Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Listener.
Speaker 2: Josiah, who has sent to us just a ton of
Speaker 2: very good episode suggestions sent in a request for an
Speaker 2: episode on the eighteen nineteen balloon riot. We do have
Speaker 2: a number of episodes on balloons and ballooning, including the
Speaker 2: Mongolfier Brothers and Sophie Blanchard and essay Andre's attempt to
Speaker 2: get to the North Pole by balloon, and we have
Speaker 2: mentioned in those episodes that balloons became a huge fad
Speaker 2: starting in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: I don't think we.
Speaker 2: Have ever talked about how much rioting was associated with that.
Speaker 2: We have talked more about excite and not about tearing stuff. Apart,
Speaker 2: this eighteen nineteen incident that Josiah requested was not the
Speaker 2: only riot to talk about. In other words, we are
Speaker 2: going to cover several in this episode, but it is
Speaker 2: not all of the balloon riots. Over the course of
Speaker 2: my research, I found various mentions of other riots as
Speaker 2: kind of asides or mentioned in footnotes or a newspaper
Speaker 2: article would say blah blah blah, similarly to the thing
Speaker 2: that happened to this other time, But then I was
Speaker 2: not able to find a lot of detail about that
Speaker 2: other time briefly mentioned. It's also possible that there were
Speaker 2: other more documented balloon riot incidents that I just didn't
Speaker 2: happen to stumble over while working on this. These riots
Speaker 2: all involved large balloons filled with either hot air or
Speaker 2: a lighter than air gas like hydrogen or coal gas,
Speaker 2: which is a mix of mostly hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.
Speaker 2: Ones so we're talking about took place in France, the UK,
Speaker 2: the US, and Australia. But the earliest precursors to these
Speaker 2: kinds of balloons came from another part of the world.
Speaker 2: They date back to the third century BCE in China.
Speaker 2: These were flying lanterns also called sky lanterns, that were
Speaker 2: made from paper and open at the bottom. A candle
Speaker 2: or some other source of flames suspended under the opening
Speaker 2: heated the air inside, causing the lantern to float. Sky
Speaker 2: lanterns are quite small, you can launch them from your hands,
Speaker 2: and by the eighteenth century, various scientists and inventors were
Speaker 2: trying to figure out how to use that same principle
Speaker 2: to make much larger balloons. The first successful launches of
Speaker 2: balloons that were big enough to carry human beings took
Speaker 2: place in France. After testing various materials and designs, brothers
Speaker 2: Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Mongolfier made a balloon from
Speaker 2: cloth and paper that had a diameter of about thirty
Speaker 2: three feet or ten meters. They lit a fire under
Speaker 2: the opening of this balloon to fill it with hot air,
Speaker 2: and they successfully sent it aloft on June fourth, seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty three. They did not have anybody aboard that first time.
Speaker 2: That balloon stayed in the air for about ten minutes.
Speaker 2: On September nineteenth, they sent a duck, a rooster, and
Speaker 2: a sheep up in a slightly smaller balloon, and all
Speaker 2: of those animals returned to Earth safely hooray. From there,
Speaker 2: the Mongolfier brothers tried tethered balloon flights with people on board,
Speaker 2: and then their first untethered flight with a human crew
Speaker 2: was on November twenty first, seventeen eighty three. We talked
Speaker 2: about the Mongolfier brothers in more detail in our episode
Speaker 2: on them that ran as a Saturday Classic on January
Speaker 2: twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, While the Mongolfier brothers were
Speaker 2: working on hot air balloons, other people were working on
Speaker 2: balloons with some other gas or gas mixture. Professor Jacques
Speaker 2: Charles commissioned brothers and gen Robert and Nicola Luis Robert,
Speaker 2: who is sometimes also called Marie Noel Robert, to build
Speaker 2: a balloon. They took a demonstration flight from the champ
Speaker 2: de Mars in August of seventeen eighty three. This was
Speaker 2: a varnished silk balloon filled with hydrogen gas. They made
Speaker 2: that hydrogen gas by pouring sulfuric acid onto iron filings.
Speaker 2: This balloon successfully went aloft without a crew, but from
Speaker 2: there it drifted to the northeast of Paris. When it
Speaker 2: landed near the village of Geness, people who didn't know
Speaker 2: what it was reportedly attacked it with things like sticks
Speaker 2: and pitchforks. On December first.
