November 17, 2025 • 35 mins
Ballooning became a huge fad starting in the late 18th century, and there was a surprising amount of rioting associated with it. Fervor, excitement, and intoxication in some instances, meant that balloon events were prone to get out of control.
Research:
- Bond, Elizabeth Andrews. “Popular Science and Public Participation.” From The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France. Cornell University Press. 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv310vktg.8
- Branson, Susan. “Scientific Americans.” Cornell University Press, 2022. Cornell University Press, 2022.
- Coxwell, Henry Tracey. “My Life and Balloon Experiences.” W.H. Allen. 1889. https://archive.org/details/mylifeandballoo02coxwgoog/
- Daily National Intelligencer. “The Balloon, and Conflagration of Vauxhall.” 9/14/1819. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83026172/1819-09-14/ed-1/?sp=2&q=vauxhall&r=0.48,-0.027,0.621,0.225,0
- Franklin, Benjamin. “Benjamin Franklin to Ingenhousz, 16 January 1784.” https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-41-02-0310#BNFN-01-41-02-0310-fn-0005
- “Hot-Air Balloon: Jean-François Janinet (1752–1814).” https://www.getty.edu/publications/artists-things/things/hot-air-balloon/#fnref8
- Gillespie, Richard. “Ballooning in France and Britain, 1783-1786: Aerostation and Adventurism.” Isis, Vol. 75, No. 2 (June, 1984). https://www.jstor.org/stable/231824
- Glaisher, James. “Travels in the Air.” R. Bentley. 1871. https://archive.org/details/ldpd_7245144_000
- Holman, Brett. “The Melbourne balloon riot of 1858.” Airminded. 3/23/2017. https://airminded.org/2017/03/23/the-melbourne-balloon-riot-of-1858/
- Jackson, Joseph. “Vauxhall Garden.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. LVII. No. 4. 1933.
- Keen, Paul. “The ‘Balloonomania’: Science and Spectacle in 1780s England.” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Summer, 2006, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Summer, 2006). https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053707
- Magazine Monitor. “Victorian Strangeness: The great balloon riot of 1864.” BBC. 8/9/2014. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28674654
- Robbins, John. “Up in the Air: Balloonomania and Scientific Performance.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4, Special Issue: Performance. Summer 2015. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24690309
- Robson, David. “The Victorians who flew as high as jumbo jets.” BBC. 4/20/2016. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160419-the-victorians-who-flew-as-high-as-jets
- Smith, Zoe. “Disaster at 37,000 feet.” University of Cambridge. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/balloon-disaster
- Soth, Amelia. “Hot Air Balloon Launch Riot!” JSTOR Daily. 2/3/2022. https://daily.jstor.org/hot-air-balloon-launch-riot/
- Sparrow, Jeff. “Wrath and awe: a short history of balloons and their power to fire up mob fury.” The Guardian. 2/14/2023. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/wrath-and-awe-a-short-history-of-balloons-and-their-power-to-fire-up-mob-fury
- Sydney Morning Herald. “The Balloon Riot in the Domain: Death of Thomas Downs.” 12/19/1856. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12990254
- Sydney Morning Herald. “The Sydney Balloon.” Trove. 12/16/1856. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12990120
- The Rhode-Island American. “Riotous Proceedigns.” 9/14/1819. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025442/1819-09-14/ed-1/?sp=3&q=vauxhall&r=-0.14,1.265,0.686,0.248,0
- Tucker, Jennifer. “Voyages of Discovery on Oceans of Air: Scientific Observation and the Image of Science in an Age of ‘Balloonacy.’” Osiris, 1996, Vol. 11, Science in the Field (1996). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/301930
- Wroth, Warwick. “Cremorne and the Later London Gardens.” London. Elliot Stock. 1907.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Listener.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Josiah, who has sent to us just a ton of
very good episode suggestions sent in a request for an
episode on the eighteen nineteen balloon riot. We do have
a number of episodes on balloons and ballooning, including the
Mongolfier Brothers and Sophie Blanchard and essay Andre's attempt to
(00:37):
get to the North Pole by balloon, and we have
mentioned in those episodes that balloons became a huge fad
starting in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I don't think we.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Have ever talked about how much rioting was associated with that.
We have talked more about excite and not about tearing stuff. Apart,
this eighteen nineteen incident that Josiah requested was not the
only riot to talk about. In other words, we are
going to cover several in this episode, but it is
(01:14):
not all of the balloon riots. Over the course of
my research, I found various mentions of other riots as
kind of asides or mentioned in footnotes or a newspaper
article would say blah blah blah, similarly to the thing
that happened to this other time, But then I was
not able to find a lot of detail about that
(01:35):
other time briefly mentioned. It's also possible that there were
other more documented balloon riot incidents that I just didn't
happen to stumble over while working on this. These riots
all involved large balloons filled with either hot air or
a lighter than air gas like hydrogen or coal gas,
which is a mix of mostly hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.
(02:00):
Ones so we're talking about took place in France, the UK,
the US, and Australia. But the earliest precursors to these
kinds of balloons came from another part of the world.
They date back to the third century BCE in China.
These were flying lanterns also called sky lanterns, that were
made from paper and open at the bottom. A candle
(02:21):
or some other source of flames suspended under the opening
heated the air inside, causing the lantern to float. Sky
lanterns are quite small, you can launch them from your hands,
and by the eighteenth century, various scientists and inventors were
trying to figure out how to use that same principle
to make much larger balloons. The first successful launches of
(02:45):
balloons that were big enough to carry human beings took
place in France. After testing various materials and designs, brothers
Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Mongolfier made a balloon from
cloth and paper that had a diameter of about thirty
three feet or ten meters. They lit a fire under
(03:06):
the opening of this balloon to fill it with hot air,
and they successfully sent it aloft on June fourth, seventeen
eighty three. They did not have anybody aboard that first time.
That balloon stayed in the air for about ten minutes.
On September nineteenth, they sent a duck, a rooster, and
a sheep up in a slightly smaller balloon, and all
(03:27):
of those animals returned to Earth safely hooray. From there,
the Mongolfier brothers tried tethered balloon flights with people on board,
and then their first untethered flight with a human crew
was on November twenty first, seventeen eighty three. We talked
about the Mongolfier brothers in more detail in our episode
(03:47):
on them that ran as a Saturday Classic on January
twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, While the Mongolfier brothers were
working on hot air balloons, other people were working on
balloons with some other gas or gas mixture. Professor Jacques
Charles commissioned brothers and gen Robert and Nicola Luis Robert,
(04:11):
who is sometimes also called Marie Noel Robert, to build
a balloon. They took a demonstration flight from the champ
de Mars in August of seventeen eighty three. This was
a varnished silk balloon filled with hydrogen gas. They made
that hydrogen gas by pouring sulfuric acid onto iron filings.
(04:32):
This balloon successfully went aloft without a crew, but from
there it drifted to the northeast of Paris. When it
landed near the village of Geness, people who didn't know
what it was reportedly attacked it with things like sticks
and pitchforks. On December first.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Of that year, Nicola, Louis and Jacques successfully went aloft
themselves in a hydrogen balloon, which was launched from the
Tuileriri gardens. Within a year, more than one hundred eighty
balloon launches had taken place all around Europe, often before
just enormous crowds. When the Mongolfier brothers sent those animals,
(05:09):
aloft An estimated one hundred and thirty thousand people had
been watching, including King Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette.
