As the Irish balloon championships get under way in Longford…

Olivari’s balloon (1798)

Imagine the impact of the first hot-air balloon rising into the sky in 1783. Suddenly, it was possible to fly! The first living flight was from Versailles in June 1783, with a sheep, a duck and a cock in the car. Four months later the maestro himself, Étienne Montgolfier, rose above the earth in a splendidly decorated balloon. Others across Europe quickly followed suit.

The first manned flight in Ireland was made by Richard Crosbie on 19 January 1785 when he rose up from Ranelagh Gardens in Dublin before a vast crowd. Wind and bad weather affected his departure and he was obliged to land at Clontarf. A poem was published in celebration, The aerial voyage (Dublin, 1785), prefaced by an account of the event.

For the next five years, the hold on the popular imagination was evident. The pamphlets of the time convey the febrile excitement of it all. Farces were in vogue -Frederick Pilon, in his Aerostation (1785), urged with tongue in cheek the need for ‘legislation of the upper regions’, formerly the realm of poets only. There were ‘diverting accounts’ of flights, novels, balloon jests, and songs in the streets and public gardens. There were even silken ‘balloon hats’ covering lofty coiffures.

Serious experiments and advances were reported to the Royal Society. Then, in time of war, balloons became political. Francis Olivari (possibly a pseudonym) in The balloons of Citizen Campenas (Dublin, 1798) took up a suggestion made by a French hydraulic engineer that Napoleon could use balloons for a military invasion. Not to be scoffed at, said Olivari, and carefully calculated that if each were 100 yards in diameter it could carry 500 soldiers with hammocks, baggage, food, canons, arms and ammunition.

A vivid account of an attempt in 1812 to cross the Irish Sea from Belvedere House, Drumcondra, was published by veteran balloonist James Sadler, who was then 59 and had carried out more than 40 flights since his first attempt in Oxford in 1784. In Balloon (Dublin, 1812) he gives a graphic description of swarming up the cords to close a rent that had appeared, and of how finally, he was dragged through the sea before rescue.

Sadler’s Balloon: an authentic narrative (1812)

September 2010