Speaker 1: Of that year, Nicola, Louis and Jacques successfully went aloft
Speaker 1: themselves in a hydrogen balloon, which was launched from the
Speaker 1: Tuileriri gardens. Within a year, more than one hundred eighty
Speaker 1: balloon launches had taken place all around Europe, often before
Speaker 1: just enormous crowds. When the Mongolfier brothers sent those animals,
Speaker 1: aloft An estimated one hundred and thirty thousand people had
Speaker 1: been watching, including King Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette.
Speaker 1: When Robert and Charles took their first flight, it was
Speaker 1: reportedly before a crowd of four hundred thousand people, which
Speaker 1: would have been more than half the population of Paris,
Speaker 1: and people were fascinated. Letters and diary entries from the
Speaker 1: late eighteenth century are full of references to balloons and
Speaker 1: which launches people had seen, and how big the crowds were,
Speaker 1: and what the balloon looked like. This includes numerous letters
Speaker 1: from American visitors who were in France for the negotiations
Speaker 1: of the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Revolutionary War,
Speaker 1: so that includes Benjamin Franklin. Balloon hats for ladies came
Speaker 1: into fashion with puffy crowns and wide brims, and balloons
Speaker 1: were emblazoned on every kind of souvenir imaginable. A broadside
Speaker 1: called Balloon Wish printed in Boston read quote in this
Speaker 1: wild romantic age, what fantastic whims engage high and low
Speaker 1: and old and young, all with balloon madness, rung balloon
Speaker 1: hats and frying pans, balloon ribbons, balloon fans, balloon gauzes,
Speaker 1: balloon caps, balloon hoops or balloon traps. Balloons and balloon
Speaker 1: launches were also depicted in stories, novels, poems, plays, and
Speaker 1: visual artwork. As an example, in seventeen eighty four, the
Speaker 1: Covent Garden Theater, which we just talked about in October,
Speaker 1: staged a play called Harlequin Junior or The Magic Cestus,
Speaker 1: in which past podcast subject Joseph Grimaldy was supposed to
Speaker 1: handle a real floating balloon that was scaled down for
Speaker 1: use on the stage. However, the theater scrapped this part
Speaker 1: of the show after deciding it was quote very offensive
Speaker 1: and in some degree dangerous in the confined air of
Speaker 1: the theater.
Speaker 2: That decision makes sense because they had to burn material
Speaker 2: under this balloon to inflate it in the theater just
Speaker 2: seemed like a bad idea given the known propensity of
Speaker 2: theaters to catch on fire.
Speaker 1: In the theater lit by candlelight at this point, so
Speaker 1: if the balloon fell in the wrong place, double trouble.
Speaker 1: The culture in parts of Europe was so saturated with
Speaker 1: balloons that some people actually got sick of hearing about
Speaker 1: them almost immediately. In September seventeen eighty three, English author
Speaker 1: and playwright Samuel Johnson wrote a letter to Sir Joshua
Speaker 1: Reynolds that said, in part, quote, I have three letters
Speaker 1: in this day, all about the balloon. I could have
Speaker 1: been content with one. Do not write about the balloon.
Speaker 1: Whatever else you may think proper to say that cracks
Speaker 1: me up.
Speaker 2: It's also kind of sad that he died a few
Speaker 2: months later, so one of his final frustrations balloons balloons.
Speaker 2: The term balloon omania appeared in writing for the first
Speaker 2: time two years later in a letter from past podcast
Speaker 2: subject Horace Walpole to Madame du Defont, after Jean Francois
Speaker 2: Pilatre de Rosier died in a balloon crash while trying
Speaker 2: to cross the English Channel. Walpole wrote, quote, the balloon
Speaker 2: omania is I think a little chilled, not extinguished by
Speaker 2: Rosier's catastrophe. Walpole also expressed concerns about whether balloons would
Speaker 2: be used for military purposes, and that was something people
Speaker 2: had started thinking about basically right after those very earliest launches.
Speaker 2: We talked about that more in our episode on the
Speaker 2: balloons of World War Two that came out in March
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty three. This eighteenth century fascination with balloons
Speaker 2: was interconnected with ongoing discoveries in the sciences that it
Speaker 2: started to evolve in the sixteenth century and the European
Speaker 2: intellectual movement that has come to be known as the
Speaker 2: Age of Enlightenment. People were similarly fascinated with experiments with
Speaker 2: electricity that were also happening around the same time. By necessity,
Speaker 2: balloon launches were the most public of all the various
Speaker 2: experiments that were going on. The balloons were huge, and
Speaker 2: even if they were launched from some out of the
Speaker 2: way place, people could still see them in the air.
