Michael: Alright Kevin, quick question for you. What do you think was the most dangerous job in the 19th century? Kevin: Oh, that’s easy. Gotta be a coal miner, right? Or maybe a sailor on one of those old whaling ships. Constant danger, terrible conditions. Michael: Good guesses. Very reasonable. But I want to propose a write-in candidate: "Official Aeronaut of the Fêtes for Napoleon Bonaparte." Kevin: Wait, what? Official Aeronaut? What does that even mean? Michael: It means your job is to ascend thousands of feet into the Parisian night sky in a silk balloon filled with highly flammable hydrogen gas... while lighting massive firework displays from your wicker basket for the cheering crowds below. Kevin: Come on. That can't be a real job. That’s a suicide mission disguised as a party. Michael: It was very real, and it’s one of the many wild, terrifying, and beautiful stories from Richard Holmes's incredible book, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. This book is a journey into the very first century of flight, when humanity first left the ground. Kevin: Okay, Falling Upwards. I like that title. It’s already messing with my brain. Michael: Exactly. And what’s fascinating is that the author, Richard Holmes, isn't a tech historian or an engineer. He's a celebrated biographer. So the book is less about the mechanics of lift and more about the souls of the people who dared to step into that basket. He was apparently inspired by that classic French film, Le Ballon Rouge—The Red Balloon—which gives you a sense of the wonder and poetry he was aiming for. Kevin: I can see that. So this is a story about the dreamers and the daredevils, not just the invention itself. Michael: Precisely. It’s about the profound, and often paradoxical, experience of leaving the earth behind for the very first time.

Michael: The title, Falling Upwards, perfectly captures the central paradox of ballooning. It’s not like flying in a plane, where you feel propelled forward. In a balloon, you are utterly still. You don't feel the wind because you are moving with it. The world simply... falls away beneath you. It’s a feeling of serene, god-like detachment. Kevin: That sounds almost meditative. A silent ascent. Michael: It is. H.G. Wells described it as a "supreme" experience, something that takes you "extraordinarily out of human things." But that serene beauty was always tethered to mortal danger. And no one embodies that duality more than the woman who held that "most dangerous job," Sophie Blanchard. Kevin: The firework-lighting aeronaut for Napoleon? Michael: The very one. On the ground, Sophie was described as a small, nervous, bird-like woman, easily startled. But once she was in the air, she was transformed. She was fearless, a true superstar of her time. She specialized in night ascents, releasing parachuting animals and setting off spectacular fireworks that would illuminate her balloon against the dark sky. Kevin: Hold on. I have to stop you there. Her job was literally to set off explosives next to a giant, delicate bag of the most flammable gas known to man? For entertainment? Michael: For mass entertainment. Thousands would gather in Paris's Tivoli Gardens to watch her. It was the ultimate spectacle. Kevin: But why would anyone do that? And why on earth would people pay to watch something so obviously perilous? Michael: Because that was the whole point! This was the Romantic era, and they were obsessed with the idea of the "sublime"—an experience that is so beautiful and so vast that it's also terrifying. It’s the feeling of standing on a cliff edge overlooking a stormy sea. Sophie Blanchard’s flights were the sublime in action. And for years, she was a master. Until one night in July 1819. Kevin: Oh no. Michael: She ascended as usual from the Tivoli Gardens. She began her firework display. But a spark from one of her Bengal lights caught on the balloon's rigging. At first, the crowd thought it was part of the show—a new, brilliant effect. But the fire wasn't an effect. It began to eat away at the gas-filled envelope. The balloon, now a silent, falling fireball, descended rapidly. Kevin: That’s horrifying. Michael: It crashed onto the roof of a house on the rue de Provence. Sophie was tangled in the netting. She almost managed to grab onto the parapet, but she slipped. As she fell, the crowd below heard her cry out, not in a scream, but in a clear, calm voice: "A moi!" — "To me!" or "Help me!" She died on the cobblestones below. Kevin: Wow. That's... haunting. Her composure at the very end. It’s like she was still the performer, even in death. Michael: Exactly. Her story is the perfect, if tragic, emblem of that early era. It wasn't about getting from Point A to Point B. It was about the experience itself—the beauty, the terror, the feeling of touching the heavens and risking the fall back to earth.

