December 30, 2017 • 22 mins
Today's classic episode revisits Sophie Blanchard, a timid girl who grew into a trailblazer, and became famous in the early 1800s as the first woman to become a career balloonist.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
How do how do you? Everybody? Welcome to Saturday. We
hope you are having a good weekend if these are
indeed your days off. Since we are headed into a
new year in everyone's perhaps thinking about setting goals for
achieving great things, in which we hope for all of you,
it seems like a good time to read visit the
story of a woman who achieved a great deal in
the early nineteenth century, Sophie Blanchard, and this show we
(00:23):
talked a little about the ballooning craze, but it's mostly
about one female aeronaut who was so obsessed with flying
even after her husband, famed balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard, died
in a ballooning accident. So we'll talk about how she
kept on going after that. So let's just take to
the skies. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class
(00:47):
from how Stop works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast I'll Fry. I'm Tracy being Wilson uh And
two hundred years ago there was a craze sweeping Europe
which was balloon Omania. Manned balloon flights were amazing crowds
(01:11):
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 named Sophie Blanchard, and she was the first woman
to become a professional balloonist. But how did a timid girl,
(01:34):
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 at how balloons became so popular in the late
eighteenth century. So in seventeen sixty six there was a
scientific thing that happened, which is at British philosopher and
chemist Henry Cavendish made a discovery that really kind of
(01:57):
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 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,
(02:20):
which was also known as Charlie or Robertine uh took place,
whereas nowadays we're back to hot air. But there's a
reason for that that kind of comes up in this podcast. Well,
and you may guess what it is if you have
listened to our podcast about the Hindenburg. Yeah, it's not
a super big scret that hydrogen. They called it inflammable
(02:42):
air for a reason. Yes, it caught fire extremely easily. Yes,
so spoiler alert, there will be fire, fire will happen.
So when Sophie was still just the child in the
seventeen eighties, two brothers by the name of Mongolfier were
experimenting with balloon technology. France's King Louis the sixteenth was
(03:05):
intrigued by the Montgolfies 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 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
that sort of demonstrates the element of danger that was
(03:29):
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 actually opted to send up farm animals. They started
with a duck, a rooster and a sheep, and the
animal's main history is the first living creatures in flight
(03:49):
in seventeen eighty three and at n and a France
and they landed safely on the ground after about ten
minutes aloft. So the king and his queen, who was
Brie Antoinette, were apparently utterly delighted by this exhibition, as
was a very large crowd that had gathered to witness
this event. Sounds like a like the setup to a
(04:09):
duke to me that there were get in a balloon
and delight the King of Frances. Yes. A few months later,
one of the brothers, et Tienne Mongolfier, got to be
the first human to man a balloon flight. So at
Hen's flight was tethered, but not long after his controlled
fouray into the sky, an untethered flight carried the French
(04:30):
marquis Francois Laurent le Vie d'arlande and Pilatrude 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 quite entranced by these
balloon flights. The man Sophie would marry was born on
July fourth, seventeen fifty three. Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard was
(04:55):
twenty five years older than she was, and Jean Pierre
started his own exp yeraments 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 lift the vessel. But
once the Mongolfie Brothers showed the success of balloon ing,
(05:16):
Jean Pierre switched gears completely enjoined 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 seventy five he made the first manned
flight over the English Channel with an American doctor, John Jeffries.
They started in England and landed in France. YEAH subsequent
(05:39):
attempt to cross the Channel in the opposite direction by
Platro de 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 a showman above anything else, and to
make money, he took his balloon ing on tour. During
(06:02):
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. Ye. There, Jean 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
(06:22):
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 flare to the proceedings,
and so he would sometimes drop a parachuted dog from
(06:45):
the balloon basket or shoot off fireworks. Um. And the
first dog drop happened on June three seive 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 a balloon
and surviving. He also tried parachuting himself. He was the
(07:07):
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 trend setter.
Balloon enthusiasts copied his hairstyle and the images of his
balloon appeared on ladies, fans and other accessories, and he also,
(07:29):
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 Geen Pierre ascended
from a prison yard in Philadelphia aboard a balloon, the
first North American ascent for an audience which included the
US founding fathers. It was his forty five ascension, and
(07:51):
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 it sell tickets.
But Jean Pierre really found himself in some pretty steep
financial trouble. And to make matters worse, he had angered
John Jeffries, who had been as primary financial contributor and
was also his partner in the English crossing, the English
(08:13):
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
more shows. Before we go on, we need to finally
(08:37):
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,
when you look it up in books on the history
(08:59):
of ballooning, it's litter really like she was born and
then she married this guy, and then she became important.