Speaker 2: People made and launched hot, air and gas balloons in
Speaker 2: all kinds of places beyond just England and France, and
Speaker 2: beyond just Europe. But in these two countries there was
Speaker 2: kind of a competitive rivalry going on. But there were
Speaker 2: also some differences in how ballooning developed in those two countries.
Speaker 2: A lot of balloon experiments in France were under the
Speaker 2: auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, and that meant
Speaker 2: that until the French Revolution, they were effectively being overseen
Speaker 2: by the scientific community and ultimately the monarch. But in England,
Speaker 2: the Royal Society didn't take up that same level of
Speaker 2: interest in ballooning. So the ballooning community in England was
Speaker 2: more made up of adventurers who might work with scientists
Speaker 2: or allow scientists to bring instruments on board, but they
Speaker 2: could be focused a lot more on excitement and spectacle
Speaker 2: and showmanship than on research and discovery. But it was
Speaker 2: clear from the beginning that balloon launches could spark a
Speaker 2: backlash if they did not go as planned. On January sixteenth,
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty four, just weeks after humans had successfully flown
Speaker 2: in balloons for the first time, Benjamin Franklin wrote a
Speaker 2: letter to Dutch scientists Jon Ingenhause. Franklin had previously sent
Speaker 2: Ingenhouse everything he had learned about balloons, and he said
Speaker 2: that if Ingenhause sent someone to France, Franklin was sure
Speaker 2: they could learn whatever they needed to figure out how
Speaker 2: to make one for themselves from there. He said, quote,
Speaker 2: if you undertake to make one, I think it extremely
Speaker 2: proper and necessary to send an ingenious man here for
Speaker 2: that purpose. Otherwise, for want of attention to some particular circumstance,
Speaker 2: or of being acquainted with it, the experiment might miscarry, which,
Speaker 2: being in an affair of so much public expectation, would
Speaker 2: have bad consequences, draw upon you a great deal of
Speaker 2: censure and affect your reputation.
Speaker 1: It is a serious thing to draw out from their
Speaker 1: affairs all the inhabitants of a great city and its environs,
Speaker 1: and a disappointment makes them angry. At Bordeaux lately a
Speaker 1: person who pretended to send up a balloon and had
Speaker 1: received money of many people, not being able to make
Speaker 1: it rise. The populace were so exasperated that they pulled
Speaker 1: down his house and had liked to have killed him.
Speaker 2: We will talk about some other exasperated populaces after a
Speaker 2: sponsor break. In seventeen eighty four, printmaker Jean Francois Genine,
Speaker 2: who had started calling himself an artist physicist, worked with
Speaker 2: Abbe Laurent Antoine Melin, who lectured in physics, to build
Speaker 2: a balloon. Their design actually involved three balloons. There was
Speaker 2: the primary hot air balloon and a gas filled balloon
Speaker 2: that would float above it, and then a balloon filled
Speaker 2: with cold air that would hang below it. They wanted
Speaker 2: to study the atmosphere and the behavior of the three
Speaker 2: balloons and the gases within them from the gondola that
Speaker 2: was suspended below. They had financed their project primarily by
Speaker 2: selling tickets to the launch, and that was the case
Speaker 2: for a lot of balloonists. Even like the hardcore scientific balloonists,
Speaker 2: a lot of times were funding things with ticket sales.
Speaker 1: They planned to take off from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris
Speaker 1: on July eleventh, seventeen eighty four. Although they had made
Speaker 1: some successful test flights, this public launch failed when they
Speaker 1: were not able to adequately fill the hot air balloon.