When Robert and Charles took their first flight, it was
reportedly before a crowd of four hundred thousand people, which
would have been more than half the population of Paris,
(05:29):
and people were fascinated. Letters and diary entries from the
late eighteenth century are full of references to balloons and
which launches people had seen, and how big the crowds were,
and what the balloon looked like. This includes numerous letters
from American visitors who were in France for the negotiations
of the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Revolutionary War,
(05:53):
so that includes Benjamin Franklin. Balloon hats for ladies came
into fashion with puffy crowns and wide brims, and balloons
were emblazoned on every kind of souvenir imaginable. A broadside
called Balloon Wish printed in Boston read quote in this
wild romantic age, what fantastic whims engage high and low
(06:15):
and old and young, all with balloon madness, rung balloon
hats and frying pans, balloon ribbons, balloon fans, balloon gauzes,
balloon caps, balloon hoops or balloon traps. Balloons and balloon
launches were also depicted in stories, novels, poems, plays, and
visual artwork. As an example, in seventeen eighty four, the
(06:36):
Covent Garden Theater, which we just talked about in October,
staged a play called Harlequin Junior or The Magic Cestus,
in which past podcast subject Joseph Grimaldy was supposed to
handle a real floating balloon that was scaled down for
use on the stage. However, the theater scrapped this part
(06:57):
of the show after deciding it was quote very offensive
and in some degree dangerous in the confined air of
the theater.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
That decision makes sense because they had to burn material
under this balloon to inflate it in the theater just
seemed like a bad idea given the known propensity of
theaters to catch on fire.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
In the theater lit by candlelight at this point, so
if the balloon fell in the wrong place, double trouble.
The culture in parts of Europe was so saturated with
balloons that some people actually got sick of hearing about
them almost immediately. In September seventeen eighty three, English author
and playwright Samuel Johnson wrote a letter to Sir Joshua
(07:40):
Reynolds that said, in part, quote, I have three letters
in this day, all about the balloon. I could have
been content with one. Do not write about the balloon.
Whatever else you may think proper to say that cracks
me up.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
It's also kind of sad that he died a few
months later, so one of his final frustrations balloons balloons.
The term balloon omania appeared in writing for the first
time two years later in a letter from past podcast
subject Horace Walpole to Madame du Defont, after Jean Francois
(08:17):
Pilatre de Rosier died in a balloon crash while trying
to cross the English Channel. Walpole wrote, quote, the balloon
omania is I think a little chilled, not extinguished by
Rosier's catastrophe. Walpole also expressed concerns about whether balloons would
be used for military purposes, and that was something people
(08:38):
had started thinking about basically right after those very earliest launches.
We talked about that more in our episode on the
balloons of World War Two that came out in March
of twenty twenty three. This eighteenth century fascination with balloons
was interconnected with ongoing discoveries in the sciences that it
started to evolve in the sixteenth century and the European
(09:00):
intellectual movement that has come to be known as the
Age of Enlightenment. People were similarly fascinated with experiments with
electricity that were also happening around the same time. By necessity,
balloon launches were the most public of all the various
experiments that were going on. The balloons were huge, and
even if they were launched from some out of the
(09:21):
way place, people could still see them in the air.
People made and launched hot, air and gas balloons in
all kinds of places beyond just England and France, and
beyond just Europe. But in these two countries there was
kind of a competitive rivalry going on. But there were
also some differences in how ballooning developed in those two countries.
(09:44):
A lot of balloon experiments in France were under the
auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, and that meant
that until the French Revolution, they were effectively being overseen
by the scientific community and ultimately the monarch. But in England,
the Royal Society didn't take up that same level of
interest in ballooning. So the ballooning community in England was
(10:06):
more made up of adventurers who might work with scientists
or allow scientists to bring instruments on board, but they
could be focused a lot more on excitement and spectacle
and showmanship than on research and discovery. But it was
clear from the beginning that balloon launches could spark a
backlash if they did not go as planned. On January sixteenth,
(10:29):
seventeen eighty four, just weeks after humans had successfully flown
in balloons for the first time, Benjamin Franklin wrote a
letter to Dutch scientists Jon Ingenhause. Franklin had previously sent
Ingenhouse everything he had learned about balloons, and he said
that if Ingenhause sent someone to France, Franklin was sure
they could learn whatever they needed to figure out how
(10:50):
to make one for themselves from there. He said, quote,
if you undertake to make one, I think it extremely
proper and necessary to send an ingenious man here for
that purpose. Otherwise, for want of attention to some particular circumstance,
or of being acquainted with it, the experiment might miscarry, which,
being in an affair of so much public expectation, would
(11:12):
have bad consequences, draw upon you a great deal of
censure and affect your reputation.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It is a serious thing to draw out from their
affairs all the inhabitants of a great city and its environs,
and a disappointment makes them angry. At Bordeaux lately a
person who pretended to send up a balloon and had
received money of many people, not being able to make
it rise. The populace were so exasperated that they pulled
(11:39):
down his house and had liked to have killed him.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
We will talk about some other exasperated populaces after a
sponsor break. In seventeen eighty four, printmaker Jean Francois Genine,
who had started calling himself an artist physicist, worked with
(12:06):
Abbe Laurent Antoine Melin, who lectured in physics, to build
a balloon. Their design actually involved three balloons. There was
the primary hot air balloon and a gas filled balloon
that would float above it, and then a balloon filled
with cold air that would hang below it. They wanted
to study the atmosphere and the behavior of the three
(12:28):
balloons and the gases within them from the gondola that
was suspended below. They had financed their project primarily by
selling tickets to the launch, and that was the case
for a lot of balloonists. Even like the hardcore scientific balloonists,
a lot of times were funding things with ticket sales.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
They planned to take off from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris
on July eleventh, seventeen eighty four. Although they had made
some successful test flights, this public launch failed when they
were not able to adequately fill the hot air balloon.
It's not clear whether the balloon caught fire during the
attempt to fill it, or if angry onlookers set it alight,
(13:09):
but it did catch fire, and once it was burning,
outraged ticket holders burst into the launch area, tearing pieces
off of the balloon and breaking up the viewing stands
to throw into the fire. One of the people who
witnessed this was Benjamin Franklin Batch, grandson of Benjamin Franklin,
whose diary entry about the day described some of the
(13:30):
carried off balloon pieces as big enough to make a mattress. Afterwards,
Milan and Jeanniet were ridiculed in the popular press, including
people writing satirical songs about them. The September eighth, eighteen
nineteen riot that inspired this episode took place in Vauxhall Gardens,
(13:52):
not the ones in London, but gardens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
that had been named for them. I think people in
England also said that more like Vauxhall, the balloon belonged
to a French aeronaut known as Monsieur Michel, who was
going to go up in the balloon and then parachute
down from it. This was just a few days after
(14:14):
a failed balloon launch by a different aeronaut in Camden,
and Camden is just on the other side of the
Delaware River from Philadelphia, so a lot of people from
Philadelphia had gone to Camden to try to watch, and
they had not been able to see a balloon. Vauxhall
Garden was surrounded by a tall wooden fence, and hundreds
(14:35):
of people had paid a dollar apiece, significant money in
these days to come inside to watch. People who did
not have a dollar or just didn't want to pay
it tried to get a glimpse from the outside, and
the crowd included people who traveled in from Camden or
from other places around Philadelphia. The balloon was big enough
that the top would be visible from the ground outside
(14:57):
the fence once it was inflated, and people also climbed
onto roofs and into trees to get a better view.