Kevin: Okay, so it was a dangerous, sublime performance art. I get that. But was it good for anything else? Did it have any practical use, or was it just for daredevils and show-offs? Michael: That’s the exact question people asked at the time. When the Montgolfier brothers first demonstrated their hot air balloon in 1783, someone in the crowd supposedly asked Benjamin Franklin, who was there as the American ambassador, "What is the use of it?" And Franklin gave the perfect reply: "What is the use of a new-born baby?" Kevin: I love that. It has potential, but no one knows what it will become. Michael: Precisely. And that "baby" grew up fast and in some very unexpected directions. The spectacle of ballooning gave way to the science of it. This is where a man named James Glaisher comes in, a meticulous English meteorologist. He realized that no one actually knew what was happening in the upper atmosphere. All our weather was forming up there, but it was a total mystery. Kevin: So he decided to go have a look himself. Michael: He did. Between 1862 and 1866, he made dozens of high-altitude ascents with his pilot, Henry Coxwell. These were not for show. They were floating laboratories. Glaisher had a whole array of instruments—barometers, thermometers, hygrometers—and he was obsessively taking readings. On one flight, they decided to go as high as they possibly could. Kevin: How high are we talking? Michael: They just kept going up. 17,000 feet, the height of Mont Blanc. 29,000 feet, the height of Everest. They kept ascending into the thin, freezing air. Glaisher’s last reading was at an estimated 37,000 feet—nearly seven miles up. He tried to write in his logbook, but his arms were paralyzed. He tried to speak to Coxwell, but his head lolled to one side. He lost consciousness. Kevin: He passed out from lack of oxygen. They were going to die. Michael: They were. Coxwell, the pilot, realized what was happening, but his own hands were black with frostbite and completely useless. He couldn't pull the valve-cord to release gas and start their descent. So, in a final act of desperation, he climbed up the rigging, gripped the cord with his teeth, and yanked his head back again and again until the balloon finally began to fall. They saved themselves, and Glaisher's data from that flight became the foundation for the science of meteorology. Kevin: Wow. So the first weather forecasts were basically born from a man pulling a rope with his teeth seven miles in the sky. That’s incredible. And it wasn't just science, right? The book mentions warfare. Michael: Yes, the balloon’s "angel's eye" view was too tempting for the military to ignore. During the American Civil War, a man named Thaddeus Lowe established the Union Army Balloon Corps. At first, the generals were skeptical. But Lowe proved its worth during the Siege of Yorktown. The Union army was stuck, believing the Confederates were dug in and reinforcing. Kevin: But Lowe saw something different from above? Michael: He saw that while some wagons were coming into the Confederate lines, many more heavily-laden wagons were secretly leaving at night. From the ground, it looked like business as usual. From the sky, it was a clear pattern. He reported that the Confederates were evacuating. The Union army advanced and caught the retreating forces, winning a major strategic victory. Kevin: So this is the birth of aerial reconnaissance. It's funny, we think of that as a modern drone thing, but they were doing it with wicker baskets and telescopes 150 years ago. Michael: They were. And the psychological impact was huge. One Confederate soldier wrote that the Union balloon hovering over their lines "excited us more than all the outpost attacks." Another source compared it to "a hawk hovering above a chicken yard." It was this all-seeing, silent eye in the sky. Kevin: But how effective could it really be? Weren't they just a giant, slow-moving target? Michael: Absolutely. They were incredibly vulnerable to wind, weather, and enemy fire. There were many failed attempts and mishaps. But when it worked, it provided intelligence that was simply impossible to get any other way. That "useless new-born baby" was now changing the course of battles and helping predict the weather.