Speaker 1: It's not clear whether the balloon caught fire during the
Speaker 1: attempt to fill it, or if angry onlookers set it alight,
Speaker 1: but it did catch fire, and once it was burning,
Speaker 1: outraged ticket holders burst into the launch area, tearing pieces
Speaker 1: off of the balloon and breaking up the viewing stands
Speaker 1: to throw into the fire. One of the people who
Speaker 1: witnessed this was Benjamin Franklin Batch, grandson of Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 1: whose diary entry about the day described some of the
Speaker 1: carried off balloon pieces as big enough to make a mattress. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: Milan and Jeanniet were ridiculed in the popular press, including
Speaker 1: people writing satirical songs about them. The September eighth, eighteen
Speaker 1: nineteen riot that inspired this episode took place in Vauxhall Gardens,
Speaker 1: not the ones in London, but gardens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: that had been named for them. I think people in
Speaker 1: England also said that more like Vauxhall, the balloon belonged
Speaker 1: to a French aeronaut known as Monsieur Michel, who was
Speaker 1: going to go up in the balloon and then parachute
Speaker 1: down from it. This was just a few days after
Speaker 1: a failed balloon launch by a different aeronaut in Camden,
Speaker 1: and Camden is just on the other side of the
Speaker 1: Delaware River from Philadelphia, so a lot of people from
Speaker 1: Philadelphia had gone to Camden to try to watch, and
Speaker 1: they had not been able to see a balloon. Vauxhall
Speaker 1: Garden was surrounded by a tall wooden fence, and hundreds
Speaker 1: of people had paid a dollar apiece, significant money in
Speaker 1: these days to come inside to watch. People who did
Speaker 1: not have a dollar or just didn't want to pay
Speaker 1: it tried to get a glimpse from the outside, and
Speaker 1: the crowd included people who traveled in from Camden or
Speaker 1: from other places around Philadelphia. The balloon was big enough
Speaker 1: that the top would be visible from the ground outside
Speaker 1: the fence once it was inflated, and people also climbed
Speaker 1: onto roofs and into trees to get a better view.
Speaker 1: Counting the ticket holders and the people outside the fence,
Speaker 1: roughly thirty thousand people were estimated to be there. Monsieur
Speaker 1: Michelle started filling the balloon with gas at about two PM,
Speaker 1: and at seven pm it still was not ready. According
Speaker 1: to an article in the Rhode Island American published about
Speaker 1: a week after the incident, one of the reasons it
Speaker 1: was filling so slowly is that an impatient spectator had
Speaker 1: thrown a rock at it, and that rock had made
Speaker 1: a hole that was continually letting gas out of the balloon.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the Washington, DC Daily National Intelligencer
Speaker 1: said this rock puncture happened after the balloon had been
Speaker 1: somewhat filled at least and was partially aloft. Most of
Speaker 1: the documentation I found on this whole incident was in
Speaker 1: news reports, and all of them are slightly different from
Speaker 1: one another. Vendors were selling food and drink at this event,
Speaker 1: and after a while a lot of the spectators were intoxicated.
Speaker 1: A detail that most of the accounts agree upon is
Speaker 1: that a boy in his mid teens climbed the fence.
Speaker 1: In some accounts, one of the garden attendants struck and
Speaker 1: killed him. In others, the boy struck someone inside the
Speaker 1: fence with a stick, and that person either hit him
Speaker 1: back or hit a couple of children who happened to
Speaker 1: be nearby. Rumors spread that either this teenager or a
Speaker 1: young child had been killed, or maybe one of them
Speaker 1: really had been killed. All of this unclear.
Speaker 2: Whatever exactly the details, it sparked a riot in which
Speaker 2: the onlookers from the outside of the fence burst through it,
Speaker 2: tearing the balloon to shreds and lighting a lot of
Speaker 2: the garden on fire, including its pavilion and benches. Musicians
Speaker 2: had been hired to play for the day, and rioters
Speaker 2: smashed their instruments. People robbed the vendors of their food
Speaker 2: and their alcohol and other wares, and somebody stole all
Speaker 2: the ticket money, which was about eight hundred dollars. Multiple
Speaker 2: people were injured, and by nine pm Vauxhall Gardens was
Speaker 2: basically destroyed. Its owner sold the property in the aftermath,
Speaker 2: and it changed hands a couple of times before eventually
Speaker 2: being rebuilt and reopened as an outdoor theater. In eighteen
Speaker 2: thirty eight, an ascent that was supposed to take place
Speaker 2: in Cremorne Gardens in London similarly went wrong. The event
Speaker 2: was described this way in a nineteen oh seven book
Speaker 2: about the gardens quote. It was announced to ascend on
Speaker 2: May twenty four, and people began to assemble in the
Speaker 2: grounds at noon. By seven o'clock there were nearly five
Speaker 2: thousand spectators and behind a huge tarpaulin the balloon was
Speaker 2: supposed to be in the process of inflation. The balloon
Speaker 2: was attached to a platform in the middle of the lake,
Speaker 2: and its peculiarity was that it had to be inflated
Speaker 2: by chopped straw burnt in a brazier under the orifice