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. U
(09:20):
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, which 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
(09:40):
features in history. Yeah, 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.
That gets on my nerves. John, she had a very
interesting life. It didn't really matter. I think it matters.
The focus on appearances is getting out my nerve. Jean
(10:02):
Pierre and Sophie were married at some point between seventeen
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.
(10:22):
Others suggest that they had already been married, but and
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
(10:45):
bigger crowds. So again some some books will suggest that, um,
him taking 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 of his age, up in their first
duo flight together on December four at Marseille. That sort
(11:07):
of unexpectedly, given everything everybody had said about her at
this point, Sophie found balloon flight exhilarating, and she 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
(11:29):
Jean Pierre, Sophie also started to make solo balloon trips
as well, and just as a note, while Sophie is
often referred to as the first female aeronaut, she was not,
strictly speaking, the first female balloonists. 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,
(11:50):
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 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
(12:11):
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 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,
(12:31):
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
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
(12:52):
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,
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 horse carriages and
you know, out on the streets, was just the noise
of it. It is quite noisy to be in a
(13:15):
carriage drawn by horses over 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 following her to cease 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
(13:36):
just as bad of an idea as it sounds horrible idea.
Please don't ever go up in a helium balloon. This
was hydrogen. Don't do helium either. Don't set off fireworks
trouble look even if the what's inside of it is
not an immensely flammable gas. On June, Sophie made her
(14:00):
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 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
(14:22):
these were not missions that he should plan on doing.
They needed dragons, like in the Terrier books. That's what
I think. Even after the French monarchy was restored, Sophie
stayed in the good graces of the nation's leaders. As
part of Louis the eighteenth Restoration celebration, Sophie ascended in
a balloon from pont Neuf and was eventually named official
(14:44):
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 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
(15:08):
was interested in doing but never achieved. En route to
turn in April of eighteen twelve, she had nosebleeds and
icicles formed 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.
(15:30):
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.
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
(15:52):
in the sky and also flammable. None of the vehicles
should you sleep on your but especially if it's in
the sky and also flammable. So on July six, nineteen,
Sophie prepared for one of her regular appearances over the
(16:14):
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 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
(16:36):
slow burning fireworks shoe. She reported to have said at
all sisera as she got into the basket, which means
let's go for the last time. 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
(16:57):
and ready to retire. It's not really year. We don't
have a record we're sure of whether she really meant
for this to be her last show. Yeah, there are
discussions of it in different books. One is just that
because she had so many fireworks, there are some stories,
and again they're unverified, that people were like, no, no,
(17:18):
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.
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
(17:40):
from the basket on parachutes, similar to how they had
dropped dogs and people after the pass ket previously. UH,
and they would burn out as they fell to the ground.
But because of the wind shift, she was being carried
away from to Voli gardens. Something went wrong with the show,
and Sophie's balloon can on fire. As you may have
guessed was going happened by the abundant foreshadowing and just
(18:04):
the simple science, like the choice of hydrogen is as
a gas to inflate the balloon and then carry fire
and carry fire around. Yeah, there was some spectators cheered,
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 you look
like the balloon's on fire. The balloon was on fire. Uh,
(18:28):
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
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
(18:48):
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.
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 Parlasches Cemetery, and
(19:11):
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. Find that kind of morbid.
It is a little bit weird to show the manner
of death on the monument. There's an apoct full story
that the funds for the monument were actually the profits
from ticket sales, which the Toboli Gardens management had initially
(19:34):
earmarked for Blanchard's children, but then they realized she had
no children and reallocated them to the monument. Yeah. 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 going, she doesn't
have kids, we must build a monument. It's so almost
(19:54):
money python esque, and it's kind of uh well meaning,
uh incorrectness, that is, and I don't mean to 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
(20:17):
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 well
all part of science. And as we've talked about, 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
(20:39):
Gen 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 Indigo Go campaign, and as of
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
(20:59):
I of 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.
I think that sounds like fun and I hope it's
available for people to stream or otherwise see. Yeah, you
can visit the website now and we'll link to it
(21:21):
in the show notes. Um, and you'll see kind of
the pitch animation that they did for Indiegogo, which is
quite interesting and it's a fun style, and you'll see
kind of where it's going. Thank you so much for
joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out
(21:43):
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now, so
here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at
Missed in the History. All over social media you that
is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram.