Counting the ticket holders and the people outside the fence,
roughly thirty thousand people were estimated to be there. Monsieur
Michelle started filling the balloon with gas at about two PM,
and at seven pm it still was not ready. According
(15:21):
to an article in the Rhode Island American published about
a week after the incident, one of the reasons it
was filling so slowly is that an impatient spectator had
thrown a rock at it, and that rock had made
a hole that was continually letting gas out of the balloon.
On the other hand, the Washington, DC Daily National Intelligencer
(15:42):
said this rock puncture happened after the balloon had been
somewhat filled at least and was partially aloft. Most of
the documentation I found on this whole incident was in
news reports, and all of them are slightly different from
one another. Vendors were selling food and drink at this event,
and after a while a lot of the spectators were intoxicated.
(16:05):
A detail that most of the accounts agree upon is
that a boy in his mid teens climbed the fence.
In some accounts, one of the garden attendants struck and
killed him. In others, the boy struck someone inside the
fence with a stick, and that person either hit him
back or hit a couple of children who happened to
be nearby. Rumors spread that either this teenager or a
(16:29):
young child had been killed, or maybe one of them
really had been killed. All of this unclear.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Whatever exactly the details, it sparked a riot in which
the onlookers from the outside of the fence burst through it,
tearing the balloon to shreds and lighting a lot of
the garden on fire, including its pavilion and benches. Musicians
had been hired to play for the day, and rioters
smashed their instruments. People robbed the vendors of their food
(17:00):
and their alcohol and other wares, and somebody stole all
the ticket money, which was about eight hundred dollars. Multiple
people were injured, and by nine pm Vauxhall Gardens was
basically destroyed. Its owner sold the property in the aftermath,
and it changed hands a couple of times before eventually
being rebuilt and reopened as an outdoor theater. In eighteen
(17:23):
thirty eight, an ascent that was supposed to take place
in Cremorne Gardens in London similarly went wrong. The event
was described this way in a nineteen oh seven book
about the gardens quote. It was announced to ascend on
May twenty four, and people began to assemble in the
grounds at noon. By seven o'clock there were nearly five
(17:43):
thousand spectators and behind a huge tarpaulin the balloon was
supposed to be in the process of inflation. The balloon
was attached to a platform in the middle of the lake,
and its peculiarity was that it had to be inflated
by chopped straw burnt in a brazier under the orifice
of the bag. The size of the furnace had been miscalculated,
(18:05):
and after the balloon had twice been set on fire,
the intrepid aeronaut decided not to ascend. Some of the
spectators considered that at any rate the balloon could be punished,
and a well directed volley of stones soon left the
monster prostrate on the lake. An attempt was made to
(18:25):
drag it on shore and tear it in pieces, but
at this moment the cord broke. Some of the rowdier
spirits now sought out the proprietor, hoping to duck him
in one of his own ponds, and when this failed,
they attacked the glass planes of the Lion's conservatory. Not
seemed like a great idea, but suddenly the police appeared
(18:47):
and Vesuvius burst forth in all of its fury, and
when the fireworks were over, the visitors quietly dispersed. In
case that last bit is not totally clear, this park
had a panorama of Mount Vesuvius, and they set off
fireworks from there at night, and they basically started the
fireworks display to try to get everybody to focus on
something else. A riot in Sydney, Australia, on December eighteenth,
(19:12):
eighteen fifty six was also similar. French balloonist Pierre Magre
hoped to make Australia's first successful balloon flight. Roughly five
thousand people had gathered by two pm, which is when
he was supposed to start inflating the balloon with hot air,
but he didn't actually get started until three PM, and
the crowd continued to grow and to become more and
(19:34):
more impatient. As the balloon slowly filled, people started to
doubt that it was even possible to inflate the balloon
because it seemed like the material was just too heavy.
They added more fuel to the fire. Things started to
move a little bit faster, and eventually the balloon did
start to ascend, but the cords that had been used
to tether it were dangling, and one of them got
(19:57):
caught in something. The effort to un tangle that trailing
cord wound up releasing a lot of the hot air
out of the balloon. As the balloon started to deflate,
people from the less expensive outer part of the viewing
area rushed to the inside. Either the balloon caught fire
or someone set it on fire. I feel like that's
(20:18):
a frequent refrain in this episode. Somebody had possibly kicked
the fire that had been used to fill it, and
then people started chanting burn.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The balloon, Burn the balloon. The fire spread to the
tent where the wine and straw used for fuel had
been stored, and that caught fire as well. Megra was
forced to flee during the early stages of its inflation.
This balloon had been suspended from a cord that was
draped between two poles, and in this chaos people started
(20:48):
knocking down the poles. One of them hit two children
as it fell. Eleven year old Thomas Downs was reported
to have died of a skull fracture two days after this.
An inquest found Meg to be responsible, describing him as
the quote perpetrator of the sham balloon incident and censuring
(21:10):
him a little more than a year later, on February first,
eighteen fifty eight, Joseph Dean went aloft in a balloon
filled with coal gas, taking off from Cremorne Gardens in Melbourne,
Australia and succeeding where Pierre Magra had not. Then, on
February fifteenth, Charles Henry Brown did the same. Both men
(21:31):
had been hired by George Coppin, who was a theater
entrepreneur who also funded both of the ascents. But according
to Brown's account, this crowd was angry with him when
he returned. This might have been because they got bored
since he had taken off really late in the day,
or it could have been because Coppin had offered a
(21:52):
reward for the safe return of the balloon. If something
went wrong with the launch, people might have wanted to
claim that reward, even though nothing had gone wrong and
Brown was still in possession of the balloon. In Brown's
words quote on my descent, I was treated in a
most brutal manner by the people assembled. Why I know not,
(22:13):
but they tore the hair from my head, bruised, crushed,
and almost suffocated me, besides damaging the balloon by tugging
at and trampling on it. This does not apply to
mister Hugh Peck of Collingwood, to whom I am under
the obligation of returning the balloon to Cremorne in safety
and declining to receive any remuneration for his trouble. Mister
(22:34):
Needham of the gas works assisted in extricating me from
the savages. Probably the most thoroughly documented and well known
balloon riot took place in Leicester, England, in eighteen sixty four,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
(23:00):
Sixty four Leicster balloon riot involved a balloonist who had
become particularly well known because of an earlier incidence that
did not involve a riot that was Henry Tracy Coxwell.
Coxwell was born in eighteen nineteen and had trained originally
as a dentist, but he had shifted a lot of
his focus to ballooning after taking his first balloon flight
(23:23):
at the age of twenty five. He undertook numerous balloon launches,
primarily in and around London, including in London's Vauxhall Gardens
and Cremorne Gardens, which were ticketed money making entertainment events.
