronaut to steer the balloon through the skies. On the other hand, anticipating the aircraft design that would one day follow, some participants in these debates argued that the balloons (and the baskets underneath them) should be shaped in an oblong manner, like a fish or (as one publication suggested) a bird. The image shown here retains the standard shape of the balloon but includes both a rudder and the equivalent of paddlewheels, which could be operated from the carriage.
Some critics, anticipating similar debates today, rejected the idea that ballooning must be proven to be useful in any sort of practical way. “What is the use of a new-born child,” Benjamin Franklin famously responded when asked about ballooning’s utility. It was enough, they insisted, that it be embraced as an exciting example of the fruits of curiosity-driven research without demanding that it be translated into applied knowledge. But for those who felt the need to respond to this challenge to demonstrate ballooning’s usefulness, devices for steering them remained a crucial and intriguing element of the technological challenge.
Locations Description
The Montgolfiers launched their first balloons at Varsailles; Vincento Lunardi ascended from London. By its nature, however, balloon flights soon proliferated across both countries, as well as much of Europe and America.
Additional Information
Bibliography
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