There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

10 The First Flight

54 There’s More to New Jersey . . . 10 The First Flight On January 9, 1793, Monsieur Jean Pierre Blanchard traveled from Philadelphia across the Delaware River to New Jersey, accompanied by a little dog. What made his trip worthy of remembering is that he did it 5,812 feet in the air. It was the first human flight in the Western Hemisphere, 110 years before the Wright brothers. Balloons are sort of ho-hum in this age of space travel, but back in the eighteenth century, lighter-than-air flight was a giant step for mankind. For the first time in history, humans could leave the surface of the earth to soar over church steeples and hills. Aerial balloons were invented by the Montgolfier brothers of France in the early 1780s. The first flights produced excitement and astonishment . When one balloon came down in a French village, frightened peasants thought the moon had fallen from the sky. It took some time before anyone dared to send up a balloon with a human passenger, since there was considerable doubt that anyone could breathe at that height. In a bold experiment, a balloon was launched in Paris with a duck, a sheep, and a rooster on board. Spectators were delighted when they found that the animals were still alive when the balloon came down. A few weeks later a man went up in a balloon that was tethered to the ground with a rope. A short time after that, two Frenchmen made a free flight. Before long, bold aeronauts were making flights all over Europe. Those pioneer balloonists were daredevils, much like the barnstormers of the early airplane age, making a living by wowing the astonished yokels. It was a perilous business; the early balloons had a habit of colliding with buildings, trees, and the ground. Hydrogen balloons exploded; hot-air balloons caught fire. The only thing the balloonist could control was going up and coming back down; the direction was determined by the whim of the winds. One of the first of the European aeronauts was the Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard. A portrait shows him as a small man with a massive head, rather like a balloon. He was a hot-tempered and proud character, but he was undeniably brave. Blanchard’s best-known accomplishment was the first-ever flight across the English Channel, which he made in 1785. He and his companion Jean Pierre Blanchard The daring French aviation pioneer made the first balloon flight in the western hemisphere, from Philadelphia to Deptford, in 1793. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries—Pictorial Collection. The First Flight 55 56 There’s More to New Jersey . . . on that trip took off from the English side of the channel. The balloon began to sink over the ocean, and to keep from ditching, they had to throw everything overboard, including their trousers and coats and even their urine. After three hours they managed to come to a safe landing in France, freezing and nearly naked. His channel crossing made Blanchard a celebrity. But while he had achieved fame, he was unable to amass much money from his flights. His temper was also getting him in trouble, and on one occasion he was thrown into an Austrian jail as an agent of the French Revolution. In 1792 Blanchard packed his balloon and his family on board ship and sailed to Philadelphia, the capital of the United States, to find a new audience. Americans had been fascinated by the eyewitness accounts of balloon ascensions sent back from France by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson , and other overseas compatriots. In Baltimore a man had gone aloft in a tethered balloon. But as yet no one had made a free flight. Blanchard resolved to do so. He announced that he would make an ascent from the yard of the Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia. Why a prison yard? The answer here, as it is to so many things in life, is money. In order to sell tickets, Blanchard needed an enclosed area protected by walls, where he could keep the paying customers in and the rest of the world out. On Wednesday, January 9, 1793, a large audience, including President George Washington and the French ambassador, assembled in the prison yard to watch the great event. Unfortunately for Blanchard’s finances, an even larger crowd of non-ticket-holders was outside the gates, watching...