This earlier incident also involved doctor James Glacier. Glacier was
(23:44):
born in eighteen oh nine and he was a meteorologist
who wanted to conduct experiments aboard balloons. He undertook twenty
eight balloon ascents during his career, many of them with Coxwell,
often with funding from the British Association for the van
of Science. The two men had launched from Wolverhampton, England,
(24:05):
on September fifth, eighteen sixty two. Glacier was equipped with
photographic plates, what bulb thermometers, a hygrometer and other instruments
to study the atmosphere and weather as they ascended to
high altitudes. They also had several pigeons aboard to see
how those pigeons would fly at high altitudes. We don't
(24:26):
really need to get into the detail, but only one
of the pigeons seems to have survived this journey. By
one forty PM, they had reached an elevation of about
four miles or more than twenty one thousand feet. They
continued to ascend in about ten minutes. After that, Glacier
realized he could no longer see the mercury column in
(24:47):
the wet bulb thermometer, or the hands of his watch,
or any other fine detail on any of his instruments.
Glacier asked Coxwell for help, but just then the balloon's
valve line came entangled and Coxwell had to fix it.
Glacier had already noticed that Coxwell seemed winded, and Glacier
had attributed that to the physical work that he was
(25:09):
having to do around the balloon. But shortly after Coxwell
went to fix this valve line. In Glacier's words, quote,
I laid my arm upon the table, possessed of its
full vigor, but on being desirous of using it, I
found it powerless. It must have lost its power. Momentarily
trying to move the other arm, I found it powerless also.
(25:33):
Then I tried to shake myself and succeeded, but I
seemed to have no limbs, and looking at the barometer,
my head fell over my left shoulder. I struggled and
shook my body again, but could not move my arms,
getting my head upright for an instant only it fell
on my right shoulder. Then I fell backwards, my back
resting against the side of the car and my head
(25:55):
on its edge. In this position, my eyes were directed
to me mister Coxwell in the ring. When I shook
my body, I seemed to have full power over the
muscles of the back, and considerably so over those of
the neck, but none over either my arms or my legs,
as in the case of the arms, so all muscular
(26:15):
power was lost in an instant from my back and neck.
I dimly saw mister Coxwell and endeavored to speak, but
could not. In an instant, intense darkness overcame me, so
that the optic nerve lost power suddenly, but I was
still conscious with as active a brain as at the
present moment. Whilst writing this, I thought I had been
(26:36):
seized with asphyxia, and believed I should experience nothing more,
as death would come unless we speedily descended. Glacier then
lost consciousness and a few minutes later became aware of
Coxwell trying to rouse him. Coxwell had nearly lost consciousness
as well and had started to lose control of his limbs.
(26:57):
Coxwell had realized that they had to get to a
lower altitude, and since he couldn't use his hands, he
had managed to open the valve to release some of
the gas from the balloon by grabbing the cord with
his teeth. Coxwell still couldn't use his hands by the
time Glacier regained consciousness, and Glacier tried to treat them
by pouring brandy over them. The last barometer reading that
(27:20):
Glacier was able to record as they ascended suggested that
at that point they were at an altitude of about
twenty nine thousand feet, and then after that he had
lost consciousness, but they were still climbing when he lost consciousness,
and they are estimated to have reached an altitude of
thirty seven thousand feet or just over seven miles in
other words, in the cruising altitude ranged for today's commercial airliners.
(27:46):
Neither man fully understood what had happened to them physiologically,
at that elevation, but his words spread about the terrifying flight.
It was obvious to everyone that they would have died
if Coxwell had not managed to open that valve. This
experience did not discourage Glacier from his scientific pursuits on balloons,
though he got back to work almost immediately after regaining consciousness,
(28:10):
and twenty one of his scientific balloon flights happened after
this one. Almost two years later, on July eleventh, eighteen
sixty four, Coxwell, who was famous from this earlier experience,
planned a balloon ascent that was to take place at
a Forester's fete at a racecourse in Leicester. The Foresters
are a friendly society also known as a Mutual Aid Society,
(28:33):
which had been established as the Ancient Order of Foresters
in eighteen thirty four. For this, Coxwell was going to
test a new balloon called the Britannia, and it was
going to be attached to the car that he had
used for his experimental flights with Glacier. The plan was
for a group of passengers, including two women, to go
(28:54):
aloft with him. Coxwell later wrote a letter to the
editor at the Times describing what happened. He noted that
no real barrier had been erected around the launch site
and that he had to quote beg hard for a
policeman to be present. He had heard that there were
only eight on site for an event with an estimated
fifty thousand people. According to an eyewitness statement, no arrangements
(29:18):
had been made for keeping the ground around the balloon clear.
There was just a temporary barrier which was quickly knocked
down by the crowd, and that made it impossible for
Coxwell to do what he needed to do with the
balloon before the flight could even begin.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
According to Coxwell quote, early in the afternoon, a gentleman
reported to be a provincial aeronaut gave it out that
the balloon then present was not my largest and newest balloon,
but a small one. This was a cruel libel, and aroused.
I was told an angry feeling among the visitors. The
lack of policeman to maintain order soon manifested itself, For
(29:55):
on a band entering the balloon ground, the boards were
carried at once, and thousands of persons broke in and
harassed my operations excessively. It was in vain that I
entreated for and that several gentlemen succeeded in clearing an
open space the deficiency of strong barriers having afforded access.
(30:16):
All subsequent attempts to stop the tide of human pressure
proved unavailing.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
The crowd demanded that he take off immediately, but he couldn't.
Some supports that had been put up to hold the
balloon while it was being inflated needed to be taken down,
but the crew that was supposed to do that wasn't
even there. Coxwell threatened to let the gas out of
the balloon unless the crowd got itself under control, because
they were creating a dangerous situation. Police officers arrived and
(30:46):
they started trying to clear the area around the balloon,
but when Coxwell started releasing the gas, the crowd became
enraged and attacked it. There were also rumors that police
officers had struck a woman. Police sergeant led Coxwell away
from all of this, but in his words, quote, my
clothes were soon torn, and then the cry was raised,
(31:08):
rip him up, knock him in the head, finish him,
et cetera, all of which would have inevitably been executed
had I not followed the inspector's advice. The crowd set
fire to the balloon car and tore the balloon to pieces.
Many of these pieces were then sold as souvenirs. The
(31:28):
balloon's hoop was not flammable, and the crowd paraded it
around the streets. Coxwell attributed this incident to a lack
of foresight in not providing enough policeman for a forester's bet.
He asked the foresters for compensation for this incident and
for the destruction of his equipment, but because of the
Aid Society's rules, this wasn't something they could just do immediately.
(31:52):
There was like a whole process that had to happen
before giving away the Society's money. Other people in Lester
raised funds totaling more than eight hundred pounds to try
to compensate him. Although Glacier doesn't seem to have been
involved in this ascension attempt, the destruction of the balloon
and the car that he had used for his experiments
(32:13):
did cause a setback in his meteorological research. He later
returned to the sky in one of Coxwell's old balloons,
equipped with a new car, but it seems like the
two men had a more personal falling out at some
point after this. The details regarding that don't seem to
be well documented. The twenty nineteen movie The Aeronauts stars
(32:35):
Eddie Redmain as James Glacier, but Henry Tracy Coxwell is
just not depicted in the movie. It seems like this
was one of the last big balloon riots, not because
of some kind of change in the psychology and dynamics
of sometimes drunken crowds, but because ballooning stopped being such
a huge fad and it stopped drawing those kinds of
(32:55):
crowds of expectant onlookers.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
And that there's balloon riots. I have some listener mail
to take us out. This actually is from a little
bit ago. This is from Christy who wrote after our
episode on Soap. Christy wrote and said, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I love listening to the podcast during my commute. I
(33:19):
probably only have my PhD in s y MIHC if
I was the kind of student who skips classes because
I've listened for a very long time, but I've also
had a couple of year plus gaps. In your recent
episode on Soap, you mentioned an earlier not technically soap
product related to wool. It's a bit of a tangent,
but I thought you might enjoy hearing about suwant fermentation.
