The Lost History of the Lady Aeronauts

Sharon Wright

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781399005395
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From have-a-go Georgians to emancipated Edwardians, the lady aeronauts were actresses, writers, heiresses, scientists, engineers, explorers, showgirls and suffragettes. These unsung trailblazers for female freedom enjoyed lives shot through with sheer courage and joie de vivre. Yet they were all but forgotten. Hold on tight for a white-knuckle balloon ride through their remarkable real life stories… Praise for Sharon Wright! - "Sharon Wright tells a fabulous tale, and has uncovered some terrific stories of long forgotten heroines of the air. Some stories are comic, many are tragic, many are a bit of both, and she tells it brilliantly." Bristol Post "A simply brilliant history that rescues from undeserved obscurity a roster of pioneering women in the very beginning of the age of aviation … an inherently fascinating and impressively informative read from cover to cover." Midwest Book Review "You couldn’t want for a better antidote to pinkness than these tales of girls and women unleashing their pluck and inventiveness in the unregulated age of balloonomania… This is history at its most satisfying." Damesnet "You don't need to be interested in ballooning or anything to enjoy this book - it is just a thoroughly entertaining read from a really good writer." Amazon review "History has never been so much fun!" What’sHerName podcast

Chapter 1

Wonder Women

In 1783 the balloon went up in more ways than one. Radical thinking swept across Europe and America, the spirit of change churning the air of politics, philosophy, fashion and art. The months were so stuffed with marvels they became known as an annus mirabilis, year of wonders. A giant comet cut a fiery path across the heavens and epic volcanic eruptions in Iceland sent sulphur pouring into the jet stream to cause weather chaos. Events in the sky above Enlightenment Europe were as dramatic as those on the earth when most wonderful of all, humans learned how to fly. A beautiful balloon hung in the French sky at Versailles above an astounded crowd of Parisians. As brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier unlocked the secret of soaring above the earth, the watching women, from Queen Marie Antoinette down, shared a single thought: the eighteenth century equivalent of ‘what’s not to love?’

Balloonomania was unleashed, spreading like wildfire through France, then all Europe and quickly on to America. Commentators also called it balloon mania and when it proved so infectious, balloon influenza. It was a ‘craze’, a ‘rage’ and all so maddeningly thrilling it held European and American society in thrall. From the earliest days, women were in on the act. The first female aeronauts were flamboyant, fashionable or just plain fearless as they embraced ballooning and all it promised. The craze swept the world and its pioneering women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, evolving into a fabulous story of female flight that stretched across 120 years before the first aeroplane left the ground.

Balloon legend puts women at the very dawn of ballooning. One theory is that Joseph Montgolfier saw a washerwoman place a petticoat on a wicker frame to dry over a stove and it began to rise. Another has the unmentionables of Madame Montgolfier drying as her inventive husband became fascinated by how smoke drifted upwards to lift a chemise. As he and Étienne puzzled over how to prevent a smoke-filled paper bag from leaking, did the widow next door poke her head through the window to suggest they tie the bottom? The story was good enough for Victorian balloonist Gertrude Bacon but whatever their real role at the birth of ballooning, women were at the heart of everything that followed. Down on the ground they were trapped in subordinate roles imposed by the law and rules of society. Up in the sky they were free.

The mania for balloons happened very quickly. A string of historic breakthroughs came thick and fast over just six months in the year of wonders. The Montgolfiers fired the starting pistol in the south of France where they lived. Scientists by inclination, they were paper manufacturers by profession. The family had made paper for generations and in 1783 they were suppliers to the king, Louis XVI. Two brothers among sixteen siblings, unkempt Joseph was a drifter and a dreamer who once ran away from the family trade, while Étienne trained as an architect and had a good head for business. They had nothing in common until they invented the balloon.

They unveiled the floating linen bag, fastened by buttons and lined with paper, in Annonay on 5 June 1783, three months before they risked it in front of royalty. Eight sweating men hung on for dear life as the red and yellow balloon measuring 110ft around was filled in front of invited VIPs. At the signal to let go astonishment spread among the dignitaries in the town square, and terror among the peasants where it landed. The balloon rose to 6,000ft, flew for ten minutes and bobbed to earth a mile and a half away. There it caught fire and was left to burn by field hands convinced the moon had fallen from the sky and the day of judgement was upon them. It caused a sensation. News flew by letter and word of mouth to Paris. The sensation earned a name – aerostation – and the Montgolfiers became its first megastars. The inflatable invention, immediately dubbed a montgolfier, was the talk of the town. The race was on to replicate the experiment. For French scientists, philosophers and leaders of fashion, nothing really counted until it had happened in Paris.

