3 - People and Places

Summary

‘the New application of Inflammable air to make flying balons has already invaded the whole Earth, and turned the head in every body. I am glad to hear that even the English do amuse them Selves about that play.’

Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabroni to Sir Joseph Banks, 30 December 1783 (Royal Society Archives)

BALLOON NEWS SPREAD fast around Britain. Newspapers printed detailed accounts, local and international, so that readers in notionally provincial towns were often as well-informed as those in London. Some magazines too had national distribution, and private letters carried by an efficient postal system told of sightings and ascents. The balloon-mad read and talked avidly of aerostation in their area and worldwide. Benedict Anderson's classic work on the communication of ideas puts newspapers as a pillar of imagined communities, connecting people through common readership. That model holds good for balloon news though with a question of tone. Eighteenth-century newspapers, like newspapers now, combined apparently dispassionate reporting with commentary or tone that angled the subject in positive or negative ways. Many newspapers published accounts sent by witnesses with explicit views; many also printed balloon materials – advertisements, poems, periodical-style pieces, some serious, some humorous – that both reflected and created a composite tone about balloons. Newspapers expressed pride, civic and national; they also poured scorn. Their volatile views on balloons embraced scepticism, enthusiasm and contempt; like crowds at balloon launches, their mood could suddenly turn hostile. So although they are an index of public opinion, they were not always in sympathy with the balloon madness of other actors, including their contributors and readers.

Enthusiasm for balloons created activity all round Britain. Some of it was independent of events in London, though metropolitan ascents were widely reported and made aeronauts known in provincial places. Lunardi, for instance, started in London and then toured north, taking in York, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. But he did not bring balloon madness to a new audience: Edinburgh had had its own inventor, and York had aeronauts who came flushed from success in Norwich and Bristol. The wildfire spread of balloon madness had hotspots other than London. Liverpool in the northwest of England, York in the north-east, Norwich in the east and Bristol in the west were centres of trade that looked outward to the world.