I loved Holmes's The Age of Wonder, about science and scientists in the Romantic era. This book could be seen as an extended footnote to that one, focusing as it does on the romantic era of ballooning. Though it's been superseded in our minds by the far more powerful and controllable technology of airplanes and space travel, Holmes reminds us that the dream of flying began with the simple balloon. 

What today is a relatively safe novelty experience was at the time of its invention an awe-inspiring revelation. Human beings were no longer bound by gravity! This gave rise to some exaggerated claims -- that ballooning would spread peace and democracy everywhere by erasing the arbitrary boundaries between nations, for example. This, of course, did not prove to be the case. 

Balloons did play a role in history, as they were used for wartime reconnaissance in the Civil War and  for communication during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. But their most important effect might have been on our imaginations. Holmes includes a wealth of literary examples, from Poe to Dickens to Verne (though he regrettably omits one that falls slightly out of the time range he's covering: the balloon that carries the Wizard in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.) Ballooning evokes a daring journey that takes one into a strange land, dangerous and magical, possibly difficult or impossible to return from, and that is ripe material for storytelling. 

Indeed, rising up into the air inspired an incredible degree of foolhardy recklessness in some aeronauts, who seemed to think that overcoming gravity meant that they were now invulnerable to any other limitation, and were prone to wishful assurance that the wind they wanted at any particular moment would blow in the right direction! The stories of some of their disastrous journeys could stand as a metaphorical warning for the inflated hubris of our industrialized Western culture. We, too, have taken off in a direction we now find hard to control, and seem to be headed for a crash landing. 

However, those aeronauts who managed to stay a bit more sensible might inspire us with their bravery in the cause of science -- meteorology and an understanding of the earth's atmosphere began with them. The revolutionary discovery that gases could be weighed and some were lighter than air also meant a new direction in chemistry.

The book ends with a particularly sad story about a doomed polar expedition, which put an end to romantic dreams of heroic exploration by balloon. But the balloon, with its silent, wind-borne flight, still tugs on our heartstrings in a way noisy airplanes and rockets can't. I've never been up in one, but now I'm quite tempted to give it a try ...