On 27 August, a young physics professor called Jacques Charles launched the Globe over the enthralled capital. He had not actually repeated the experiment, though. He was misled by an inaccurate account that said the June balloon was filled with hydrogen, the ‘inflammable air’ discovered by British recluse Henry Cavendish a few years earlier. It was a serendipitous mistake, leading to an intense but friendly rivalry between the Montgolfiers who filled their balloons with smoke (not realizing it was hot air doing the work) and Charles who championed hydrogen. Less friendly was the reception the Globe received when it fell to earth fifteen miles from Paris. No-one had alerted people living in the countryside. For unsuspecting spectators a deflating balloon looked horribly like a writhing visitor from hell. Men and women panicked when the terrifying object fell to earth, billowing like a monster in its death throes. The daggers, pitchforks, muskets and rocks used to ‘kill’ the world’s first hydrogen balloon are captured in a contemporary drawing, General Alarm of the Inhabitants of Gonesse occasioned by the fall of the air balloon of M.Montgolfier.

Soon Étienne Montgolfier was in Paris too, answering the summons to demonstrate a balloon before King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette and a vast crowd at Versailles. The city buzzed with excitement and traders cashed in by selling miniature balloons. In The History and Practice of Aerostation written the following year, Tiberius Cavallo describes how mini montgolfiers popped up in Paris amid burgeoning balloon mania:

‘As the price of these balloons did not exceed a few shillings, almost every family satisfied its curiosity relative to the new experiment, and in a few days time balloons were seen very frequently flying about Paris, and soon after were sent abroad. Thus this curious experiment was spread in the world with an unparalleled rapidity.’

The showcase event on 19 September 1783 was awash with all the pomp the French court so enjoyed. The balloon was 57ft tall and dubbed Aérostat Réveillon by Étienne, after the wallpaper designer who helped create the blue, gold and red taffeta beauty. Cannons fired to mark liftoff but the ascent also had a practical purpose; to discover whether living creatures could deal with great height. Hence the first aeronauts were a sheep, a cock and a duck, perhaps underwhelming for the duck, if not its flightless companions. When they landed neither dizzy nor dead, the implications were enormous. If a sheep could fly without its head exploding (an actual worry at the time), could a human being?

The Cuthbert-Hodgson Collection and Major B.F.S. Baden-Powell Collection of Aeronautical Cuttings in the National Aerospace Library at Farnborough record several attempts to fly like the birds long before the first aeronauts finally pulled it off. From the legend of the British king Bladud of Bath who strapped wings to his arms in 850BC and unintentionally jumped to his death from the temple of Apollo in ancient London, to a Paris convict in 1777 being ‘surrounded with whirls of feathers’ and dropped 70ft, descending slowly if not actually flying, the idea wasn’t new. A Brazilian priest called Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmão demonstrated an unmanned one to the king of Portugal in 1709. The father then designed a balloon car resembling a hollow pigeon to carry passengers but gave up when people decided it all smacked of witchcraft and reported him to the Portuguese Inquisition. A Russian called Kria Kutnoi also annoyed the clergy by flying a balloon into a church tower in 1731 and was excommunicated. Both were deemed to have invented unholy floating fire hazards.

Sustained and repeatable human flight only truly arrived with frères Montgolfier but the cautious duo left hair-raising trials of their contraptions to other people. Celebrated for their contribution to the age of enlightenment in paint, poetry and prose, they were usually watching proceedings with feet planted firmly on the ground. Étienne never flew and Joseph only once. That flight ended terrifyingly quickly with a rip in the balloon that sent it crashing back to earth. He never tried again. Hydrogen hero Jacques Charles also gave up on ballooning when it gave him earache. The test pilots for the very first flight were daring young volunteers. On 21 November 1783 the science teacher Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and soldier François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, became the first men to fly.

