Sophie Blanchard and Balloonomania

From timid girl to trailblazer, Sophie Blanchard became famous in the early 1800s as the first woman to become a career balloonist.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Fry, I'm Tracy ban Wilson. Uh And two
hundred years ago, there was a craze sweeping Europe which

(00:22):
was balloon Nomania. Manned balloon flights were amazing crowds and
capturing imaginations, and balloons became a popular decorative motif from
everything from ceramic plates to copper cake tins and even
integrated into fashion. Uh And, one of the famed figures
in this whole balloon ing um madness was a woman

(00:43):
named Sophie Blanchard, and she was the first woman to
become a professional balloonist. But how did a timid girl,
which she was according to most people, become a trailblazer
in what was an extremely dangerous career field. Before we
get to that story, we need to look a little
bit how balloons became so popular in the late eighteenth century.

(01:04):
So in seventeen sixty six there was a scientific thing
that happened, which is that British philosopher and chemist Henry
Cavendish made a discovery that really kind of catapulted ballooning
into the public eye. He isolated hydrogen, which at the
time he called inflammable air. It wasn't named hydrogen until
another scientist worked with it, later named Antoine Levoisier. This

(01:27):
new knowledge of this lighter than air element led to
experimentations in balloon technology that weren't based on hot air uh,
and so the invention of the gas balloon, which was
also known as Charliere or Robertine uh took place. Whereas
nowadays we're back to hot air. But there's a reason
for that that comes up in this podcast. Well, and

(01:48):
you may guess what it is if you have listened
to our podcast about the Hindenburg. Yeah, it's not a
super big serret that they called it inflammable air for
a reason. It caught fire extremely easily. Yes, so spoiler alert,
there will be fire. Fire will happen. So when Sophie

(02:10):
was still just a child in the seventeen eighties, two
brothers by the name of Mongolfy eight were experimenting with
balloon technology. France's King Louis the sixteenth was intrigued by
the Mongolfies work, and he proposed that they send two
criminals up in a manned flight. When the technology had
reached the appropriate five. Yeah, they had balloons, had started small,

(02:33):
and we're getting bigger and bigger, and Louis the sixteenth
is like, we could send up a couple of criminals.
There's no real risk there. Something happened sort of demonstrates
the element of danger that was involved here, like not
quite safe enough for regular people, but in the view
of the king, criminals would be fine. Yeah. But the
Mongolfiated brothers did not actually agree their first flight. They

(02:56):
actually opted to send up farm animals. They arted with
a duck, a rooster and a sheep, and the animal's
main history is the first living creatures in flight in
seventeen eighty three and at ann and A, France, and
they landed safely on the ground after about ten minutes aloft.
So the king and his queen, who was of course
Brie Antoinette, were apparently utterly delighted by this exhibition, as

(03:20):
was a very large crowd that had gathered to witness
this event. Sounds like a like the setup to a juke.
There were get in a balloon and delight the King
of France. Yes. A few months later, one of the brothers,
et Tienne, got to be the first human to man
a balloon flight, so at the end flight was tethered,

(03:42):
but not long after his controlled foura into the sky.
An untethered flight carried the French Marquis Francois Laurent, le
Vie d'arlande and Pila Rosier on a brief flight, which
was witnessed once again by King Louis the sixteenth as
well as Benjamin Franklin, and again a sizeable crowd. People
were really white entranced by these balloon flights. The man

(04:04):
Sophie would marry was born on July fourth, seventeen fifty three.
Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard was twenty five years older than
she was, and Jean Pierre started his own experiments with
flying machines in the seventeen seventies. His focused on the
use of a rowing in the air, almost like you
would have ship, and trying to get air currents to

(04:26):
lift the vessel. But once the Mongolfie brothers showed the
success of balloon ing, Jean Pierre switched gears completely and
joined the ballooning craze. Jean Pierre made his first balloon
ascent in March of seventeen eighty four. Sophie would have
been around six at this point, and in January seventeen
eighty five he made the first manned flight over the

(04:47):
English Channel with an American doctor, John Jeffries. They started
in England and landed in France. Yeah. Subsequent attempt to
cross the Channel in the opposite direction by pelatroge Rosier,
who was had been in one of those earlier flights,
did not end so well. Uh. It resulted in the
first recorded aviation fatality. In his heart, Jean Pierre was

