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In August 1869, French chemist Gaston Tissandier was on holiday in Calais with his family. He spotted a poster advertising a balloon launch and talked his way onto the flight, despite nightmares about bursting balloons and his family's pleas not to go. A storm was battering the coast. At dawn, Tissandier arrived wearing life vests bought from the Calais Humane Society. A small test balloon crashed into a bell tower and was blown out to sea, yet the crew of the Neptune climbed into their wicker basket. A military band played, and the balloon shot 4,000 feet into the air.
From that height, the crowd on shore looked like ants. Tissandier saw a strange mirage of the Calais-Dover ferry projected onto a cloud. He grew nervous when he realized they were drifting over the open ocean, not toward England. At 5,200 feet, the pilot noticed clouds below them moving southwest, back toward Calais. After dropping sand ballast, they floated over the Calais jetty, where Tissandier saw his younger brother Albert waving from below.
The balloon traveled west along the French coast until nightfall. The crew threw out an anchor when they spotted a lighthouse, crashing into a sand dune and scattering a flock of sheep. The lighthouse keeper informed them they had landed just a few hundred yards from the tomb of Pilâtre de Rozier. Rozier was the first human to fly in a hot-air balloon in 1783; he also became the first aviation fatality in 1785 when he crashed in those same dunes.
The book Travels in the Air collects stories like this one. Edited by the British scientist James Glaisher, the volume mixes Glaisher's sober scientific reports with more dramatic tales from French balloonists like Tissandier, Camille Flammarion, and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. All the accounts share a sense of adventure, chance, and danger.
These early balloon flights offered a completely new view of the world. Aeronauts reported seeing spiders and butterflies flying a mile above the ground. They encountered curious officials who demanded to see their passports. They learned that throwing chicken bones overboard could make the balloon rise as effectively as dropping heavy sandbags. Upon landing, they were often greeted with the cheerful cry, "Come down! Come down! Dinner is waiting for you!"
Glaisher was preparing the first edition of Travels in the Air in London in 1870. That summer, France declared war on Prussia, and the Prussian army quickly surrounded Paris in a siege. Glaisher's first edition ended with a call for more scientific use of tethered, or "captive," balloons.
A revised American edition was published in 1871. In it, Glaisher noted that his wish had been granted in a tragic way. During the four-month siege of Paris, balloons became the city's only link to the outside world. The French used 67 manned balloon flights to carry military messages and letters out of the surrounded city. They also sent homing pigeons out by balloon; later, those pigeons returned to Paris carrying tiny photographic film messages.
Before the siege, many people thought balloons were useless novelties. The successful airmail operation changed that view completely, showing that balloon technology, nearly a century old, could be practical and even patriotic in a time of war.