Once again it was Paris that witnessed the epoch-making event. At first the huge audience fell into stunned silence as it watched the first humans head for the clouds. When it sank in that the ascent was a success, the crowd went suitably wild. By December 1783 balloon events were drawing phenomenal numbers. The largest recorded gathering of people the world had ever seen turned up to watch the first manned flight of a hydrogen balloon. More than 400,000 men and women saw Jacques Charles and Ainé Robert take off from Paris, enough people to fill modern day Wembley Stadium four and a half times over. By now balloons were big news everywhere and when this one came down twenty miles away the pitchforks stayed in the barns. The king sent out a proclamation to warn people they would be seeing more monsters and not to panic as they were harmless and might even prove useful.

Witnessing the initial trips to the clouds, Cavallo suggested that ‘a few years hence, the most timid woman will perhaps not hesitate to trust herself to the same experience.’ In fact women were raring to go, very far from timid and certainly not prepared to wait years for a balloon ride. Within a few months the first female aeronauts claimed their place in the history books. On 20 May 1784 the Marchioness and Countess of Montalembert, the Countess of Podenas and their companion Miss de Lagarde became the first women in the world to fly, boarding a tethered balloon in, of course, Paris. A fortnight later on 4 June the charismatic Elisabeth Thible ascended from Lyon to become the first woman in the world to fly entirely free of the earth.

The age of flight had begun and ballooning gripped the public imagination. The invention flooded fashion and philosophy from the street to the salon. The rage for all things aerostation was entirely in keeping with the overwrought mood of the times. Scientific discovery, revolutionary philosophy and political tumult were as much in vogue in late eighteenth century society as a Montgolfier medallion. The ink was barely dry on the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American War of Independence, when the hot air balloon made its royal debut a few miles away. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette enjoyed the spectacular show at Versailles never guessing their days were numbered. Before the decade was out some in that crowd would storm the Bastille and trigger the French revolution.

Ballooning arrived when the natural world seemed upside down, too. The wonders of 1783 were often terrifying or deadly. Enormous volcanic eruptions from the Laki fissure in Iceland wrought havoc with the climate. They began just four days after the Montgolfier demonstration at Annonay in June and continued for eight months, killing a fifth of Icelanders and sending sulphur spewing across Europe as acid rain. The hottest summer on record was followed by a bitterly cold winter. The sky turned white with ash, crops failed and tens of thousands more died from breathing the killer smog that settled over Norway, Germany, France and Britain.

Nine days before Pilâtre de Rozier and Laurent became the first balloonists, a giant comet known as a flying dragon scorched across the August sky above Scotland, England and France. In the midst of such portents, political crises and climatic confusion people seized on the delightful distraction of the balloon craze. Marie Antoinette stands accused of telling the restless poor of the 1780s to eat cake. She may just as easily have advised blotting out their worries by watching balloons.

Thus balloon-inspired art, fashion and entertainment blossomed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Balloons themselves were made to look gorgeous. Aeronauts competed to impress princes and public alike, ascending in montgolfiers made of hand-made paper, kid leather, linen or silk, striped or painted with ornate designs. Much as modern balloons display the logos of their sponsors, the Montgolfiers decorated their early aerostats (another name for balloons) to flatter the king. Royal emblems were picked out in gold on sky blue backgrounds. The Royal Aeronautical Society’s Cuthbert-Hodgson Collection holds a fragment of the balloon that lifted Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes aloft. A rare piece of printed chintz from the 1780s depicting a balloon flight demonstrates how quickly the craze caught on in fashionable homes. By Christmas 1783 there was no shortage of balloon-themed gifts in the shops. The montgolfier motif appeared on everything from silk fans to exquisite furniture, cufflinks to handkerchiefs. French craftsmen turned their talents to producing rococo delights such as crystal chandeliers, delicate jewellery and elaborate clocks. Potteries produced plates, tiles, teapots and tureens. Artists sold paintings and prints of famous ballooning scenes. People rode in montgolfier-shaped coaches and balloon ascents were the hottest tickets in town.