(05:12):
a showman above anything else, and to make money he
took his ballooning on tour. During this time, he abandoned
the wife he had been married to since seventeen seventy four,
Victoire Lebron, and their four children to poverty while he
traveled and showed crowds his arenautical skills. Yeah there. Jean

(05:33):
Pierre is a very interesting character and he could be
his own whole podcast because there are a lot of
crazy stories about him, and they are always these little like, oh,
he was doing these amazing things. By the way, he
did some really seedy stuff as well, like he left
his wife. He tried to cheat some business partners along
the way there there are all of those, so keep
that in mind. Um. But as he was doing all
of his showmanship, he decided to add a bit of

(05:56):
flare to the proceedings, and so he would sometimes drop
a parachuted dog from the balloon basket or shoot off fireworks. Um.
And the first dog drop happened on June three five,
and according to accounts, the dog survived, so Blanchard would
repeat the experiment on subsequent shows because people were so
wowed by this idea of a dog being dropped from

(06:18):
a balloon and surviving. He also tried parachuting himself. He
was the first person to successfully use a parachute, and
at one point he added sales to his balloon in
the hope of improving propulsion and maneuvering. Jean Pierre was
basically a rock star of the ballooning world and even
a trendsetter. Balloon enthusiasts copied his hairstyle and the images

(06:40):
of his balloon appeared on ladies, fans, and other accessories,
and he also, as one of his business ventures, founded
a short lived school called the Balloon and Parachute Aristatic Academy,
but it did not last terribly long. In sevente Jean
Pierre ascended from a prison yard in Philadelphia aboard a balloon,
the first North American ass for an audience, which included

(07:02):
the US founding fathers. It was his forty five ascension,
and he was doing all of these incredible things. He
actually still holds records, and he was incredibly popular, and
he did a lot of theatrical lifts and would sell tickets.
But Jean Pierre really found himself in some pretty steep
financial trouble, and to make matters worse, he had angered

(07:22):
John Jeffries, who had been his primary financial contributor and
was also his partner in the English crossing, the English
Channel crossing. But he had always handled his money poorly.
Even when he was making a lot of money, he
was spending far more than he was taking in, and
he was trying to find new ways to reinvigorate the
interest of spectators and always sell more tickets and book

(07:43):
more shows. Before we go on, we need to finally
talk about Sophie. Sophie was born on March. Her birth
name was Marie Madeleine Sophie Armand one of the bothersome
aspects of this story is that we just don't have
a lot of information about what her life was like
pre Jean Pierre. Yeah, almost any biography you read of her,

(08:06):
when you look it up in books on the history
of ballooning, it's literally like she was born and then
she married this guy, and then she became important. Things
happened in between. Yeah, there must have been, but it
really is pretty difficult to find any of them. But
what we do know is that she was a very
nervous young woman. People that know who knew her describe
her as being afraid of even writing in carriages. Uh.

(08:29):
Physical descriptions of her from multiple sources all describe her
as very small, with angular features. Sometimes she's described as
bird like, and most accounts of her appearance are actually
kind of unflattering. I found one that said she was pretty,
but the rest were kind of mean. I am sort
of tired of mean descriptions of ladies personal features in history. Yeah.

(08:51):
I mean that happens now today too. At some point
we will be history and people will talk about how
everyone was, talking about how ugly everybody was. I gets
on my ner herbs John she had a very interesting life.
It didn't really matter. I think it matters the focus
on appearance is what is getting on my nerve. Jean
Pierre and Sophie were married at some point between seventeen

(09:13):
nine and eighteen o four, and it kind of varies
depending on the source you look at, so you might
see any number of conflicting dates. Yes, some suggest that,
um there, it's hinted in some biographies that he may
have married her as a way to propel his show career. Um.
Others suggest that they had already been married, but and

(09:34):
what had happened to his old wife? She died in poverty. Yeah,
thanks Jean Pierre. Sorry Victoire, You're apparently not important enough
to him to worry about. Uh, he's got to do
his balloon thing. And as part of his plan to
drum up new income, Jean Pierre hatched this plan to
add Sophie to the show to add novelty and attract
bigger crowds. So again some some books will suggest that, um,