(22:05):
Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. H
How do how do you? Everybody? Welcome to Saturday. We
hope you are having a good weekend if these are
indeed your days off. Since we are headed into a
new year in everyone's perhaps thinking about setting goals for
achieving great things, in which we hope for all of you,
it seems like a good time to read visit the
story of a woman who achieved a great deal in
the early nineteenth century, Sophie Blanchard, and this show we
(00:23):
talked a little about the ballooning craze, but it's mostly
about one female aeronaut who was so obsessed with flying
even after her husband, famed balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard, died
in a ballooning accident. So we'll talk about how she
kept on going after that. So let's just take to
the skies. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class
(00:47):
from how Stop works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast I'll Fry. I'm Tracy being Wilson uh And
two hundred years ago there was a craze sweeping Europe
which was balloon Omania. Manned balloon flights were amazing crowds
(01:11):
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 named Sophie Blanchard, and she was the first woman
to become a professional balloonist. But how did a timid girl,
(01:34):
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 at how balloons became so popular in the late
eighteenth century. So in seventeen sixty six there was a
scientific thing that happened, which is at British philosopher and
chemist Henry Cavendish made a discovery that really kind of
(01:57):
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 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,
(02:20):
which was also known as Charlie or Robertine uh took place,
whereas nowadays we're back to hot air. But there's a
reason for that that kind of comes up in this podcast. Well,
and you may guess what it is if you have
listened to our podcast about the Hindenburg. Yeah, it's not
a super big scret that hydrogen. They called it inflammable
(02:42):
air for a reason. Yes, it caught fire extremely easily. Yes,
so spoiler alert, there will be fire, fire will happen.
So when Sophie was still just the child in the
seventeen eighties, two brothers by the name of Mongolfier were
experimenting with balloon technology. France's King Louis the sixteenth was
(03:05):
intrigued by the Montgolfies 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 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
that sort of demonstrates the element of danger that was
(03:29):
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 actually opted to send up farm animals. They started
with a duck, a rooster and a sheep, and the
animal's main history is the first living creatures in flight
(03:49):
in seventeen eighty three and at n and a France
and they landed safely on the ground after about ten
minutes aloft. So the king and his queen, who was
Brie Antoinette, were apparently utterly delighted by this exhibition, as
was a very large crowd that had gathered to witness
this event. Sounds like a like the setup to a
(04:09):
duke to me that there were get in a balloon
and delight the King of Frances. Yes. A few months later,
one of the brothers, et Tienne Mongolfier, got to be
the first human to man a balloon flight. So at
Hen's flight was tethered, but not long after his controlled
fouray into the sky, an untethered flight carried the French
(04:30):
marquis Francois Laurent le Vie d'arlande and Pilatrude 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 quite entranced by these
balloon flights. The man Sophie would marry was born on
July fourth, seventeen fifty three. Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard was
(04:55):
twenty five years older than she was, and Jean Pierre
started his own exp yeraments 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 lift the vessel. But
once the Mongolfie Brothers showed the success of balloon ing,
(05:16):
Jean Pierre switched gears completely enjoined 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 seventy five he made the first manned
flight over the English Channel with an American doctor, John Jeffries.
They started in England and landed in France. YEAH subsequent
(05:39):
attempt to cross the Channel in the opposite direction by
Platro de 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 a showman above anything else, and to
make money, he took his balloon ing on tour. During
(06:02):
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. Ye. There, Jean 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
(06:22):
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 flare to the proceedings,
and so he would sometimes drop a parachuted dog from
(06:45):
the balloon basket or shoot off fireworks. Um. And the
first dog drop happened on June three seive 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 a balloon
and surviving. He also tried parachuting himself. He was the
(07:07):
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 trend setter.
Balloon enthusiasts copied his hairstyle and the images of his
balloon appeared on ladies, fans and other accessories, and he also,
(07:29):
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 Geen Pierre ascended
from a prison yard in Philadelphia aboard a balloon, the
first North American ascent for an audience which included the
US founding fathers. It was his forty five ascension, and
(07:51):
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 it sell tickets.
But Jean Pierre really found himself in some pretty steep
financial trouble. And to make matters worse, he had angered
John Jeffries, who had been as primary financial contributor and
was also his partner in the English crossing, the English
(08:13):
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
more shows. Before we go on, we need to finally
(08:37):
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,
when you look it up in books on the history
(08:59):
of ballooning, it's litter really like she was born and
then she married this guy, and then she became important.