(33:41):
It's a method of cleaning raw wool that relies on
fermentation of natural sweat and minerals in the wool with
rain water to create a cleaning substance. Supposedly also stinks
like you wouldn't believe, so I may put off trying
it until I have somewhere it wouldn't bother me to
let it sit. Thank you so much for the work
you put into thoughtfully selecting and researching topics, presenting them
(34:03):
with care, and sharing them own way that is both
personable and informative. As a pet tax, please see my
ten year old dog Zelda. While we usually say she
is a Sheba husky mix, looks like Sheba size of
a husky, Her adoption paperwork listed four different variations on
breed mixes, and a DNA test said she was a mutt,
high percentage of Asian slash Arctic breeds, and a moderate
(34:26):
percentage of terrier. All my best, Christie, this is a
cute little puppy dog. I am not good at a
described I'm like, what do I want to say about
this dog? A kind of fox? Like face and ears
and a mostly kind of buff and hand color coat,
(34:47):
looking very happy sitting under some hydranchas in bloom. Thank
you so much for sending this dog picture and about
suant for vacation. I'm not a thing that I had
ever heard of, and in fact misread when reading the
email initially as Sue it, which is not quite the
same thing, not at all the same thing, really, If
(35:12):
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcasts, where a history podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
(35:35):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Listener.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Josiah, who has sent to us just a ton of
very good episode suggestions sent in a request for an
episode on the eighteen nineteen balloon riot. We do have
a number of episodes on balloons and ballooning, including the
Mongolfier Brothers and Sophie Blanchard and essay Andre's attempt to
(00:37):
get to the North Pole by balloon, and we have
mentioned in those episodes that balloons became a huge fad
starting in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I don't think we.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Have ever talked about how much rioting was associated with that.
We have talked more about excite and not about tearing stuff. Apart,
this eighteen nineteen incident that Josiah requested was not the
only riot to talk about. In other words, we are
going to cover several in this episode, but it is
(01:14):
not all of the balloon riots. Over the course of
my research, I found various mentions of other riots as
kind of asides or mentioned in footnotes or a newspaper
article would say blah blah blah, similarly to the thing
that happened to this other time, But then I was
not able to find a lot of detail about that
(01:35):
other time briefly mentioned. It's also possible that there were
other more documented balloon riot incidents that I just didn't
happen to stumble over while working on this. These riots
all involved large balloons filled with either hot air or
a lighter than air gas like hydrogen or coal gas,
which is a mix of mostly hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.
(02:00):
Ones so we're talking about took place in France, the UK,
the US, and Australia. But the earliest precursors to these
kinds of balloons came from another part of the world.
They date back to the third century BCE in China.
These were flying lanterns also called sky lanterns, that were
made from paper and open at the bottom. A candle
(02:21):
or some other source of flames suspended under the opening
heated the air inside, causing the lantern to float. Sky
lanterns are quite small, you can launch them from your hands,
and by the eighteenth century, various scientists and inventors were
trying to figure out how to use that same principle
to make much larger balloons. The first successful launches of
(02:45):
balloons that were big enough to carry human beings took
place in France. After testing various materials and designs, brothers
Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Mongolfier made a balloon from
cloth and paper that had a diameter of about thirty
three feet or ten meters. They lit a fire under
(03:06):
the opening of this balloon to fill it with hot air,
and they successfully sent it aloft on June fourth, seventeen
eighty three. They did not have anybody aboard that first time.
That balloon stayed in the air for about ten minutes.
On September nineteenth, they sent a duck, a rooster, and
a sheep up in a slightly smaller balloon, and all
(03:27):
of those animals returned to Earth safely hooray. From there,
the Mongolfier brothers tried tethered balloon flights with people on board,
and then their first untethered flight with a human crew
was on November twenty first, seventeen eighty three. We talked
about the Mongolfier brothers in more detail in our episode
(03:47):
on them that ran as a Saturday Classic on January
twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, While the Mongolfier brothers were
working on hot air balloons, other people were working on
balloons with some other gas or gas mixture. Professor Jacques
Charles commissioned brothers and gen Robert and Nicola Luis Robert,
(04:11):
who is sometimes also called Marie Noel Robert, to build
a balloon. They took a demonstration flight from the champ
de Mars in August of seventeen eighty three. This was
a varnished silk balloon filled with hydrogen gas. They made
that hydrogen gas by pouring sulfuric acid onto iron filings.
(04:32):
This balloon successfully went aloft without a crew, but from
there it drifted to the northeast of Paris. When it
landed near the village of Geness, people who didn't know
what it was reportedly attacked it with things like sticks
and pitchforks. On December first.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Of that year, Nicola, Louis and Jacques successfully went aloft
themselves in a hydrogen balloon, which was launched from the
Tuileriri gardens. Within a year, more than one hundred eighty
balloon launches had taken place all around Europe, often before
just enormous crowds. When the Mongolfier brothers sent those animals,
(05:09):
aloft An estimated one hundred and thirty thousand people had
been watching, including King Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette.
When Robert and Charles took their first flight, it was
reportedly before a crowd of four hundred thousand people, which
would have been more than half the population of Paris,
(05:29):
and people were fascinated. Letters and diary entries from the
late eighteenth century are full of references to balloons and
which launches people had seen, and how big the crowds were,
and what the balloon looked like. This includes numerous letters
from American visitors who were in France for the negotiations
of the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Revolutionary War,
(05:53):
so that includes Benjamin Franklin. Balloon hats for ladies came
into fashion with puffy crowns and wide brims, and balloons
were emblazoned on every kind of souvenir imaginable. A broadside
called Balloon Wish printed in Boston read quote in this
wild romantic age, what fantastic whims engage high and low
(06:15):
and old and young, all with balloon madness, rung balloon
hats and frying pans, balloon ribbons, balloon fans, balloon gauzes,
balloon caps, balloon hoops or balloon traps. Balloons and balloon
launches were also depicted in stories, novels, poems, plays, and
visual artwork. As an example, in seventeen eighty four, the
(06:36):
Covent Garden Theater, which we just talked about in October,
staged a play called Harlequin Junior or The Magic Cestus,
in which past podcast subject Joseph Grimaldy was supposed to
handle a real floating balloon that was scaled down for
use on the stage. However, the theater scrapped this part
(06:57):
of the show after deciding it was quote very offensive
and in some degree dangerous in the confined air of
the theater.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
That decision makes sense because they had to burn material
under this balloon to inflate it in the theater just
seemed like a bad idea given the known propensity of
theaters to catch on fire.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
In the theater lit by candlelight at this point, so
if the balloon fell in the wrong place, double trouble.