(09:59):
him to eating her up in a balloon was like
a honeymoon, and others just say no, no, they were
already married, but he took his wife, who at this
point was just aged six, half his age, up in
their first duo flight together on December four at Marseilles,
sort of unexpectedly, given everything everybody had said about her
at this point, Sophie found balloon flight exhilarating, and she

(10:22):
didn't show any of her timidity that she had shown
on land while she was aloft, so this attraction to
traveling was born. She said to have described balloon flight
as an incomparable sensation. In addition to her as sense
with Jean Pierre, Sophie also started to make solo balloon
trips as well, and just as a note, while Sophie

(10:45):
is often referred to as the first female aeronaut, she
was not, strictly speaking, the first female balloonist. Several other
women had made a sense in balloons, both tathered and
free before her, but she was the first woman to
fly a balloon solo, and she was certainly the first
to make a career out of it. During a flight
over the Hague in February eighteen o eight, Jean Pierre

(11:06):
had a heart attack and he fell out of the
basket that he and Sophie were in, and we wound
up following more than fifty feet or fifteen point two meters,
and Jean Pierre never recovered from his injuries. From this fall,
and he hung on for a little more than a year,
but he died on March seventh of eighteen o nine,
and he was only fifty six at the time. When

(11:27):
Jean Pierre died, he left this mountain of debt behind,
and rather than being a quiet and retiring widow, Sophie,
he vowed to make good on all of those debts.
She kept on with her ballooning career to bring in money,
and she fulfilled her promise to pay back the creditors
that Jean Pierre owed. That always kind of blows me away,
Like this woman in the early eighteen hundreds is left

(11:49):
not just destitute, but deeply in debt by her husband,
and she's like, Okay, I'll handle it all right, ballooning,
let's do it. That's pretty impressive. Uh. And she is
said to have loved ballooning at night in particular, and
she eventually got into the habit of all night trips.
There was one biographical article I was reading that suggested
that part of why she might have its pure speculation,

(12:11):
enjoyed ballooning even though she was afraid of like everything
on the ground, was that it was quiet there. And
what was really scaring her like in of course carriages,
and you know out on the streets was just the
noise of it. It is quite noisy to be a
carriage drawn by horses like cobblestone or whatever. But we
don't know. But if that was the case, it would
make sense that she would really find it to be
a good place to spend the night. Uh and then

(12:33):
following her to see spouse's lead. She also took on
some theatrics. She would use these night trips to launch
fireworks from the balloon to dramatic effect. That is just
as bad of an idea as it sounds horrible idea.
These don't ever go up in a helium balloon. This
was hydrogen. Don't do helium either. Don't set off fireworks

(12:56):
bullet even if what's inside of it is not an
immensely flammable gas. On June ten, Sophie made her sixteenth
ascension as part of a celebration of the marriage of
Napoleon and Marie Louise, and Napoleon was extremely fond of Sophie.
He appointed her Chief Air Minister of Ballooning, and in

(13:19):
this role she actually developed and assessed plans for balloon
based aerial raids of England for Napoleon, although she eventually
had to report to him that this really was not
a feasible way to wage a war, that these were
not missions that he should plan on doing. They needed
dragons like in the Terror air books. That's what I think.
Even after the French monarchy was restored, Sophie stayed in

(13:42):
the good graces of the nation leaders. As part of
Louis the eighteenth Restoration celebration, Sophie ascended in a balloon
from pont Neuf and was eventually named official aeronaut of
the Restoration by the Bourbon king. And she was also
something of a daredevil in the air, and she really
did become quite famous throughout Europe. Uh. What's interesting is

(14:03):
that she accomplished a lot of feats that her husband
had only dreamed of, and of course she also got
herself in a lot of dangerous situations. One of the
big accomplishments was that she crossed the Alps by balloon,
which UH Jean Pierre had always said he was interested
in doing but never achieved. En route to turn in
April of eighteen twelve, she had nosebleeds and icicles formed

(14:26):
on her face and hands a little bit dangerous. In
eighteen seventeen, she had a really weird sort of brush
with danger. She mistook a flooded field for a meadow
and she tried to land there and she nearly drowned.
But fortunately there were horsemen that had been tracking her
flight and when they saw the balloon go down, they
were able to get to her and pull her to safety.