Speaker 2: of the bag. The size of the furnace had been miscalculated,
Speaker 2: and after the balloon had twice been set on fire,
Speaker 2: the intrepid aeronaut decided not to ascend. Some of the
Speaker 2: spectators considered that at any rate the balloon could be punished,
Speaker 2: and a well directed volley of stones soon left the
Speaker 2: monster prostrate on the lake. An attempt was made to
Speaker 2: drag it on shore and tear it in pieces, but
Speaker 2: at this moment the cord broke. Some of the rowdier
Speaker 2: spirits now sought out the proprietor, hoping to duck him
Speaker 2: in one of his own ponds, and when this failed,
Speaker 2: they attacked the glass planes of the Lion's conservatory. Not
Speaker 2: seemed like a great idea, but suddenly the police appeared
Speaker 2: and Vesuvius burst forth in all of its fury, and
Speaker 2: when the fireworks were over, the visitors quietly dispersed. In
Speaker 2: case that last bit is not totally clear, this park
Speaker 2: had a panorama of Mount Vesuvius, and they set off
Speaker 2: fireworks from there at night, and they basically started the
Speaker 2: fireworks display to try to get everybody to focus on
Speaker 2: something else. A riot in Sydney, Australia, on December eighteenth,
Speaker 2: eighteen fifty six was also similar. French balloonist Pierre Magre
Speaker 2: hoped to make Australia's first successful balloon flight. Roughly five
Speaker 2: thousand people had gathered by two pm, which is when
Speaker 2: he was supposed to start inflating the balloon with hot air,
Speaker 2: but he didn't actually get started until three PM, and
Speaker 2: the crowd continued to grow and to become more and
Speaker 2: more impatient. As the balloon slowly filled, people started to
Speaker 2: doubt that it was even possible to inflate the balloon
Speaker 2: because it seemed like the material was just too heavy.
Speaker 2: They added more fuel to the fire. Things started to
Speaker 2: move a little bit faster, and eventually the balloon did
Speaker 2: start to ascend, but the cords that had been used
Speaker 2: to tether it were dangling, and one of them got
Speaker 2: caught in something. The effort to un tangle that trailing
Speaker 2: cord wound up releasing a lot of the hot air
Speaker 2: out of the balloon. As the balloon started to deflate,
Speaker 2: people from the less expensive outer part of the viewing
Speaker 2: area rushed to the inside. Either the balloon caught fire
Speaker 2: or someone set it on fire. I feel like that's
Speaker 2: a frequent refrain in this episode. Somebody had possibly kicked
Speaker 2: the fire that had been used to fill it, and
Speaker 2: then people started chanting burn.
Speaker 1: The balloon, Burn the balloon. The fire spread to the
Speaker 1: tent where the wine and straw used for fuel had
Speaker 1: been stored, and that caught fire as well. Megra was
Speaker 1: forced to flee during the early stages of its inflation.
Speaker 1: This balloon had been suspended from a cord that was
Speaker 1: draped between two poles, and in this chaos people started
Speaker 1: knocking down the poles. One of them hit two children
Speaker 1: as it fell. Eleven year old Thomas Downs was reported
Speaker 1: to have died of a skull fracture two days after this.
Speaker 1: An inquest found Meg to be responsible, describing him as
Speaker 1: the quote perpetrator of the sham balloon incident and censuring
Speaker 1: him a little more than a year later, on February first,
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty eight, Joseph Dean went aloft in a balloon
Speaker 1: filled with coal gas, taking off from Cremorne Gardens in Melbourne,
Speaker 1: Australia and succeeding where Pierre Magra had not. Then, on
Speaker 1: February fifteenth, Charles Henry Brown did the same. Both men
Speaker 1: had been hired by George Coppin, who was a theater
Speaker 1: entrepreneur who also funded both of the ascents. But according
Speaker 1: to Brown's account, this crowd was angry with him when
Speaker 1: he returned. This might have been because they got bored
Speaker 1: since he had taken off really late in the day,
Speaker 1: or it could have been because Coppin had offered a
Speaker 1: reward for the safe return of the balloon. If something
Speaker 1: went wrong with the launch, people might have wanted to
Speaker 1: claim that reward, even though nothing had gone wrong and
Speaker 1: Brown was still in possession of the balloon. In Brown's
Speaker 1: words quote on my descent, I was treated in a
Speaker 1: most brutal manner by the people assembled. Why I know not,
Speaker 1: but they tore the hair from my head, bruised, crushed,
Speaker 1: and almost suffocated me, besides damaging the balloon by tugging
Speaker 1: at and trampling on it. This does not apply to
Speaker 1: mister Hugh Peck of Collingwood, to whom I am under
Speaker 1: the obligation of returning the balloon to Cremorne in safety
Speaker 1: and declining to receive any remuneration for his trouble. Mister
Speaker 1: Needham of the gas works assisted in extricating me from
Speaker 1: the savages. Probably the most thoroughly documented and well known
Speaker 1: balloon riot took place in Leicester, England, in eighteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
Speaker 1: Sixty four Leicster balloon riot involved a balloonist who had
Speaker 1: become particularly well known because of an earlier incidence that
Speaker 1: did not involve a riot that was Henry Tracy Coxwell.
