Читать книгу Falling Upwards - Richard Holmes - Страница 16

Just like space flight, early balloon flight offered military as well as metaphysical prospects. Cavallo’s dream of scientific ballooning was soon displaced by prospects of a more warlike kind. Benjamin Franklin had warned Sir Joseph Banks of this possibility, and such signs of the times were recognised by many contemporaries, including Banks’s clever younger sister, Sophia. She had begun to make a collection of balloon memorabilia, which she stuck into an enormous red-leather folio scrapbook especially purchased for the purpose. It would eventually run to over a hundred items.¹ One of her earliest specimens was a British cartoon, dated 16 December 1784, entitled ‘The Battle of the Balloons’.

This shows four balloons, two flying the French fleur de lys and two the British Union Jack, manoeuvring for aerial combat. Their crews are armed with muskets, but also, more menacingly, with broadside cannons. Their muzzles point through portholes cut in the balloon wickerwork.² Here the balloon is already conceived of as a weapon of war, comparable to the navy’s ships of the line.

Sophia also had an eye for many of the more eccentric examples of balloon propaganda. One set of this type was ‘Mr Ensler’s Wonderful Air Figures’, in which balloons were constructed in various animal and mythological shapes, such as the ‘Flying Horse Pegasus’. Some of these figures were intended to be provocative, like the giant ‘Nymphe coiffée en ballon et habillée à la Polonaise’. The Frenchified style of this description suggests sexual mockery. Then there was the bluffly patriotic ‘Mr Prossor’s Aerial Colossus’, showing an enormous ‘Sir John Falstaff’ floating defensively above the Dover cliffs.³ Such inventions were probably pure design fantasies, or at the most models, never actually manufactured full-size. But they suggest how balloons would become powerful forms of imaginative propaganda later, in the nineteenth century.^fn8