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. U
(09:20):
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, which 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
(09:40):
features in history. Yeah, 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.
That gets on my nerves. John, she had a very
interesting life. It didn't really matter. I think it matters.
The focus on appearances is getting out my nerve. Jean
(10:02):
Pierre and Sophie were married at some point between seventeen
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.
(10:22):
Others suggest that they had already been married, but and
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
(10:45):
bigger crowds. So again some some books will suggest that, um,
him taking 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 of his age, up in their first
duo flight together on December four at Marseille. That sort
(11:07):
of unexpectedly, given everything everybody had said about her at
this point, Sophie found balloon flight exhilarating, and she 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
(11:29):
Jean Pierre, Sophie also started to make solo balloon trips
as well, and just as a note, while Sophie is
often referred to as the first female aeronaut, she was not,
strictly speaking, the first female balloonists. 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,
(11:50):
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 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
(12:11):
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 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,
(12:31):
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
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
(12:52):
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,
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 horse carriages and
you know, out on the streets, was just the noise
of it. It is quite noisy to be in a
(13:15):
carriage drawn by horses over 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 following her to cease 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
(13:36):
just as bad of an idea as it sounds horrible idea.
Please don't ever go up in a helium balloon. This
was hydrogen. Don't do helium either. Don't set off fireworks
trouble look even if the what's inside of it is
not an immensely flammable gas. On June, Sophie made her
(14:00):
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 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
(14:22):
these were not missions that he should plan on doing.
They needed dragons, like in the Terrier books. That's what
I think. Even after the French monarchy was restored, Sophie
stayed in the good graces of the nation's leaders. As
part of Louis the eighteenth Restoration celebration, Sophie ascended in
a balloon from pont Neuf and was eventually named official
(14:44):
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 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
(15:08):
was interested in doing but never achieved. En route to
turn in April of eighteen twelve, she had nosebleeds and
icicles formed 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.
(15:30):
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.
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
(15:52):
in the sky and also flammable. None of the vehicles
should you sleep on your but especially if it's in
the sky and also flammable. So on July six, nineteen,
Sophie prepared for one of her regular appearances over the
(16:14):
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 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
(16:36):
slow burning fireworks shoe. She reported to have said at
all sisera as she got into the basket, which means
let's go for the last time. 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
(16:57):
and ready to retire. It's not really year. We don't
have a record we're sure of whether she really meant
for this to be her last show. Yeah, there are
discussions of it in different books. One is just that
because she had so many fireworks, there are some stories,
and again they're unverified, that people were like, no, no,
(17:18):
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.
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
(17:40):
from the basket on parachutes, similar to how they had
dropped dogs and people after the pass ket previously. UH,
and they would burn out as they fell to the ground.
But because of the wind shift, she was being carried
away from to Voli gardens. Something went wrong with the show,
and Sophie's balloon can on fire. As you may have
guessed was going happened by the abundant foreshadowing and just
(18:04):
the simple science, like the choice of hydrogen is as
a gas to inflate the balloon and then carry fire
and carry fire around. Yeah, there was some spectators cheered,
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 you look
like the balloon's on fire. The balloon was on fire. Uh,
(18:28):
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
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
(18:48):
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.
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 Parlasches Cemetery, and
(19:11):
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. Find that kind of morbid.
It is a little bit weird to show the manner
of death on the monument. There's an apoct full story
that the funds for the monument were actually the profits
from ticket sales, which the Toboli Gardens management had initially
(19:34):
earmarked for Blanchard's children, but then they realized she had
no children and reallocated them to the monument. Yeah. 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 going, she doesn't
have kids, we must build a monument. It's so almost
(19:54):
money python esque, and it's kind of uh well meaning,
uh incorrectness, that is, and I don't mean to 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
(20:17):
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 well
all part of science. And as we've talked about, 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
(20:39):
Gen 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 Indigo Go campaign, and as of
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
(20:59):
I of 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.
I think that sounds like fun and I hope it's
available for people to stream or otherwise see. Yeah, you
can visit the website now and we'll link to it
(21:21):
in the show notes. Um, and you'll see kind of
the pitch animation that they did for Indiegogo, which is
quite interesting and it's a fun style, and you'll see
kind of where it's going. Thank you so much for
joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out
(21:43):
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now, so
here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at
Missed in the History. All over social media you that
is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram.
(22:05):
Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands
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