Speaker 1: Coxwell was born in eighteen nineteen and had trained originally
Speaker 1: as a dentist, but he had shifted a lot of
Speaker 1: his focus to ballooning after taking his first balloon flight
Speaker 1: at the age of twenty five. He undertook numerous balloon launches,
Speaker 1: primarily in and around London, including in London's Vauxhall Gardens
Speaker 1: and Cremorne Gardens, which were ticketed money making entertainment events.
Speaker 1: This earlier incident also involved doctor James Glacier. Glacier was
Speaker 1: born in eighteen oh nine and he was a meteorologist
Speaker 1: who wanted to conduct experiments aboard balloons. He undertook twenty
Speaker 1: eight balloon ascents during his career, many of them with Coxwell,
Speaker 1: often with funding from the British Association for the van
Speaker 1: of Science. The two men had launched from Wolverhampton, England,
Speaker 1: on September fifth, eighteen sixty two. Glacier was equipped with
Speaker 1: photographic plates, what bulb thermometers, a hygrometer and other instruments
Speaker 1: to study the atmosphere and weather as they ascended to
Speaker 1: high altitudes. They also had several pigeons aboard to see
Speaker 1: how those pigeons would fly at high altitudes. We don't
Speaker 1: really need to get into the detail, but only one
Speaker 1: of the pigeons seems to have survived this journey. By
Speaker 1: one forty PM, they had reached an elevation of about
Speaker 1: four miles or more than twenty one thousand feet. They
Speaker 1: continued to ascend in about ten minutes. After that, Glacier
Speaker 1: realized he could no longer see the mercury column in
Speaker 1: the wet bulb thermometer, or the hands of his watch,
Speaker 1: or any other fine detail on any of his instruments.
Speaker 1: Glacier asked Coxwell for help, but just then the balloon's
Speaker 1: valve line came entangled and Coxwell had to fix it.
Speaker 1: Glacier had already noticed that Coxwell seemed winded, and Glacier
Speaker 1: had attributed that to the physical work that he was
Speaker 1: having to do around the balloon. But shortly after Coxwell
Speaker 1: went to fix this valve line. In Glacier's words, quote,
Speaker 1: I laid my arm upon the table, possessed of its
Speaker 1: full vigor, but on being desirous of using it, I
Speaker 1: found it powerless. It must have lost its power. Momentarily
Speaker 1: trying to move the other arm, I found it powerless also.
Speaker 1: Then I tried to shake myself and succeeded, but I
Speaker 1: seemed to have no limbs, and looking at the barometer,
Speaker 1: my head fell over my left shoulder. I struggled and
Speaker 1: shook my body again, but could not move my arms,
Speaker 1: getting my head upright for an instant only it fell
Speaker 1: on my right shoulder. Then I fell backwards, my back
Speaker 1: resting against the side of the car and my head
Speaker 1: on its edge. In this position, my eyes were directed
Speaker 1: to me mister Coxwell in the ring. When I shook
Speaker 1: my body, I seemed to have full power over the
Speaker 1: muscles of the back, and considerably so over those of
Speaker 1: the neck, but none over either my arms or my legs,
Speaker 1: as in the case of the arms, so all muscular
Speaker 1: power was lost in an instant from my back and neck.
Speaker 1: I dimly saw mister Coxwell and endeavored to speak, but
Speaker 1: could not. In an instant, intense darkness overcame me, so
Speaker 1: that the optic nerve lost power suddenly, but I was
Speaker 1: still conscious with as active a brain as at the
Speaker 1: present moment. Whilst writing this, I thought I had been
Speaker 1: seized with asphyxia, and believed I should experience nothing more,
Speaker 1: as death would come unless we speedily descended. Glacier then
Speaker 1: lost consciousness and a few minutes later became aware of
Speaker 1: Coxwell trying to rouse him. Coxwell had nearly lost consciousness
Speaker 1: as well and had started to lose control of his limbs.
