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‘Transporting thought’: cultures of balloon flight in Britain, 1784–1785

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2017

CAITLÍN RÓISÍN DOHERTY
CAITLÍN RÓISÍN DOHERTY*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK. Email: crd37@cam.ac.uk.
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Abstract

The balloon has long drifted through popular discourse as a symbol of an Enlightenment attitude towards discovery and a Romanticized image of rationality. This article uses two accounts of early British balloon voyages, both published in 1786, and through them attempts to understand the wide range of practices – literary, social, chemical and adventurous – employed by early balloonists in Britain. I argue that the two series of flights recorded by John Jeffries and Vincenzo Lunardi can be read to show two different philosophical ideas of and aspirations for ballooning, each of which is tied to a different British location, and established a different paradigm for the public reception of flight experiments in later years.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 229 - 247
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Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2017 

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References

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3 As an example of the risks involved it should be noted that French balloonist Pilatre de Rozier was the first person to die in a ballooning accident when he attempted to cross from France to England six months later.

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