In August 1869, the French chemist Gaston Tissandier was on a family holiday in Calais when he saw a poster advertising a balloon launch from the central square. He talked his way onto the voyage, bought a life vest from the Calais Humane Society, and rose 4,000 feet in a single bound in the Neptune — the storm that had already flung a trial balloon out over the North Sea notwithstanding. The Public Domain Review’s collection draws on Travels in the Air, the 1871 anthology edited by James Glaisher, with accounts by Tissandier, Camille Flammarion and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. What unites them, as Kevin Dann writes in the introduction, is the absolute novelty of the endeavor — and the fact that every flight is governed by chance, contingency and caprice rather than command.

  • Above Calais, Tissandier watched a mirage of the Calais–Dover ferries and other ships cast onto a cloud; the pilot read the cumulus layer two thousand feet below, dropped sand ballast, and steered them back over the jetty, where Tissandier’s younger brother Albert was waving
  • The descent at dusk smashed balloon and basket into a dune, scattering sheep and shepherds — a few hundred yards from the tomb of Pilâtre de Rozier, the first human to leave the earth in a Montgolfier in 1783, and humanity’s first air-crash victim two years later
  • The carnivalesque keeps breaking in: spiders and butterflies met a mile above ground, a customs officer demanding passports on suspicion of coastal smuggling, and the discovery that chicken bones tossed from lunch lift the balloon as surely as a dropped sandbag
  • Plate captions double as a catalogue of what aeronauts could see: “Mr. Glaisher insensible at the height of seven miles,” “A thunder-storm above Fontainebleau as seen from the balloon,” “Absolute silence reigns supreme in all its sad majesty,” “Falling stars as observed from the balloon”

Glaisher’s sober scientific reports sit alongside the French contributors’ unbridled Romanticism, and both registers survived into the book’s second edition — which exists because of a war. Napoleon III declared war on Prussia while Glaisher was preparing the London volume. Paris was besieged from mid-September 1870, and the first edition’s closing appeal for tethered “captive” balloons for science was answered only through France’s misfortune: for four months balloons were the besieged city’s sole link to the rest of the nation.

Sixty-seven manned flights carried military dispatches and letters out of Paris, and ferried homing pigeons that flew back in with microfilm messages. An invention universally derided as good for nothing had, overnight, become both practical and patriotic — Montgolfier’s century-old caprice recast as the technology that changed the conditions of modern warfare. The revised American edition, with half a dozen of Albert Tissandier’s chromolithographs, opens with Glaisher’s admission of exactly that. The whole book is free to read and download from the Internet Archive.