(14:46):
Her night trips would also sometimes last all night, and
she would occasionally fall asleep in the basket, which isn't
really maybe the smartest thing doze off while you're conducting
a vehicle. I'm gonna go with a vehicle that is
in the sky and also flammable. None of the vehicles
should you sleep all your but especially if it's in

(15:07):
the sky and also flammable. Uh so. On July six,
eight nineteen, Sophie prepared for one of her regular appearances
over the Tivoli Gardens in Paris, and she normally made
this ascent twice each week. When she was in Paris,
she would sell tickets to spectators who would come and
watch her balloon, and they would also watch her huge

(15:27):
nighttime fireworks show. On this particular night, she was carrying
a larger than normal compliment of the fireworks because she
was preparing what she called her Bengal fire display, and
this was a slow burning fireworks shoe. She reported to
have said at all Sister a Pla as she got
into the basket, which means, let's go for the last time.

(15:51):
Whether she actually meant for the show to be her
last one, she was forty one at the time, and
all she was financially stay stable, but she was not
exactly rolling in money and ready to tire. It's not
really clear. We don't have a record or sure of
whether she really meant for this to be her last show. Yeah,
there are discussions of it in different books. One is

(16:13):
just that because she had so many fireworks, there are
some stories, and again they're unverified that people were like, no, no,
you shouldn't go. It's it's too much, and others were like,
come on, let's start the fireworks. And it could be
that she was just saying for the last time, I'm going,
we're doing this, just that it didn't have anything to
do with it being her last time in the air.

(16:34):
But it did prove to be a little bit prophetic
because as the show started, the wind shifted, and Uh,
Sophie would do this thing where she would drop fireworks
from the basket on parachutes, similar to how they had
dropped dogs and people after the past ket previously. Uh,
and they would burn out as they fell to the ground.
But because of the wind shift, she was being carried

(16:54):
away from to Voli Gardens. Something went wrong with this
show and Sophie's balloon on on fire, as you may
have guessed was going to happen by the abundant foreshadowing
and just the simple science, like the choice of hydrogen
is as a gas to inflate the balloon and then
carry fire and carry fire around those some spectators cheered,

(17:16):
believing that the flames were part of just a huge
spectacle that was intentional and part of the show. Yeah,
she had such a reputation for putting on these amazing
shows that they were like, wow, she's making it look
like the balloon's on fire. The balloon was on fire. Uh.
And she is said to have tried to slow the
descent of the balloon by cutting ballast as it went
up in flames. So she's kind of floating over Paris

(17:37):
at this point, um, and trying to slow things down
so she doesn't just crash into something. And there are
some accounts that suggest that spectators thought, even after they
had realized that this was not part of the show,
they really thought that she might have a good shot
at landing safely. But as she was working, the balloon
hit the roof of a house and she was thrown
out of it. She was found dead on the street,

(18:00):
according to newspaper accounts YEA. Some suggests that she broke
her neck um others simply say that she was dead
in the street, and they don't go into any detail.
Sophie was buried in Paris in the Parlasch Cemetery, and
her monument was paid for through public donations. It features
a pedestal with a sphere and a flame atop it,
representing the aeronaut's fiery final voyage. I find that kind

(18:23):
of morbid. It is a little bit weird to show
the manner of death on the monuments. There's an apoctable
story that the funds for the monument were actually the
profits from ticket sales, which the Tivoli Gardens management had
initially earmarked for Blanchard's children, but then they realized she
had no children and reallocated them to the monument. Yeah.

(18:44):
I couldn't find verification on that one, but it was
such a fun odd story, like they were like, we
must give the money to her children, someone knowing she
doesn't have kids. We must build a monument. It's so
almost money python esque and it's kind of uh, well
meaning uh incorrectness, that is. And I don't mean to

(19:06):
disparage her or using hydrogen for her balloon. That is
what was available for her to you well, and it
was an age of excitement, you know, where things were
being experimented and you know, it had only been about
fifty years since hydrogen had been identified and these balloons
kind of represented like a new age of what they
could do and achieve and how far they could go.
And we all part of science. And as we've talked about,

(19:29):
it took a very long time for people to stop
filling things with hydrogen to then float people around in Yes,
there is actually an animated documentary that's being directed by
Jen Sachs titled The Fantastic Flights of Sophie Blanchard that's
been in production um for a while now, since it's
successfully funded through an indiego go campaign and as of

(19:50):
about a month ago. Their last update was that the
production was working on the final animation sequence, so there
will very soon theoretically be a new short animated documentary.
I love those two words together about Sophie Blanchard and
her life and work and uh, this crazy balloon career
that she had, which you know, relatively short but quite fascinating.