The culture in parts of Europe was so saturated with
balloons that some people actually got sick of hearing about
them almost immediately. In September seventeen eighty three, English author
and playwright Samuel Johnson wrote a letter to Sir Joshua
(07:40):
Reynolds that said, in part, quote, I have three letters
in this day, all about the balloon. I could have
been content with one. Do not write about the balloon.
Whatever else you may think proper to say that cracks
me up.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
It's also kind of sad that he died a few
months later, so one of his final frustrations balloons balloons.
The term balloon omania appeared in writing for the first
time two years later in a letter from past podcast
subject Horace Walpole to Madame du Defont, after Jean Francois
(08:17):
Pilatre de Rosier died in a balloon crash while trying
to cross the English Channel. Walpole wrote, quote, the balloon
omania is I think a little chilled, not extinguished by
Rosier's catastrophe. Walpole also expressed concerns about whether balloons would
be used for military purposes, and that was something people
(08:38):
had started thinking about basically right after those very earliest launches.
We talked about that more in our episode on the
balloons of World War Two that came out in March
of twenty twenty three. This eighteenth century fascination with balloons
was interconnected with ongoing discoveries in the sciences that it
started to evolve in the sixteenth century and the European
(09:00):
intellectual movement that has come to be known as the
Age of Enlightenment. People were similarly fascinated with experiments with
electricity that were also happening around the same time. By necessity,
balloon launches were the most public of all the various
experiments that were going on. The balloons were huge, and
even if they were launched from some out of the
(09:21):
way place, people could still see them in the air.
People made and launched hot, air and gas balloons in
all kinds of places beyond just England and France, and
beyond just Europe. But in these two countries there was
kind of a competitive rivalry going on. But there were
also some differences in how ballooning developed in those two countries.
(09:44):
A lot of balloon experiments in France were under the
auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, and that meant
that until the French Revolution, they were effectively being overseen
by the scientific community and ultimately the monarch. But in England,
the Royal Society didn't take up that same level of
interest in ballooning. So the ballooning community in England was
(10:06):
more made up of adventurers who might work with scientists
or allow scientists to bring instruments on board, but they
could be focused a lot more on excitement and spectacle
and showmanship than on research and discovery. But it was
clear from the beginning that balloon launches could spark a
backlash if they did not go as planned. On January sixteenth,
(10:29):
seventeen eighty four, just weeks after humans had successfully flown
in balloons for the first time, Benjamin Franklin wrote a
letter to Dutch scientists Jon Ingenhause. Franklin had previously sent
Ingenhouse everything he had learned about balloons, and he said
that if Ingenhause sent someone to France, Franklin was sure
they could learn whatever they needed to figure out how
(10:50):
to make one for themselves from there. He said, quote,
if you undertake to make one, I think it extremely
proper and necessary to send an ingenious man here for
that purpose. Otherwise, for want of attention to some particular circumstance,
or of being acquainted with it, the experiment might miscarry, which,
being in an affair of so much public expectation, would
(11:12):
have bad consequences, draw upon you a great deal of
censure and affect your reputation.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It is a serious thing to draw out from their
affairs all the inhabitants of a great city and its environs,
and a disappointment makes them angry. At Bordeaux lately a
person who pretended to send up a balloon and had
received money of many people, not being able to make
it rise. The populace were so exasperated that they pulled
(11:39):
down his house and had liked to have killed him.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
We will talk about some other exasperated populaces after a
sponsor break. In seventeen eighty four, printmaker Jean Francois Genine,
who had started calling himself an artist physicist, worked with
(12:06):
Abbe Laurent Antoine Melin, who lectured in physics, to build
a balloon. Their design actually involved three balloons. There was
the primary hot air balloon and a gas filled balloon
that would float above it, and then a balloon filled
with cold air that would hang below it. They wanted
to study the atmosphere and the behavior of the three
(12:28):
balloons and the gases within them from the gondola that
was suspended below. They had financed their project primarily by
selling tickets to the launch, and that was the case
for a lot of balloonists. Even like the hardcore scientific balloonists,
a lot of times were funding things with ticket sales.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
They planned to take off from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris
on July eleventh, seventeen eighty four. Although they had made
some successful test flights, this public launch failed when they
were not able to adequately fill the hot air balloon.
It's not clear whether the balloon caught fire during the
attempt to fill it, or if angry onlookers set it alight,
(13:09):
but it did catch fire, and once it was burning,
outraged ticket holders burst into the launch area, tearing pieces
off of the balloon and breaking up the viewing stands
to throw into the fire. One of the people who
witnessed this was Benjamin Franklin Batch, grandson of Benjamin Franklin,
whose diary entry about the day described some of the
(13:30):
carried off balloon pieces as big enough to make a mattress. Afterwards,
Milan and Jeanniet were ridiculed in the popular press, including
people writing satirical songs about them. The September eighth, eighteen
nineteen riot that inspired this episode took place in Vauxhall Gardens,
(13:52):
not the ones in London, but gardens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
that had been named for them. I think people in
England also said that more like Vauxhall, the balloon belonged
to a French aeronaut known as Monsieur Michel, who was
going to go up in the balloon and then parachute
down from it. This was just a few days after
(14:14):
a failed balloon launch by a different aeronaut in Camden,
and Camden is just on the other side of the
Delaware River from Philadelphia, so a lot of people from
Philadelphia had gone to Camden to try to watch, and
they had not been able to see a balloon. Vauxhall
Garden was surrounded by a tall wooden fence, and hundreds
(14:35):
of people had paid a dollar apiece, significant money in
these days to come inside to watch. People who did
not have a dollar or just didn't want to pay
it tried to get a glimpse from the outside, and
the crowd included people who traveled in from Camden or
from other places around Philadelphia. The balloon was big enough
that the top would be visible from the ground outside
(14:57):
the fence once it was inflated, and people also climbed
onto roofs and into trees to get a better view.
Counting the ticket holders and the people outside the fence,
roughly thirty thousand people were estimated to be there. Monsieur
Michelle started filling the balloon with gas at about two PM,
and at seven pm it still was not ready. According
(15:21):
to an article in the Rhode Island American published about
a week after the incident, one of the reasons it
was filling so slowly is that an impatient spectator had
thrown a rock at it, and that rock had made
a hole that was continually letting gas out of the balloon.
On the other hand, the Washington, DC Daily National Intelligencer
(15:42):
said this rock puncture happened after the balloon had been
somewhat filled at least and was partially aloft. Most of
the documentation I found on this whole incident was in
news reports, and all of them are slightly different from
one another. Vendors were selling food and drink at this event,
and after a while a lot of the spectators were intoxicated.
(16:05):
A detail that most of the accounts agree upon is
that a boy in his mid teens climbed the fence.