Michael: But even with these practical uses in science and war, the true soul of ballooning was always about grand, impossible dreams. This led to the final, spectacular era of the great showmen. Kevin: People who wanted to push it even further. Michael: To the absolute limit. And no one personifies this more than the French photographer, writer, and all-around 19th-century influencer, Félix Nadar. Kevin: An influencer? In the 1860s? Michael: Absolutely. He was a master of publicity and self-promotion. And he decided to build the biggest balloon the world had ever seen. He called it, simply, Le Géant—The Giant. This thing was colossal. It was over 13 stories high and had a two-story wicker gondola complete with a darkroom, a refreshment bar, and even a toilet. Kevin: A two-story wicker basket? That's not a balloon, that's a floating apartment building. What was the point? Michael: The point was spectacle. Nadar wasn't trying to create a practical mode of transport. He was creating a media event to fund his real passion: developing heavier-than-air flight. Le Géant was a massive, glorious publicity stunt. And its second flight became one of the most legendary disasters in aviation history. Kevin: Let me guess, it didn't go as planned. Michael: It launched from Paris with great fanfare, but a storm blew it off course. They ended up over Germany, losing gas and descending too fast. The anchor didn't hold. For nine miles, the balloon was dragged across the landscape at the speed of a galloping horse. The two-story wicker basket smashed through trees, bounced off fields, and was torn to shreds. At one point, they were hurtling directly towards a set of railway tracks as an express train was approaching. Kevin: You're kidding me. Michael: They narrowly missed it. The balloon finally came to a halt when it crashed into a forest, utterly destroying the gondola and injuring everyone on board, including Nadar and his wife. Kevin: So he crashes this thing, nearly dies, and his first thought is... 'This is great for my brand'? Michael: That is almost exactly what happened! The story of the crash was an international sensation. And Nadar, the genius showman, used that fame not to promote more giant balloons, but to argue that the crash proved the inherent flaw of ballooning: you can't steer it. He wrote a book called The Right to Flight and argued that the future wasn't in these "unguidable" gasbags, but in powered, heavier-than-air machines. Kevin: So the biggest balloon failure in history was used to launch the age of the airplane. Michael: In a way, yes. He even got the most famous writer in the world at the time, Victor Hugo, to write a public letter in support of his cause. Hugo wrote this powerful, poetic manifesto calling for an end to the "ancient, universal tyranny of gravity." It was the perfect, dramatic end to the balloon's golden age. The dream had gotten so big it had to burst, making way for a new one.

Michael: When you look back on it all, from Sophie Blanchard's fireworks to Nadar's crashing giant, the balloon's greatest legacy wasn't really as a machine. It was as a change in perspective. Kevin: It literally gave us a new point of view. Michael: A completely new one. For the first time in history, we could see the world as the birds see it. We could see the whole of London, as one writer put it, "dwindled into a mere rubbish heap." Another aeronaut, Benjamin Haydon, wrote in 1825, "No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species, unless he has been up in an air-balloon." Kevin: That’s a humbling thought. It’s not about feeling powerful and god-like, but about realizing how small you are. Michael: It’s both. That’s the paradox. You feel this incredible freedom, this sense of floating above it all, but it simultaneously shows you the immense scale of the world and your tiny place within it. The balloon untethered us from the ground, but more importantly, it untethered the human imagination. It proved the sky wasn't a limit, but a new frontier to be explored. Kevin: It really makes you wonder what our modern 'balloons' are—the technologies that seem like pure spectacle or novelties right now, but are fundamentally changing how we see ourselves and our place in the universe. Is it AI? Is it virtual reality? Michael: That's the perfect question to end on. What technologies today are giving us that feeling of "falling upwards"—of surrendering to something new and seeing the world, and ourselves, in a completely different light? Kevin: A lot to think about. A fantastic journey through a forgotten age of wonder and terror. Michael: We'd love to hear what you think our modern-day balloons are. Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the Aibrary community.