(20:16):
I think that sounds like fun and I hope it's
available for people to to stream or otherwise see. Yeah,
you can visit the website now and we'll link to
it in the show notes. Um, and you'll see kind
of the pitch animation that they did for Indigogo, which
is quite interesting and it's a fun style, and you'll
see kind of where it's going. Do you also have
some listener mail for us? I do. Uh. This is

(20:38):
from our listener lease uh. And she says, I just
listened to both of the Bride episodes and I enjoyed
them overall. But I must say that I was disappointed
to hear you characterized Charles Lawton as gay. So many
times I've heard you discuss the issues about labeling someone's
sexual identity in ways they did not describe themselves. According
to your quote from Elsa's autobiography, Charles described himself as

(20:58):
partially homosexual, and he and Elsa did conceive a child.
Unless there's information you've come across that you did not cite,
Charles was bisexual. I find a change in terminology problematic
and hope that you rethink or clarify it. It's a
very good point and valid. Uh. And he never certainly
never came out himself publicly. And even when Elsa published

(21:19):
her autobiography at first and revealed this information, a lot
of his friends were very angry and said, no, no, no,
I think you must be making this up. Uh. So
it's really valid and we should say, like from Elsa's
point of view, she was married to a gay man,
because she does talk about throughout the book that even
when they were together, she realized that like his preference

(21:40):
for her mode of dress had more to do with
like her sort of looking boyish, and even her wedding
outfit was almost like a little uniform kind of thing.
And and she really felt like he was trying to
conform to the social norm of, you know, a heterosexual marriage,
but also trying to make it work for him, like
what appealed to her about him was probably her traits

(22:02):
that were very independent and some would characterize as masculine,
because most women were not quite as independent and self
sufficient and outspoken as her at the time, at least
not publicly. And she talks about also as they lived
their lives together that he's always very unhappy unless he
had sort of a a male companion with him, Like
he would become quite mean and angry with her um

(22:23):
and even cruel at times. But if he, you know,
had the companionship of a man, it was like he
that was when he felt right. So from her point
of view, having just read the reread the autobiography when
I was working on the show notes, I just sort
of naturally slip into her POV and go, yes, he
was gay, but you're absolutely right, we shouldn't say outright
he was gay. As for whether he was bisexual, I

(22:43):
mean that sort of gets into a whole other thing
because there are lots of people that identify as gay
that have had had her sexual relationships. So there's a
only tangentially related. There's a really interesting oral history of
the lesbian bar culture. All boots of leather, slippers of gold,
and one of the things that the author talks about

(23:05):
is how much difficulty they had finding women who had
been in this culture and had been in like more
of the them stereotype who still identified as lebian. Which
I sort of put that out there is as one
of the things about in my in my mind, sexuality
being a continuum that has all kinds of places on it,

(23:27):
and a lot of people resist fitting exclusively into a
label that's a sumhere on that continuum. Yeah. Yeah, so
that's all tricky, but it was Lee's. I appreciate very
much you bring it to my attention, because I should
not have outright I said she's married to a gay man.
She was married to what she believed was a gay man,
and she certainly felt through their years of marriage together

(23:48):
that she was married to a gay man. But it's
like a point to bring up. I'm just glad this
conversation continues and is happening and people are thinking about it,
and not just sexual identity, but just people's identities and
how they get labeled historically. It's all very um fascinating
and quick meaningful, and so I appreciate it. Thank you.
If you would like to write to us about the

(24:08):
bride or ballooning, or anything else that you have in mind.
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(24:29):
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how hot air balloons work, which are not nearly as
dangerous as the hydrogen variety. I have different dangers, but
less so much of Maybe it will catch on fire
and in a dramatic crash. Yeah, we may have learned

(24:49):
a bit from all of these bad accidents. Uh. And
if you would like to research almost anything else your
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