In some accounts, one of the garden attendants struck and
killed him. In others, the boy struck someone inside the
fence with a stick, and that person either hit him
back or hit a couple of children who happened to
be nearby. Rumors spread that either this teenager or a
(16:29):
young child had been killed, or maybe one of them
really had been killed. All of this unclear.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Whatever exactly the details, it sparked a riot in which
the onlookers from the outside of the fence burst through it,
tearing the balloon to shreds and lighting a lot of
the garden on fire, including its pavilion and benches. Musicians
had been hired to play for the day, and rioters
smashed their instruments. People robbed the vendors of their food
(17:00):
and their alcohol and other wares, and somebody stole all
the ticket money, which was about eight hundred dollars. Multiple
people were injured, and by nine pm Vauxhall Gardens was
basically destroyed. Its owner sold the property in the aftermath,
and it changed hands a couple of times before eventually
being rebuilt and reopened as an outdoor theater. In eighteen
(17:23):
thirty eight, an ascent that was supposed to take place
in Cremorne Gardens in London similarly went wrong. The event
was described this way in a nineteen oh seven book
about the gardens quote. It was announced to ascend on
May twenty four, and people began to assemble in the
grounds at noon. By seven o'clock there were nearly five
(17:43):
thousand spectators and behind a huge tarpaulin the balloon was
supposed to be in the process of inflation. The balloon
was attached to a platform in the middle of the lake,
and its peculiarity was that it had to be inflated
by chopped straw burnt in a brazier under the orifice
of the bag. The size of the furnace had been miscalculated,
(18:05):
and after the balloon had twice been set on fire,
the intrepid aeronaut decided not to ascend. Some of the
spectators considered that at any rate the balloon could be punished,
and a well directed volley of stones soon left the
monster prostrate on the lake. An attempt was made to
(18:25):
drag it on shore and tear it in pieces, but
at this moment the cord broke. Some of the rowdier
spirits now sought out the proprietor, hoping to duck him
in one of his own ponds, and when this failed,
they attacked the glass planes of the Lion's conservatory. Not
seemed like a great idea, but suddenly the police appeared
(18:47):
and Vesuvius burst forth in all of its fury, and
when the fireworks were over, the visitors quietly dispersed. In
case that last bit is not totally clear, this park
had a panorama of Mount Vesuvius, and they set off
fireworks from there at night, and they basically started the
fireworks display to try to get everybody to focus on
something else. A riot in Sydney, Australia, on December eighteenth,
(19:12):
eighteen fifty six was also similar. French balloonist Pierre Magre
hoped to make Australia's first successful balloon flight. Roughly five
thousand people had gathered by two pm, which is when
he was supposed to start inflating the balloon with hot air,
but he didn't actually get started until three PM, and
the crowd continued to grow and to become more and
(19:34):
more impatient. As the balloon slowly filled, people started to
doubt that it was even possible to inflate the balloon
because it seemed like the material was just too heavy.
They added more fuel to the fire. Things started to
move a little bit faster, and eventually the balloon did
start to ascend, but the cords that had been used
to tether it were dangling, and one of them got
(19:57):
caught in something. The effort to un tangle that trailing
cord wound up releasing a lot of the hot air
out of the balloon. As the balloon started to deflate,
people from the less expensive outer part of the viewing
area rushed to the inside. Either the balloon caught fire
or someone set it on fire. I feel like that's
(20:18):
a frequent refrain in this episode. Somebody had possibly kicked
the fire that had been used to fill it, and
then people started chanting burn.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The balloon, Burn the balloon. The fire spread to the
tent where the wine and straw used for fuel had
been stored, and that caught fire as well. Megra was
forced to flee during the early stages of its inflation.
This balloon had been suspended from a cord that was
draped between two poles, and in this chaos people started
(20:48):
knocking down the poles. One of them hit two children
as it fell. Eleven year old Thomas Downs was reported
to have died of a skull fracture two days after this.
An inquest found Meg to be responsible, describing him as
the quote perpetrator of the sham balloon incident and censuring
(21:10):
him a little more than a year later, on February first,
eighteen fifty eight, Joseph Dean went aloft in a balloon
filled with coal gas, taking off from Cremorne Gardens in Melbourne,
Australia and succeeding where Pierre Magra had not. Then, on
February fifteenth, Charles Henry Brown did the same. Both men
(21:31):
had been hired by George Coppin, who was a theater
entrepreneur who also funded both of the ascents. But according
to Brown's account, this crowd was angry with him when
he returned. This might have been because they got bored
since he had taken off really late in the day,
or it could have been because Coppin had offered a
(21:52):
reward for the safe return of the balloon. If something
went wrong with the launch, people might have wanted to
claim that reward, even though nothing had gone wrong and
Brown was still in possession of the balloon. In Brown's
words quote on my descent, I was treated in a
most brutal manner by the people assembled. Why I know not,
(22:13):
but they tore the hair from my head, bruised, crushed,
and almost suffocated me, besides damaging the balloon by tugging
at and trampling on it. This does not apply to
mister Hugh Peck of Collingwood, to whom I am under
the obligation of returning the balloon to Cremorne in safety
and declining to receive any remuneration for his trouble. Mister
(22:34):
Needham of the gas works assisted in extricating me from
the savages. Probably the most thoroughly documented and well known
balloon riot took place in Leicester, England, in eighteen sixty four,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
(23:00):
Sixty four Leicster balloon riot involved a balloonist who had
become particularly well known because of an earlier incidence that
did not involve a riot that was Henry Tracy Coxwell.
Coxwell was born in eighteen nineteen and had trained originally
as a dentist, but he had shifted a lot of
his focus to ballooning after taking his first balloon flight
(23:23):
at the age of twenty five. He undertook numerous balloon launches,
primarily in and around London, including in London's Vauxhall Gardens
and Cremorne Gardens, which were ticketed money making entertainment events.
This earlier incident also involved doctor James Glacier. Glacier was
(23:44):
born in eighteen oh nine and he was a meteorologist
who wanted to conduct experiments aboard balloons. He undertook twenty
eight balloon ascents during his career, many of them with Coxwell,
often with funding from the British Association for the van
of Science. The two men had launched from Wolverhampton, England,
(24:05):
on September fifth, eighteen sixty two. Glacier was equipped with
photographic plates, what bulb thermometers, a hygrometer and other instruments
to study the atmosphere and weather as they ascended to
high altitudes. They also had several pigeons aboard to see
how those pigeons would fly at high altitudes. We don't
(24:26):
really need to get into the detail, but only one
of the pigeons seems to have survived this journey. By
one forty PM, they had reached an elevation of about
four miles or more than twenty one thousand feet. They
continued to ascend in about ten minutes. After that, Glacier
realized he could no longer see the mercury column in
(24:47):
the wet bulb thermometer, or the hands of his watch,
or any other fine detail on any of his instruments.
Glacier asked Coxwell for help, but just then the balloon's
valve line came entangled and Coxwell had to fix it.
Glacier had already noticed that Coxwell seemed winded, and Glacier
had attributed that to the physical work that he was
(25:09):
having to do around the balloon. But shortly after Coxwell
went to fix this valve line. In Glacier's words, quote,
I laid my arm upon the table, possessed of its
full vigor, but on being desirous of using it, I
found it powerless. It must have lost its power. Momentarily
trying to move the other arm, I found it powerless also.
(25:33):
Then I tried to shake myself and succeeded, but I
seemed to have no limbs, and looking at the barometer,
my head fell over my left shoulder. I struggled and
shook my body again, but could not move my arms,
getting my head upright for an instant only it fell
on my right shoulder. Then I fell backwards, my back
resting against the side of the car and my head
(25:55):
on its edge. In this position, my eyes were directed
to me mister Coxwell in the ring. When I shook
my body, I seemed to have full power over the
muscles of the back, and considerably so over those of
the neck, but none over either my arms or my legs,
as in the case of the arms, so all muscular
(26:15):
power was lost in an instant from my back and neck.