Speaker 1: Coxwell had realized that they had to get to a
Speaker 1: lower altitude, and since he couldn't use his hands, he
Speaker 1: had managed to open the valve to release some of
Speaker 1: the gas from the balloon by grabbing the cord with
Speaker 1: his teeth. Coxwell still couldn't use his hands by the
Speaker 1: time Glacier regained consciousness, and Glacier tried to treat them
Speaker 1: by pouring brandy over them. The last barometer reading that
Speaker 1: Glacier was able to record as they ascended suggested that
Speaker 1: at that point they were at an altitude of about
Speaker 1: twenty nine thousand feet, and then after that he had
Speaker 1: lost consciousness, but they were still climbing when he lost consciousness,
Speaker 1: and they are estimated to have reached an altitude of
Speaker 1: thirty seven thousand feet or just over seven miles in
Speaker 1: other words, in the cruising altitude ranged for today's commercial airliners.
Speaker 1: Neither man fully understood what had happened to them physiologically,
Speaker 1: at that elevation, but his words spread about the terrifying flight.
Speaker 1: It was obvious to everyone that they would have died
Speaker 1: if Coxwell had not managed to open that valve. This
Speaker 1: experience did not discourage Glacier from his scientific pursuits on balloons,
Speaker 1: though he got back to work almost immediately after regaining consciousness,
Speaker 1: and twenty one of his scientific balloon flights happened after
Speaker 1: this one. Almost two years later, on July eleventh, eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, Coxwell, who was famous from this earlier experience,
Speaker 1: planned a balloon ascent that was to take place at
Speaker 1: a Forester's fete at a racecourse in Leicester. The Foresters
Speaker 1: are a friendly society also known as a Mutual Aid Society,
Speaker 1: which had been established as the Ancient Order of Foresters
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty four. For this, Coxwell was going to
Speaker 1: test a new balloon called the Britannia, and it was
Speaker 1: going to be attached to the car that he had
Speaker 1: used for his experimental flights with Glacier. The plan was
Speaker 1: for a group of passengers, including two women, to go
Speaker 1: aloft with him. Coxwell later wrote a letter to the
Speaker 1: editor at the Times describing what happened. He noted that
Speaker 1: no real barrier had been erected around the launch site
Speaker 1: and that he had to quote beg hard for a
Speaker 1: policeman to be present. He had heard that there were
Speaker 1: only eight on site for an event with an estimated
Speaker 1: fifty thousand people. According to an eyewitness statement, no arrangements
Speaker 1: had been made for keeping the ground around the balloon clear.
Speaker 1: There was just a temporary barrier which was quickly knocked
Speaker 1: down by the crowd, and that made it impossible for
Speaker 1: Coxwell to do what he needed to do with the
Speaker 1: balloon before the flight could even begin.
Speaker 2: According to Coxwell quote, early in the afternoon, a gentleman
Speaker 2: reported to be a provincial aeronaut gave it out that
Speaker 2: the balloon then present was not my largest and newest balloon,
Speaker 2: but a small one. This was a cruel libel, and aroused.
Speaker 2: I was told an angry feeling among the visitors. The
Speaker 2: lack of policeman to maintain order soon manifested itself, For
Speaker 2: on a band entering the balloon ground, the boards were
Speaker 2: carried at once, and thousands of persons broke in and
Speaker 2: harassed my operations excessively. It was in vain that I
Speaker 2: entreated for and that several gentlemen succeeded in clearing an
Speaker 2: open space the deficiency of strong barriers having afforded access.
Speaker 2: All subsequent attempts to stop the tide of human pressure
Speaker 2: proved unavailing.
Speaker 1: The crowd demanded that he take off immediately, but he couldn't.
Speaker 1: Some supports that had been put up to hold the
Speaker 1: balloon while it was being inflated needed to be taken down,
Speaker 1: but the crew that was supposed to do that wasn't
Speaker 1: even there. Coxwell threatened to let the gas out of
Speaker 1: the balloon unless the crowd got itself under control, because
Speaker 1: they were creating a dangerous situation. Police officers arrived and
Speaker 1: they started trying to clear the area around the balloon,
Speaker 1: but when Coxwell started releasing the gas, the crowd became
Speaker 1: enraged and attacked it. There were also rumors that police
Speaker 1: officers had struck a woman. Police sergeant led Coxwell away
Speaker 1: from all of this, but in his words, quote, my
Speaker 1: clothes were soon torn, and then the cry was raised,
Speaker 1: rip him up, knock him in the head, finish him,
Speaker 1: et cetera, all of which would have inevitably been executed
Speaker 1: had I not followed the inspector's advice. The crowd set
Speaker 1: fire to the balloon car and tore the balloon to pieces.
