The Progress of Knowledge in the Regions of Air?: Divisions and Disciplines in Early Ballooning

There are various stories about the invention of balloons; they reveal taxonomies of intellectual ordering. The literary formations of air include investments in imagination as well as knowledge; hence disciplines are less useful in understanding the significance of balloons than ideas of ill-discipline and anti-discipline. This mix of order and disorder challenges the intellectual seriousness attendant on disciplinarity. Questions about the uses of balloons reveal how the new discipline of aerostation contended with satire, fantasy, and playfulness in ways that undo binaries of science and spectacle. Analysis of some balloon illustrations show ambiguities in visual conventions that pictorialize discipline in complex ways.