I dimly saw mister Coxwell and endeavored to speak, but
could not. In an instant, intense darkness overcame me, so
that the optic nerve lost power suddenly, but I was
still conscious with as active a brain as at the
present moment. Whilst writing this, I thought I had been
(26:36):
seized with asphyxia, and believed I should experience nothing more,
as death would come unless we speedily descended. Glacier then
lost consciousness and a few minutes later became aware of
Coxwell trying to rouse him. Coxwell had nearly lost consciousness
as well and had started to lose control of his limbs.
(26:57):
Coxwell had realized that they had to get to a
lower altitude, and since he couldn't use his hands, he
had managed to open the valve to release some of
the gas from the balloon by grabbing the cord with
his teeth. Coxwell still couldn't use his hands by the
time Glacier regained consciousness, and Glacier tried to treat them
by pouring brandy over them. The last barometer reading that
(27:20):
Glacier was able to record as they ascended suggested that
at that point they were at an altitude of about
twenty nine thousand feet, and then after that he had
lost consciousness, but they were still climbing when he lost consciousness,
and they are estimated to have reached an altitude of
thirty seven thousand feet or just over seven miles in
other words, in the cruising altitude ranged for today's commercial airliners.
(27:46):
Neither man fully understood what had happened to them physiologically,
at that elevation, but his words spread about the terrifying flight.
It was obvious to everyone that they would have died
if Coxwell had not managed to open that valve. This
experience did not discourage Glacier from his scientific pursuits on balloons,
though he got back to work almost immediately after regaining consciousness,
(28:10):
and twenty one of his scientific balloon flights happened after
this one. Almost two years later, on July eleventh, eighteen
sixty four, Coxwell, who was famous from this earlier experience,
planned a balloon ascent that was to take place at
a Forester's fete at a racecourse in Leicester. The Foresters
are a friendly society also known as a Mutual Aid Society,
(28:33):
which had been established as the Ancient Order of Foresters
in eighteen thirty four. For this, Coxwell was going to
test a new balloon called the Britannia, and it was
going to be attached to the car that he had
used for his experimental flights with Glacier. The plan was
for a group of passengers, including two women, to go
(28:54):
aloft with him. Coxwell later wrote a letter to the
editor at the Times describing what happened. He noted that
no real barrier had been erected around the launch site
and that he had to quote beg hard for a
policeman to be present. He had heard that there were
only eight on site for an event with an estimated
fifty thousand people. According to an eyewitness statement, no arrangements
(29:18):
had been made for keeping the ground around the balloon clear.
There was just a temporary barrier which was quickly knocked
down by the crowd, and that made it impossible for
Coxwell to do what he needed to do with the
balloon before the flight could even begin.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
According to Coxwell quote, early in the afternoon, a gentleman
reported to be a provincial aeronaut gave it out that
the balloon then present was not my largest and newest balloon,
but a small one. This was a cruel libel, and aroused.
I was told an angry feeling among the visitors. The
lack of policeman to maintain order soon manifested itself, For
(29:55):
on a band entering the balloon ground, the boards were
carried at once, and thousands of persons broke in and
harassed my operations excessively. It was in vain that I
entreated for and that several gentlemen succeeded in clearing an
open space the deficiency of strong barriers having afforded access.
(30:16):
All subsequent attempts to stop the tide of human pressure
proved unavailing.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
The crowd demanded that he take off immediately, but he couldn't.
Some supports that had been put up to hold the
balloon while it was being inflated needed to be taken down,
but the crew that was supposed to do that wasn't
even there. Coxwell threatened to let the gas out of
the balloon unless the crowd got itself under control, because
they were creating a dangerous situation. Police officers arrived and
(30:46):
they started trying to clear the area around the balloon,
but when Coxwell started releasing the gas, the crowd became
enraged and attacked it. There were also rumors that police
officers had struck a woman. Police sergeant led Coxwell away
from all of this, but in his words, quote, my
clothes were soon torn, and then the cry was raised,
(31:08):
rip him up, knock him in the head, finish him,
et cetera, all of which would have inevitably been executed
had I not followed the inspector's advice. The crowd set
fire to the balloon car and tore the balloon to pieces.
Many of these pieces were then sold as souvenirs. The
(31:28):
balloon's hoop was not flammable, and the crowd paraded it
around the streets. Coxwell attributed this incident to a lack
of foresight in not providing enough policeman for a forester's bet.
He asked the foresters for compensation for this incident and
for the destruction of his equipment, but because of the
Aid Society's rules, this wasn't something they could just do immediately.
(31:52):
There was like a whole process that had to happen
before giving away the Society's money. Other people in Lester
raised funds totaling more than eight hundred pounds to try
to compensate him. Although Glacier doesn't seem to have been
involved in this ascension attempt, the destruction of the balloon
and the car that he had used for his experiments
(32:13):
did cause a setback in his meteorological research. He later
returned to the sky in one of Coxwell's old balloons,
equipped with a new car, but it seems like the
two men had a more personal falling out at some
point after this. The details regarding that don't seem to
be well documented. The twenty nineteen movie The Aeronauts stars
(32:35):
Eddie Redmain as James Glacier, but Henry Tracy Coxwell is
just not depicted in the movie. It seems like this
was one of the last big balloon riots, not because
of some kind of change in the psychology and dynamics
of sometimes drunken crowds, but because ballooning stopped being such
a huge fad and it stopped drawing those kinds of
(32:55):
crowds of expectant onlookers.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
And that there's balloon riots. I have some listener mail
to take us out. This actually is from a little
bit ago. This is from Christy who wrote after our
episode on Soap. Christy wrote and said, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I love listening to the podcast during my commute. I
(33:19):
probably only have my PhD in s y MIHC if
I was the kind of student who skips classes because
I've listened for a very long time, but I've also
had a couple of year plus gaps. In your recent
episode on Soap, you mentioned an earlier not technically soap
product related to wool. It's a bit of a tangent,
but I thought you might enjoy hearing about suwant fermentation.
(33:41):
It's a method of cleaning raw wool that relies on
fermentation of natural sweat and minerals in the wool with
rain water to create a cleaning substance. Supposedly also stinks
like you wouldn't believe, so I may put off trying
it until I have somewhere it wouldn't bother me to
let it sit. Thank you so much for the work
you put into thoughtfully selecting and researching topics, presenting them
(34:03):
with care, and sharing them own way that is both
personable and informative. As a pet tax, please see my
ten year old dog Zelda. While we usually say she
is a Sheba husky mix, looks like Sheba size of
a husky, Her adoption paperwork listed four different variations on
breed mixes, and a DNA test said she was a mutt,
high percentage of Asian slash Arctic breeds, and a moderate
(34:26):
percentage of terrier. All my best, Christie, this is a
cute little puppy dog. I am not good at a
described I'm like, what do I want to say about
this dog? A kind of fox? Like face and ears
and a mostly kind of buff and hand color coat,
(34:47):
looking very happy sitting under some hydranchas in bloom. Thank
you so much for sending this dog picture and about
suant for vacation. I'm not a thing that I had
ever heard of, and in fact misread when reading the
email initially as Sue it, which is not quite the
same thing, not at all the same thing, really, If
(35:12):
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcasts, where a history podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
(35:35):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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