Women were in the vanguard of the vogue, piling their hair high to echo the shape of a balloon or sporting hats and skirts that did the same. To be a fashionista was to be a balloonista. There were few places a dedicated female follower of fashion did not put a balloon, according to an account from 1784:

‘The balloon influenza rages with more violence than ever– added to balloon hats, balloon bonnets, balloon caps, balloon ribbons, and balloon pins, the ladies have double balloon earrings and balloon side-curls; so that there are no less than seven balloon articles appertaining to the decoration of the most beautiful balloon in nature–the head of a pretty woman!’

Satirical writers and artists had a field day. Skits on the crazy clamour to be in a balloon, wear a balloon or talk about a balloon were everywhere. The Major B.F.S. Baden-Powell Collection of Aeronautical Cuttings shows English pens were first off the mark, miffed as they were by the French stealing a march on the clouds. One 1783 cartoon shows a Montgolfier brother perched on a balloon, steering with the aid of an ass, a fool and a monkey. Balloon madness did not catch immediate hold among the English, possibly because the French had beaten them to it and feigned disdain seemed more dignified than a scramble to catch up. The first Brit in a balloon was Scotsman James Tytler in August 1784 but it was an Italian, Vincent Lunardi, who made the first ascent from English soil in September of the same year. At that point Blighty did catch balloon influenza and wags enjoyed sending up the fad that had invaded from France.

Horace Walpole, the arch wit and chronicler of his age, was irritated by the widespread frenzy, calling balloons ‘as childish as the flying kites of school-boys’ and complaining, ‘Balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody.’ Cartoonists had not tired of the topic by 1825 when renowned caricaturist George Cruikshank lampooned the pastime. His illustration A Scene In The Farce of “Lofty Projects” as performed with great success for the Benefit & amusement of John Bull shows balloons lined up like taxis beneath a crowded sky.

Theatres threw themselves into the fun too, with a pantomime at Covent Garden in London called A Flight from Lapland in an Air Balloon enjoyed by ‘an overflowing audience’ with ‘the loudest laughter and applause’. As the first women took to the skies in 1784, the English playwright Elizabeth Inchbald premiered her hit farce The Mogul Tale; or The Descent of the Balloon set in a foreign land and employing colonial language. She also appeared in the comedy that revolved around three English people in a balloon blown off course in India and forced to run around pretending to be, variously, concubines and the Pope in order to escape again. Inchbald wasn’t the only one to mine the zeitgeist for comedy. Funny verse and songs sprang up everywhere. Her contemporary George Keate penned a prologue with a topical twist that begins:

‘When half the world are soaring to the moon, Buoy’d up by fashion’s trumpery balloon; When cats, dogs, women, cleave the yielding air, to make the gaping croud look up and stare, And madly, in philosophy’s defiance, their folly sanction with the name of science; Tho’ when they thro’ the atmosphere have roll’d, All they can tell us is, ‘twas very cold.’

For filling newspapers, balloons were unbeatable. Every tragedy, triumph, near miss or outbreak of fisticuffs was splashed across the press. The cuttings collections at the National Aerospace Library show the thousands of column inches devoted to the fashions, feuds, fires, falls, fatalities and letters of outrage that followed from rampant balloonomania. Sometimes it was the fate of the fans, as in this report from Rome in June 1786:

‘The balloon-mania was productive of a most melancholy disaster here last Sunday, when a number of persons having assembled to see one of these aerial machines let off, in a gallery erected for that purpose, one of the rows suddenly gave way; in consequence of which accident upwards of twenty of the spectators were either killed or desperately wounded.’

Sometimes it was the rage of the crowds who lost the plot when a balloon failed to go up. Balloon riots broke out quite regularly when ascents went awry. Chevalier de Moret was one of the contenders jockeying with Lunardi to be England’s first aeronaut, but his attempt near the Star and Garter in Chelsea on 11 August 1784 ended badly. A vast crowd turned up and stood for three hours as he burned straw in a bid to fill the balloon with smoke. The disgruntled punters decided they had been conned out of their sixpences and mobbed the balloon, tearing it to shreds. Moret only escaped thanks to the dense smoke and a few good Samaritans in the mob.

A reliable source of sensational news was the unfortunate flip side to balloonomania – pyromania. Using the Montgolfier method of burning rubbish to create hot smoke was a particularly combustible pastime. When people sent up little balloons for fun it only took a small combination of mishaps to end in chaos. Known as the fire balloon, it lived up to its name accord...