BALLOONS

   For some six months in 1783 Paris was the Cape Canaveral of the 18th century as Parisians watched a succession of extraordinary ascents by hot-air balloons. The first successful manned trip took place on 21 Nov, as reported by Benjamin Franklin, and it started off a long series of speculations about the conquest of the air. Thomas Jefferson was certain that balloon TRANSPORTATION would lead to the discovery of the north pole "which is but one day's journey in a balloon, from where the ice has hitherto stopped adventurers". Franklin was certain that the new balloons would revolutionize warfare; and L.S.MERCIER added a new chapter to the 1786 edition of his L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; rev 1786; trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772) to show how the "aerostats" were destined to link remote Pekin to Paris in a system of world communications. When the inhabitants of major European cities watched the new balloons drifting above, they thought they saw the beginning of a profound change in human affairs: the assurance of a growing mastery of Nature. For a brief period there were plays, poems and stories about balloon travel - even a space operetta, Die Luftschiffer, performed before Catherine II in the Imperial Court Theatre at St Petersburg. Expectations about the future carried over into occasional stories like The Aerostatic Spy (1785), published anon, the first of the round-the-world stories that ran their course up to Jules VERNE's Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; trans as Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869). The balloon proved a most useful marker of the future (as the ROCKET was to do in a later period), and was used by early sf writers as a convincing way of establishing the more advanced circumstances of their future worlds. Balloons were also the source of the first visual fantasies of the future: there were engravings of balloon battles, vast transport balloons crossing the Atlantic and airborne troops crossing the Channel. By the 1870s, however, experiments with heavier-than-air flying machines had turned popular attention towards airships and aircraft of the future.