Speaker 1: Many of these pieces were then sold as souvenirs. The
Speaker 1: balloon's hoop was not flammable, and the crowd paraded it
Speaker 1: around the streets. Coxwell attributed this incident to a lack
Speaker 1: of foresight in not providing enough policeman for a forester's bet.
Speaker 1: He asked the foresters for compensation for this incident and
Speaker 1: for the destruction of his equipment, but because of the
Speaker 1: Aid Society's rules, this wasn't something they could just do immediately.
Speaker 1: There was like a whole process that had to happen
Speaker 1: before giving away the Society's money. Other people in Lester
Speaker 1: raised funds totaling more than eight hundred pounds to try
Speaker 1: to compensate him. Although Glacier doesn't seem to have been
Speaker 1: involved in this ascension attempt, the destruction of the balloon
Speaker 1: and the car that he had used for his experiments
Speaker 1: did cause a setback in his meteorological research. He later
Speaker 1: returned to the sky in one of Coxwell's old balloons,
Speaker 1: equipped with a new car, but it seems like the
Speaker 1: two men had a more personal falling out at some
Speaker 1: point after this. The details regarding that don't seem to
Speaker 1: be well documented. The twenty nineteen movie The Aeronauts stars
Speaker 1: Eddie Redmain as James Glacier, but Henry Tracy Coxwell is
Speaker 1: just not depicted in the movie. It seems like this
Speaker 1: was one of the last big balloon riots, not because
Speaker 1: of some kind of change in the psychology and dynamics
Speaker 1: of sometimes drunken crowds, but because ballooning stopped being such
Speaker 1: a huge fad and it stopped drawing those kinds of
Speaker 1: crowds of expectant onlookers.
Speaker 2: And that there's balloon riots. I have some listener mail
Speaker 2: to take us out. This actually is from a little
Speaker 2: bit ago. This is from Christy who wrote after our
Speaker 2: episode on Soap. Christy wrote and said, Dear Holly and Tracy,
Speaker 2: I love listening to the podcast during my commute. I
Speaker 2: probably only have my PhD in s y MIHC if
Speaker 2: I was the kind of student who skips classes because
Speaker 2: I've listened for a very long time, but I've also
Speaker 2: had a couple of year plus gaps. In your recent
Speaker 2: episode on Soap, you mentioned an earlier not technically soap
Speaker 2: product related to wool. It's a bit of a tangent,
Speaker 2: but I thought you might enjoy hearing about suwant fermentation.
Speaker 2: It's a method of cleaning raw wool that relies on
Speaker 2: fermentation of natural sweat and minerals in the wool with
Speaker 2: rain water to create a cleaning substance. Supposedly also stinks
Speaker 2: like you wouldn't believe, so I may put off trying
Speaker 2: it until I have somewhere it wouldn't bother me to
Speaker 2: let it sit. Thank you so much for the work
Speaker 2: you put into thoughtfully selecting and researching topics, presenting them
Speaker 2: with care, and sharing them own way that is both
Speaker 2: personable and informative. As a pet tax, please see my
Speaker 2: ten year old dog Zelda. While we usually say she
Speaker 2: is a Sheba husky mix, looks like Sheba size of
Speaker 2: a husky, Her adoption paperwork listed four different variations on
Speaker 2: breed mixes, and a DNA test said she was a mutt,
Speaker 2: high percentage of Asian slash Arctic breeds, and a moderate
Speaker 2: percentage of terrier. All my best, Christie, this is a
Speaker 2: cute little puppy dog. I am not good at a
Speaker 2: described I'm like, what do I want to say about
Speaker 2: this dog? A kind of fox? Like face and ears
Speaker 2: and a mostly kind of buff and hand color coat,
Speaker 2: looking very happy sitting under some hydranchas in bloom. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for sending this dog picture and about
Speaker 2: suant for vacation. I'm not a thing that I had
Speaker 2: ever heard of, and in fact misread when reading the
Speaker 2: email initially as Sue it, which is not quite the
Speaker 2: same thing, not at all the same thing, really, If
Speaker 2: you would like to send us a note about this
Speaker 2: or any other podcasts, where a history podcasts at iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
Speaker 2: the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
Speaker 2: your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
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